Enhancing the structure of feedback forms increases trustworthiness and usefulness of peer feedback

Peer feedback is commonly used in higher education for both practical and pedagogical reasons. However, peer feedback has been criticized by teachers, researchers, and students for being superficial, harsh, uncritical, and/or detached from learning objectives. This study contributes to the existing literature on how to enhance the effectiveness of peer feedback by examining the impact of increasing the structure of peer feedback forms. Student participants were assigned to use either an open-ended peer feedback form or a structured form with predetermined options created by the teaching team. After giving and receiving feedback, students completed a brief survey about their experience. Feedback underwent quantitative content analysis to support interpretation and contextualization of survey results. We found that students receiving feedback from the structured form perceived the feedback to be more useful and trustworthy than those receiving feedback from the unstructured form. There was limited evidence that the structured feedback form impacted the experience of providing feedback, including student’s perceived level of self-reflection during the feedback process. The findings suggest that structured feedback forms can be used to address student concerns about the usefulness and trustworthiness of peer feedback without negatively impacted self-reflection during the feedback process.