First-year undergraduate students’ perceptions of lecturer and peer feedback: a New Zealand action research project

Abstract

Providing feedback on students’ written work is a key professional activity in tertiary education. Although there has been research into the effectiveness of lecturers’ feedback, there is a need for more studies comparing students’ perceptions with those of their teachers. This article discusses the design and implementation of an innovatory approach to both peer review and associated collaborative action research in an undergraduate writing course in a New Zealand university. Data were collected from extracts of students’ written reflective journals and a focus group of the teaching team. These data were subjected to grounded analysis to identify the extent to which the respective perceptions converged. The findings from both sources indicated that the students’ initial apprehensions about giving and receiving peer feedback changed, and their skills improved during the course. The article concludes by explaining how this project was framed as mutual scaffolding in a zone of proximal development.

Keywords:

• peer review
• New Zealand
• formative feedback
• academic writing
• collaborative action research
• undergraduates