Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education

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Rethinking feedback practices in higher education:

a peer review perspective

David Nicol, Avril Thomson & Caroline Breslin

To cite this article: David Nicol, Avril Thomson & Caroline Breslin (2014) Rethinking feedback
practices in higher education: a peer review perspective, Assessment & Evaluation in Higher
Education, 39:1, 102-122, DOI: 10.1080/02602938.2013.795518

To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518

Published online: 10 May 2013.

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Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 2014
Vol. 39, No. 1, 102–122, http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/02602938.2013.795518

Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review

perspective
David Nicola*, Avril Thomsonb and Caroline Breslina
a
Department of Education Enhancement, University of Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland;
b
Department of Design, Manufacture and Engineering Management, University of
Strathclyde, Glasgow, Scotland

Peer review is a reciprocal process whereby students produce feedback reviews

on the work of peers and receive feedback reviews from peers on their own
work. Prior research has primarily examined the learning benefits that result
from the receipt of feedback reviews, with few studies specifically exploring the
merits of producing feedback reviews or the learning mechanisms that this acti-
vates. Using accounts of their experiences of peer review, this study illuminates
students’ perceptions of the different learning benefits resulting from feedback
receipt and feedback production, and, importantly, it provides insight into the
cognitive processes that are activated when students construct feedback reviews.
The findings show that producing feedback reviews engages students in multiple
acts of evaluative judgement, both about the work of peers, and, through a
reflective process, about their own work; that it involves them in both invoking
and applying criteria to explain those judgements; and that it shifts control of
feedback processes into students’ hands, a shift that can reduce their need for
external feedback. The theoretical and practical implications of these findings
are discussed. It is argued that the capacity to produce quality feedback is a fun-
damental graduate skill, and, as such, it should receive much greater attention in
higher education curricula.
Keywords: peer review; feedback; higher education; producing feedback
reviews

Introduction
Feedback is a troublesome issue in higher education. Whilst it is recognised as a
core component of the learning process, national surveys, both in the UK (Higher
Education Funding Council for England 2011) and in Australia (James, Krause, and
Jennings 2010), consistently show that students are less satisfied with feedback than
with any other feature of their courses. The natural response to this predicament has
been to put effort into enhancing the quality of the feedback information provided
by teachers, in particular, its promptness, level of detail, clarity, structure and rele-
vance. Well meaning as these interventions are, there is little evidence that they
have had any effect on student satisfaction ratings in national surveys, and, indeed,
there is a growing number of studies now showing that such enhancements of tea-
cher feedback do not result in improved student learning (e.g. Crisp 2007; Bailey
and Garner 2010; Wingate 2010). In addition, such interventions usually require a

*Corresponding author. Email: d.j.nicol@strath.ac.uk

Ó 2013 Taylor & Francis

 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 103

significant increase in academic staff workload, which is problematic given current

resource constraints and rising student numbers in higher education. In sum, the
feedback from such feedback interventions continues to be disappointing.
This state of affairs has in recent years stimulated scholars and researchers to re-
examine feedback in higher education, both in terms of how it is conceptualised and
how that translates into actual classroom practices (Boud 2007; Nicol 2010; Sadler
2010). Underpinning this re-examination is the important recognition that, if feedback
processes are to enhance learning, we must move beyond a view of feedback as
transmission and acknowledge the active role that students must play in such pro-
cesses. Sadler (2010), for example, maintains that merely ‘telling’ students what is
right and wrong in their work, and how it might be improved, will not on its own
enhance learning nor develop deep disciplinary expertise. Nicol (2010) argues that
feedback should be conceptualised as a dialogue rather than as a one-way transmis-
sion process and notes that from this perspective both the quality of feedback inputs
and of students’ responses to those inputs are important for productive learning. Most
researchers are now in agreement that, if students are to learn from feedback, they
must have opportunities to construct their own meaning from the received message:
they must do something with it, analyse it, ask questions about it, discuss it with oth-
ers and connect it with prior knowledge (Nicol 2010; Carless et al. 2011; Price,
Handley, and Millar 2011). Interestingly, this switch from a transmission to a social
constructivist paradigm took place in learning research almost two decades ago (Barr
and Tagg 1995), yet it is only now having an influence on feedback research.
One way of engaging students actively with feedback processes that is begin-
ning to receive more attention in higher education is to implement peer review (Liu
and Carless 2006; Cartney 2010; Nicol 2011). Peer review is defined here as an
arrangement whereby students evaluate and make judgements about the work of
their peers and construct a written feedback commentary. In effect, students both
produce feedback reviews on others’ work and receive feedback reviews on their
own work. Peer review is an important alternative to teacher feedback, as research
indicates that both the production and the receipt of feedback reviews can enhance
students’ learning without necessarily increasing teacher workload.

