gms | German Medical Science

Introduction: Academic writing is an important but complex competence to be acquired in higher education. A major problem is that students struggle with academic writing. Written feedback given by teachers is not well understood by students because teachers often use academic discourse [3]. As a consequence, teachers’ written feedback does not help students to move forward. A promising innovative strategy to enhance processing of teachers’ written feedback is peer-to-peer dialogue [1]. Peers use a language that is easily understood by fellow students and they are cognitively more congruent than teachers due to which the feedback is better understood [2]. Furthermore, peer-to-peer dialogue involves arguing, explaining and clarifying, which enhances negotiation about what is meant with the teachers’ written feedback which moves the student forward [1]. The research question is: To which degree does peer-to-peer dialogue improve understanding of teachers’ written feedback from the students’ perceptions?

Methods: 64 Second year students of Biomedical Sciences at Maastricht University, discussed teachers’ written feedback in groups of 3-4 students facilitated by a researcher. A questionnaire was used to measure to which degree teacher’s written feedback was understood by the students before and after the peer-to-peer dialogue in terms of feed-up, feedback and feed-forward [4].

Results: The scores on the questionnaire demonstrated an improved understanding of the feedback after the dialogue. In addition, students reported that they better understood how to rewrite and improve the text after the peer-to-peer dialogue (feed-forward).

Discussion: Peer-to-peer feedback dialogue enhances understanding of teachers’ written feedback on how to move forward and rewrite the text, which is crucial for academic writing. Further research is needed to which degree peer-to-peer dialogue on top of the teachers’ written feedback does result in better writing products and under which conditions.