Written Feedback on Design: A Comparison of Students and Educators

Design students improve their understanding of design, their design skills, and their design project work through experience and through feedback. Feedback might come from other students ( i.e. peer reviews), educators, end users, and other stakeholders. In this paper, we focus on two of these groups: other students and educators. We investigate the differences between the types of feedback that educators provide compared to the types of feedback that students provide in peer reviews. To accomplish this, we asked 19 educators and 120 first-year engineering students to independently provide feedback on the same sample student work. Our findings suggest that there are both quantitative and qualitative differences between educators' and students' feedback; compared to the students, educators provided a greater number of comments, provided longer comments, and exhibited different patterns in terms of the Focus and Substance of the feedback. In addition to our findings, we discuss our approach for helping educators and students develop their ability to give productive feedback.