Receiving feedback reviews from peers

A number of learning benefits have been identified in relation to the receipt of
feedback reviews from peers. First, research shows that students often perceive the
feedback they receive from peers as more understandable and helpful than teacher
feedback, because it is written in a more accessible language (Topping 1998;
Falchikov 2005). Secondly, where multiple peers are involved, the quantity and
variety of feedback that students receive are naturally increased (Topping 1998);
this, in some situations, can enhance the likelihood that students will locate the
feedback they need rather than receive only the feedback that teachers believe is
useful or that teachers have time to produce. Indeed, Cho and MacArthur (2010)
have shown in a controlled study that, when students received feedback from multi-
ple peers, they made more improvements to the quality of their draft assignments
than when they received feedback from a single peer or a single teacher. Interest-
ingly, this study also showed that students not only received more total feedback
from multiple peers than from a single teacher, but that they also received
proportionally more non-directive feedback – for example, comments on general
104 D. Nicol et al.

features of the text such as the clarity and flow of the argument. Such non-directive
feedback is particularly valuable as it is positively associated with complex repairs
in meaning at the sentence and paragraph level. Thirdly, some researchers maintain
that the receipt of feedback from multiple peers helps sensitise students, as authors,
to different readers’ perspectives (Cho, Cho, and Haker 2010). Such audience
awareness is regarded as important for the development of writing skills.
One feature of peer review that has perhaps not been given adequate recognition
in the research literature is that its implementation allows students, more effectively,
to close the gap between the receipt of feedback and its application. In peer review,
the normal practice is that students produce a draft assignment, receive feedback
from peers and then rework and resubmit the same assignment. Hence they have
opportunities to directly use the feedback they receive. Such structured opportunities
to update the same assignment are rare after teacher feedback, as students usually
move on to the next assignment after receiving such feedback. Seen from this per-
spective, peer review practices might benefit learning, not just because of the quan-
tity and variety of feedback students receive from multiple peers, but also because
the provision and use of feedback are more tightly coupled temporally. In this
respect, peer review practices are especially effective in bringing into play the con-
structivist learning principles advocated by feedback researchers.

Constructing feedback reviews for peers

Most research on peer review has either examined the specific learning benefits that
result when students receive feedback from peers, or the general benefits deriving
from peer review implementations. Almost no studies have directly investigated the
learning benefits that might result from having students produce feedback reviews
for their peers, although there have been a few very recent exceptions. One of these
was a controlled study carried out by Cho and MacArthur (2011), intended to ascer-
tain the effects of peer reviewing on students’ writing performance, independently
of the effects of receiving reviews. The experiment compared a reviewing, a reading
and a control condition. In the reviewing condition, a group of students rated and
commented on the quality of papers written by peers from a similar past course. In
the reading condition, another group merely read the same set of papers. In the con-
trol condition, a third group read materials unrelated to the assignment topic. After
carrying out these tasks, students from each group were then asked to write a paper
themselves on a different but related topic. The results showed that students in the
reviewing condition wrote higher quality papers than those in the reading or control
conditions. Cho and MacArthur (2011, 73) maintain that ‘this research provides
support for peer review of writing as a learning activity’.
In another study, Cho and Cho (2011) directly examined the effects of both
feedback comment provision and receipt of feedback comments on writing revisions
made by undergraduate physics students to their laboratory reports. The researchers
found, unlike previous studies, limited effects from received peer comments and
that overall ‘students seem to improve their writing more by giving comments than
by receiving them’ (640).
Whilst the two studies described above do provide evidence that reviewing and
constructing feedback have a positive effect on student learning, in both cases these
effects were evidenced through an outcome measure, namely, students’ performance
in writing tasks. Hence the studies are more informative about what students learn
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 105

