Welcome to the project on the use of peer feedback in online discussions!

A collaborative, multi-disciplinary group of researchers across Purdue's campus is investigating the use of peer feedback in online discussions in an effort to improve students' learning while also decreasing instructor load. Several research questions have been investigated to date including:

(1) What is the impact of peer feedback when used as an instructional strategy to increase the quality of students' online postings?
(2) How is the peer feedback process perceived by students?
(3) Does the peer feedback impact students' critical thinking skills?

Findings to date suggest that the quality of students' postings is maintained through the use of peer feedback and that students find that peer feedback can be valuable. More importantly, students describe how giving peer feedback not only reinforces their learning, but enables them to achieve higher understanding.

In order to disseminate our own project's findings and to provide an opportunity for dialogue among researchers who are studying technology-mediated feedback in its various forms, the project sponsored a technology-mediated feedback track as part of the 12th annual Teaching and Learning Technology Conference at Purdue University, April 21-22, 2009 (see flyer). The project is currently coordinating a special issue of the Journal of Educational Computing Research on technology-mediated feedback for teaching and learning; for more information, see the call for papers.

This Purdue University project is supported by grant #P116B060421 from the Fund for Improvement of Post-Secondary Education (FIPSE), a program of the U.S. Department of Education. The contents of this website were developed with the support of the grant, but the contents do not necessarily represent the views or policies of the Department of Education, and you should not assume endorsement by the Federal Government.