Abstract:

The benefits of giving and receiving peer reviews have been well documented (e,g Topping, 1998, 2005), but less is known about the format and content of effective peer reviews. If peer reviews are conducted formatively, that is before students submit their final products, an effective review should help students decide what to keep and what to revise. But, what kind of feedback triggers this meta-cognition?.

This study explored two research questions:
1) What type of peer review feedback (positive, negative or mixed) has the greatest effect on student learning (as measured by student revision to their work);
2) What type of feedback do students value?

Three sections of an undergraduate education course provided anonymous reviews using Blackboard’s peer assessment tool in order to compare three feedback conditions: positive, mixed, and negative. Some evidence indicated students who received negative feedback were slightly more likely to revise, but these findings were not conclusive and suggest other factors, perhaps internal to the student, are more predictive of a student’s decision to revise than the tone or content of the feedback they receive. In contrast, the findings overwhelming indicate that students prefer negative feedback over positive, which corresponds to early research showing that more experienced students seek out and benefit from negative feedback (Fishbach, Eyal & Finkelstein, 2010).

Keywords:

Peer review.