from reviewing rather than how they learn. Nonetheless, Cho and MacArthur (2010)
and Cho and Cho (2011) propose three possible interpretations to account for stu-
dents’ learning from reviewing. One interpretation is that reviewing provides students
with opportunities to examine peer texts from the perspective of a critical reader; in so
doing, they develop a better understanding of how readers might interpret the texts
they produce; this, in turn, helps them better monitor and improve their own writing.
Another interpretation is that reviewing brings into play important problem-solving
processes: students must analyse the work of peers, diagnose problems and suggest
solutions. Regular practice in these cognitive processes, it is argued, helps students
learn to produce good quality work themselves. A third interpretation is that reviewers
learn by producing explanations, by generating comments about what makes the work
of peers strong or weak. This interpretation is consistent with the extensive work of
Roscoe and Chi (2008) on peer tutoring, where they propose that the act of construct-
ing explanations for peers leads student-tutors to rehearse, evaluate and hence
improve their own understanding of the topic. Roscoe and Chi (2008) use the term
reflective knowledge building to refer to this ‘explanation’ effect.
These interpretations are interesting, as they not only contribute to the
theoretical shift away from feedback as a ‘telling’ or ‘delivery’ paradigm, but they
also re-frame the way we might view feedback within a constructivist paradigm; in
reviewing, students are not just learning by constructing meaning from feedback
provided by others, rather they are learning by constructing feedback ‘meanings’
themselves (Nicol 2011).

Aims of the study

The research reported in this paper complements and adds to the research by Cho
and MacArthur (2011) and Cho and Cho (2011). However, rather than focusing on
learning outcomes, this investigation focuses directly on the learning processes that
are activated when students engage in reviewing activities. The aims of the research
were to identify the different learning benefits resulting from receiving feedback
reviews from peers, and from producing feedback reviews for peers, and also to
gain a deeper insight into the cognitive processes that are activated when students
engage in reviewing activities. More specifically, the following research questions
framed the investigation:

(1) What were students’ experiences of and attitudes towards peer review in gen-
eral?
(2) What were students’ perceptions of the learning benefits associated with the
different components of the peer review process, giving and receiving
feedback, and how did these processes influence their own assignment
productions?
(3) What mental processes did students engage in whilst carrying out reviewing
activities and whilst constructing feedback reviews?

Methodology
The context
This study reports on an implementation of peer review within a first-year engineer-
ing design class at the University of Strathclyde. In that class, which comprised 82
106 D. Nicol et al.

students, the major assignment is to research and design a product. Students must
provide all the information required to enable the manufacture of the product. The
theme for the design in the year of this study was ‘eating and resting in the city’,
and typical designs included seating arrangements, food trays and sandwich boxes.
Students learn about a variety of design processes and methods, from investigation
through to detailed design. The design project starts as a group task with student
teams researching possible designs through desk research, observations and analysis
of products in current use, etc. This process is intended to replicate practice in an
industry context. Each student then individually produces a product design specifi-
cation (PDS) and layout drawings for their own design. A PDS is a complex and
detailed document specifying the requirements and constraints on the product being
designed. A PDS is a core element of the design process and, as such, represents a
fundamental learning outcome for this class. The PDS served as the focus for the
peer review task.
Key features of a PDS include detailed requirements on how the product must
perform, what environment it must operate in, what maintenance is expected, what
materials will be used and details of manufacturing facilities, etc. For this particular
design, students were also asked to include a rationale for key PDS components
and values. Students are given an exemplar of a PDS from another area (in the year
of this study it was a design for a stainless steel hot water cylinder), and they
receive lectures about the importance of a PDS and guidance on its construction.

