Insights into Using IT-Based Peer Feedback to Practice the Students Providing Feedback Skill

The skills students need nowadays have changed over the last decades. The required skills are shifting more and more towards higher order thinking skills, such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. One of the main ways of practicing these skills is through formative feedback, which consists of self-assessment and peer-assessment in our setting. However, today's lecturers are facing the challenge that the number of students per lecture is continuously increasing, while the available budget is stagnating. Hence, large scale lectures often lack feedback, caused by the scarcity of resources. To overcome this issue, we propose a teaching-learning scenario using IT to provide formative feedback at scale. In this paper, we are focusing on the students' providing-feedback skill, which is important for collaborative tasks. In our experiment with around 101 master students, we were able to show that the students' ability to provide feedback significantly improved by participating in IT-based peer feedback iterations.