What does it take to provide effective peer feedback?

2025/03/10 by Tegan Little, Phillip Dawson, David Boud +1 · 3 citations
Medicine · Social Sciences · #Innovations in Medical Education #Reflective Practices in Education #Student Assessment and Feedback

paper · pdf · doi:10.1080/02602938.2025.2475059

openalex publication_date 2025/03/10 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28

Abstract

Whilst contemporary ideas of feedback provide multiple insights into how feedback should be processed and enacted by students in a recipient role, little attention has been paid to understand what it takes for students to provide effective feedback to others. This conceptual paper draws on literature from peer feedback and feedback literacy to explore the capacities that are required to provide effective feedback to a peer. Using synthesis by configuration, a comprehensive classification of what students need to do is proposed: 1) recognise the purpose of providing feedback, 2) craft and deliver a suitable feedback message, 3) use evaluative judgement and 4) manage the socio-emotional environment. We argue that students should be supported to develop these capacities to produce good quality feedback for their peers that have a positive learning impact on both members of the provider/recipient dyad, and that a focus on these capacities can have implications for how feedback provision is conceptualised as a necessary component of feedback literacy.

Citations

• Supporting Learners' Agentic Engagement With Feedback: A Systematic Review and a Taxonomy of Recipience Processes
• The Power of Feedback
• Developing evaluative judgement: enabling students to make decisions about the quality of work
• The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback
• The power of internal feedback: exploiting natural comparison processes
• What feedback literate teachers do: an empirically-derived competency framework
• Navigating feedback practices across learning contexts: implications for feedback literacy
• A systematic review on peer assessment: intrapersonal and interpersonal factors
• Assessing students’ peer feedback literacy in writing: scale development and validation
• Can students’ feedback literacy be improved? A scoping review of interventions
• Feedback literacy-as-event: relationality, space and temporality in feedback encounters
• Measuring what learners do in feedback: the feedback literacy behaviour scale
• Towards an idealized model of feedback uptake: longitudinal development of feedback literacy from a social constructivist perspective

Cited by

• Providing, receiving, or self-evaluating? Comparing feedback configurations in a higher-education assignment
• The feedback process as a scaffold of evaluative judgement
• Academic ability generates better quality feedback: Evidence from PeerWise assessments

Related

• The development of student feedback literacy: enabling uptake of feedback
• From teacher transmission of information to student feedback literacy: Activating the learner role in feedback processes
• Developing student feedback literacy through self and peer assessment interventions
• Supporting student and teacher feedback literacy: an instructional model for student feedback processes
• Feedback that works: a realist review of feedback interventions for written tasks