The peer review task

All 82 students individually produced a draft PDS. The peer review task involved
two review activities that were carried out in sequence in relation to these draughts.
First, each student reviewed and provided feedback comments on the PDS drafts
produced by two of their peers. Second, each student reviewed their own PDS
using the same criteria as for the peer reviews; this was intended to encourage stu-
dents to rethink their own assignment based on the reviewing activities. All the
review activities were conducted online supported by PeerMark software, part of
the Turnitin suite. This software guided students through the review activities and
automated the anonymous distribution of assignments and of peer review com-
ments, which were distributed to students a few days after the deadline for comple-
tion of the reviewing activities. An updated PDS was required as part of the final
submission for this design class. Importantly, students could update their PDS
before final submission at any time, for example, after they had produced their feed-
back reviews and their self-review, or after they had received feedback reviews
from peers. Participation in the peer review task was high. Sixty-two out of the 82
students completed all three reviews – two peer reviews and a self-review. Fifteen
students completed two peer reviews without a self-review, and five students
completed only one peer review.
Many peer review studies require students to produce feedback both as marks
and comments, despite some researchers having shown that students do not learn
much from simply grading peer work (Sadler and Good 2006), and others highlight-
ing that students are uncomfortable about being assessed by peers and that they
have reservations about the fairness and accuracy of such processes (Liu and
Carless 2006; Kaufman and Schunn 2011). Kaufman and Shunn’s paper certainly
suggests that the potential learning benefits of peer review might be undermined, at
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 107

least for some students, when peer marking is involved. Hence, this study did not
involve students marking or rating other students’ work; instead, it specifically
focused on peer review and feedback rather than peer assessment. In effect, it
sought to identify the effects of peer review without any confounding effects from
peer marking.
The reviewing process was anonymous, in that students providing online feed-
back reviews did not know the identity of those who had produced the work, and
those receiving feedback reviews did not know the identity of the reviewer. Also,
each student’s design was different, although in the same topic domain, so they
could not directly copy ideas from another’s PDS, rather they would have to inter-
pret them. The software PeerMark not only enabled anonymity, but it also meant
that the peer review intervention did not increase the administrative workload of
academic staff. The teacher did not directly award marks for carrying out the peer
review activities, but participation was a stated course requirement. Also, students
were given a mark for ‘professionalism’ in this class (worth 10% of the overall
mark) and, when discussing this in class, the teacher made it clear that participation
in the peer review activities would influence that mark.
The criteria for the peer review activity comprised four questions formulated by
the teacher. Students could see these questions when they accessed each peer
assignment online, and there were boxes in which to type their responses. The
assignments they were asked to review were randomly assigned by the software.
The following are the review criteria/questions:

(1) Do you feel the PDS is complete in the range of headings covered? If not,
can you suggest any headings that would contribute towards the complete-
ness of the PDS and explain why they are important?
(2) Is the PDS specific enough? Does it specify appropriate target values or
ranges of values? Please suggest aspects that would benefit from further
detail and explain.
(3) To what extent do you think the rationale is convincing for the PDS? Can
you make any suggestions as to how it might be more convincing? Please
explain.
(4) Can you identify one main improvement that could be made to the PDS?
Provide reason(s) for your answer.

Evaluation
The evaluation of the peer review activities was carried out in two ways. First, stu-
dents completed an anonymous online survey after the peer review activities had
ended. The survey comprised 21 items and sought information pertinent to all three
research questions – about students’ attitudes towards peer review in general, about
their perceptions of different learning benefits associated with giving and receiving
feedback, and about the mental processes activated by reviewing. Thirteen questions
were of the fixed-response type where students selected an answer or answers or
rated their agreement using a five-point Likert scale. There were also eight
open-ended questions that prompted for further written comments on a previous
fixed-response answer or asked about a specific aspect of the peer review process;
for example, one open-ended question asked students to ‘give examples of what
108 D. Nicol et al.

you learned from providing reviews of others’ work’. The qualitative data deriving
from these open-ended questions usually comprised a phrase or a short sentence or
two. This data were analysed and categorised under common themes relating to the
research questions. Sixty-four out of the 82 students (78%) completed the online
survey and responses to the open-ended questions were high, ranging from 40 to 60
responses per question.
Second, focus groups were held with two groups of six students and with one
pair of students. A single student was also interviewed separately. In this paper, all
these are referred to as the ‘focus groups’ for ease of reporting. These interview
arrangements were pragmatic and resulted from fitting meetings around examina-
tions and on the availability of students. The focus groups and interviews deliber-
ately built on the open-ended survey responses, but were specifically used to gain a
deeper insight into the mental processes involved in reviewing and constructing
feedback – the third research question. The following are typical prompts used by
the researcher to promote discussion regarding that issue:

• How did you go about doing the review of the other students’ work?
• When you were doing it what was going on in your head, can you remem-
ber?
• What was the sequence of steps you took in carrying out the review?
• What were you thinking as you were carrying out the review?

