Abstract:

In the perspective of formative and sustainable assessment, peer feedback and peer review are valid alternatives to teacher feedback. In the peer review process, students experience embraces the possibility of reviewing the product of peers, providing improvement advices and receiving suggestions from peers. Particularly in the university contexts, getting feedback is a strategy to involve students in the learning process, by developing their monitoring, assessment and self-regulation skills. The objective of this work is to present the main theoretical and didactic-evaluative models that use the peer feedback and deviate from both the teacher feedback and the formative and summative assessment.

From a methodological point of view, a qualitative synthesis was conducted. It is a secondary research strategy that compares and reinterprets the results taken from primary studies. After establishing the inclusion criteria (the role of the teacher and/or the student; the organizational-design approach; tools and measurement techniques), synthetic descriptions of the selected works were elaborated through the meta-narrative that allowed us describing the epistemologically produced differences in teaching practices.

In drawing a summary of the analysed works, this paper highlights the peculiarities of the peer feedback, which determines an implementation of the participation and the reflective thought, by encouraging learning activities in heterogeneous situations. The advantages are the improvement of the outcomes, the increase in interaction, the use of a more accessible and sharable language, the production of critical judgments (giving feedback), the development of self-regulatory processes and collaborative skills in the productive processing.

This contribution also intends to report in more detail the differences that characterize educational innovation also through the students’ perspective about the quality of training interventions.

Keywords:

Peer review, peer feedback, higher education, qualitative syntheses.