What aspects of online peer feedback robustly predict growth in students’ task performance?

Abstract

The value of online peer feedback in education has been widely established, and the use of online peer feedback tools is rapidly growing in practice. However, effect sizes appear to vary widely across studies, suggesting implementation details matter substantially. Further, there remain open questions about exactly which aspects of the multi-faceted peer feedback experience are most closely associated with learning outcomes. Within 13 different courses involving 2421 students, drawn across seven universities and six content disciplines, temporally lagged multiple-regression analyses were used to test the unique contributions of quantity, depth, and quality of received and provided comments to students’ growth in task performance across assignments. Meta-regression is applied to precisely estimating overall effect sizes and variation in effect sizes. Results reveal stronger relationships with growth in task performance for 1) provided rather than received comments, 2) longer rather than more comments, and 3) comments perceived to be helpful for revision. Further, there was largely quantitative and qualitative variation in observed relationships across courses that not attributable to statistical noise.