The recorded interviews were transcribed. Responses that elaborated on the find-
ings of the survey were categorised accordingly and additional themes, usually
relating to the production of feedback reviews, that emerged were categorised and
recorded. The procedures used in the analysis have enabled the researchers to tell
the students’ story of their experiences of peer review using their own words. How-
ever, it is recognised that the data collected and the interpretation are driven by the
research questions that informed this investigation.

Results and interpretation

Experience of and attitudes to peer review: survey and focus group findings
In this study, a great deal of data was collected about students’ general attitudes to
peer review. However, in this article, only a brief account of some key findings is
reported as the issue of attitudes, whilst crucially important, is only one of the
research interests in this paper.
With regard to attitudes, the main finding from the survey was that students
were generally positive about their experiences of engaging in peer review. Even
though the majority of them (55%) had not participated in such activities before,
most reported that they would definitely choose (76%) or might choose (19%) to
participate in a peer review exercise in the future. In the open-ended survey ques-
tions, students were asked ‘How did you feel about reviewing other students’ work
and having them review your work?’ There were 56 written responses, and again,
the majority of students (86%) confirmed that their peer review experience had been
positive. Comments included that ‘it was good to get feedback from each other’, ‘it
was good knowing everyone wanted to help each other’, ‘good because it showed
me what others had done’, and ‘I’ve seen how helpful and useful it can be’. A few
students were positive but qualified their comments, for example, ‘I didn’t like the
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 109

idea at first but found it to be quite helpful’, ‘not completely comfortable but it was
worthwhile’ and ‘I felt that it was useful but ended up feeling that I had put more
work into my reviews than others’. A number of students maintained that anonym-
ity was important, for example, ‘I felt fine as you didn’t know who was looking at
yours or whose you were looking at’ and ‘glad it was anonymous though’.
In the survey, students were asked to rate the quality of the feedback they
received from peers and the feedback they provided to peers. The quality of the
feedback reviews received was rated as excellent or good by over 53% of the stu-
dents, as of fair quality by 31% and as poor by 13%. Students rated the quality of
the feedback reviews they provided as either excellent or good (65%), as of fair
quality (25%) and as of poor quality (12%). In the focus groups, some students dis-
cussed the poor quality of the feedback reviews they had received, and the lack of
effort made by some reviewers. This was identified as the main limitation of
received feedback by students. When asked how poor quality reviews might be
addressed, students suggested either that ‘it might be better to have more reviews as
then you had a better chance of getting one of good quality’ or ‘lecturers could
mark the review process to address effort issues’.
Interestingly, the students’ positive attitudes in this study contrast with the diffi-
culties and negative attitudes to peer review often reported in the literature (Liu and
Carless 2006; Kaufman and Schunn 2011). In part, this difference might be attrib-
uted to the way in which peer review was presented to students by the teacher and
to the quality of the guidance provided. For example, in the survey almost all stu-
dents (89%) reported positively on the guidance they received. However, what most
notably distinguishes this study from many others is that students were not asked to
mark the work of peers when providing feedback comments. Hence, it is tempting
to conclude that this was the causal factor, as the research shows that it is the mark-
ing component of peer review that causes most dissatisfaction (Kaufman and
Schunn 2011). Some evidence for this assertion comes from the survey where a sig-
nificant proportion of students were unfavourable to the idea of marking. Specifi-
cally, when asked whether it would be worthwhile for students to allocate a mark
for each piece of work as part of the peer review process, students were divided in
their answers with 39% responding ‘yes’ it would be worthwhile, 38% responding
‘no’ and 23% responding ‘don’t know’. In the survey, 47 students also provided
reasons for their answers. Over 50% of these responses were reasons for not having
students award marks; the main reasons were that students did not have enough
expertise to mark and/or were not likely to be accurate or fair (e.g. ‘would not have
enough insight into comparative performances to score’, ‘everyone will have a dif-
ferent standard’, ‘students would be too harsh’). Those agreeing that students should
allocate a mark mainly commented that this would give them a ‘more accurate pic-
ture of how they were doing’. Similar concerns about marking were also raised in
the focus group discussions.
Although more research is required on attitudes to peer review, these findings
suggest that teachers should consider carefully whether to include marking in their
peer review designs.

Learning from producing and receiving reviews: survey responses

A central interest in this study concerns the students’ perceptions of the learning
benefits that result from the production and receipt of feedback reviews. Table 1
110 D. Nicol et al.

shows the results from two survey questions that asked students about their learning
from these different processes. The responses to question 7 show that almost all stu-
dents believed that they learned from some aspect of the peer review activity
(93%). However, whilst over half reported that they learned from both giving and
receiving feedback, some reported that they learned only from giving and others
only from receiving feedback. In the latter two categories, more than twice as many
students felt that they learned from receiving rather than from giving feedback.
Question 10 addressed the same issue as question 7, but focused on reports of
behaviour rather than perceptions of learning. Again, the responses indicate that
most students (76%) did indeed learn something from the peer review processes, in
that they reported making modifications to their draught assignment. However, in
contrast to question 7, the responses to question 10 show that, in terms of actions
to make improvements, both giving and receiving feedback were perceived as
equally beneficial.
In the survey, students were also asked to give examples of the actual modifica-
tions they made to their draft PDS based on the peer review activities. Forty-one
students responded to this question. The responses were wide ranging; however, the
following are typical examples:

I included specific materials and changed the formatting of the document so it looked
more professional.

I provided more specific numeric values and expanded my rationale after seeing some-
one else’s PDS and after receiving feedback.

I added a legal and patents section.

Improved the rationale, included more facts.

I made some of my numeric points more specific to my final concept.

Table 1. Learning from peer review: students’ responses and reported actions to survey
questions 7 and 10 (n = 64).

% [no of
Q7. Which aspect of the peer review activity did you learn from? students]
Giving feedback 11 [7]
Receiving feedback 27 [17]
Both giving and receiving feedback 55 [35]
Neither giving or receiving feedback 8 [5]

Q10. Did you modify your initial assignment as a result of the peer % [no of
review activity to improve it? students]
Yes, as a result of peer review given 23 [15]
Yes, as a result of the peer review received 25 [16]
Yes, as a result of the peer review given and received 28 [18]
No 22 [14]
Not applicable 2 [1]
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 111

These comments show that students do revisit, rethink and update their work as a
result of engaging in peer review activities. They also show that students believe
that the changes they make to their assignments are improvements.
In order to gain deeper insight into the differential effects of receiving and giv-
ing feedback in peer review, students were also asked in the survey to comment on
what they learned from receiving feedback reviews from peers, and what they
learned from providing feedback reviews to peers. These two questions elicited
quite different responses.
Fifty-four students provided comments describing what they learned from
receiving reviews. The majority (63%) reported that receiving reviews from others
either helped highlight specific areas for improvement (e.g. ‘more rationale needed’,
‘I learned to put more numerical data and figures into my PDS’) or that it helped
bring deficiencies in work to their attention (e.g. ‘problems that I didn’t know of
before were highlighted’). Around a quarter of the students (23%) reported that
receiving reviews was valuable, because it helped them appreciate how other read-
ers might interpret their work (e.g. ‘I could see points from others’ viewpoints’,
‘ways in which other students see my work’). A small number of students (5%)
noted that receiving feedback could be motivational (e.g. ‘the person who reviewed
my PDS gave me positive feedback which helped me a lot’), and a small number
(5%) reported that the reviews they received were not valuable (e.g. ‘they weren’t
very good’). These findings are consistent with prior research on the benefits of
feedback receipt from peers (Topping 1998; Cho and MacArthur 2010).
Forty-five students made comments in the survey describing what they learned
from producing reviews. As highlighted above, this process was perceived as confer-
ring quite different learning benefits from receiving reviews. Some students (15%)
reported that through providing reviews they learned how to think critically or how to
make critical judgements (e.g. ‘how to look at work critically that isn’t your own, it
helps make you a better critical thinker’). Others (13%) reported that it enabled them
to see others’ work from an assessor’s perspective (e.g. ‘looking at the work from a
markers point of view’) or that it helped them better understand the assessment stan-
dards, as illustrated by the following comments from two different students:

I was given a greater understanding of the level of work the course may be demand-
ing.

I learned what the standards were and what other people’s standards were.

Importantly, the majority of the students (68%), through their survey comments,
reported that reviewing resulted in their reflecting back on their own work and/or in
their transferring ideas generated through the reviewing process to inform that work
as the following extracts show.

When giving advice to people on theirs it gave me greater perception when reviewing
my own work by listening to my own advice for example.

I had a chance to see other people’s work and aspects of their work that I felt were
lacking in my work – this helped me to improve my work.

From identifying missing pieces in other people’s work I was able to amend my own.
112 D. Nicol et al.

Also notable in the survey data reported above is that comments about receiving
reviews tended to focus more on subject content (i.e. 63% of the total comments
were about areas in need of improvement or that needed clarification, etc.),
whereas those about producing reviews focused more on learning processes
(i.e. 96% of total comments were about critical thinking, taking the assessors
perspective and transfer of learning, with the majority being about learning
transfer).
Cho and Cho (2011) have shown that producing reviews for peers leads to
greater improvements in students’ written assignments than the receipt of reviews
from peers. The findings above add to this prior research by providing insights,
from the students’ perspective, into the cognitive processes that might account for
these different effects. In particular, the students’ own accounts suggest that review-
ing is especially effective in triggering some powerful mental processes, including
critical thinking, the active interpretation and application of assessment criteria,
reflection and learning transfer – processes that are normally associated with high-
levels of academic achievement. In essence, these findings suggest that the practice
of reviewing offers considerable potential, arguably even beyond what might be
possible through received feedback, for teachers wishing to develop students own
thinking and assessment skills.

Learning from producing and receiving feedback: focus group data

The focus group interviews allowed deeper probing into perceived differences
between producing and receiving feedback reviews. Students were again asked
which they thought was more beneficial for their learning, producing feedback
reviews or receiving feedback reviews. Unlike the quantitative survey data, most
students in the focus groups reported that giving feedback was more beneficial,
often coming to this realisation as they discussed and thought deeply about the
focus group questions. Nonetheless, all students agreed that there was potential
value in both processes as this typical comment shows:

I think you need both parts but you gain more yourself from giving it as you’re
analysing your own and theirs.

Students also reported through the focus group discussions that, in comparison with
receiving reviews, producing reviews involved them in thinking critically and in
learning to be critical. Many students noted that, if they developed this capacity for
critical thinking, then this would help them to make more objective judgements
about their own work. For example, as one student pointed out:

Giving it is better because that’s what you need to learn – how to be critical of your
own work – how to stand back – and where to be judgemental.

Another benefit highlighted by some students in the focus group discussion was the
idea that reviewing gave them more control over, or more responsibility for, feed-
back processes:

If you’re reviewing it yourself you are more likely to learn as a whole and be able to
apply things in the future. Whereas if you’re just reading someone’s feedback,
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 113

probably because of how we’ve always learned, you are supposed to take it on board
and apply it but you think yes that’s how I can improve but you don’t do anything.

I think it’s more useful if you’ve had to go away and do it yourself … [produce feed-
back] … rather than rely on others’ feedback.

Some students also commented that the act of producing feedback on the work of
peers had reduced their need for, and the value of, feedback from peers. As one
student noted:

I’d already made improvements by the time it came to actually reading what people
had said about mine, I’d already spotted those things.

Indeed, in the focus groups, over half the students interviewed reported that they
had actually updated their own work after the reviewing activities, and before they
received the reviews. Many also reported that having done this, the receipt of
reviews from others did not add to the process.
Reviewing was also seen by some students to address a common limitation of
received feedback, namely that it is usually framed with reference to what has been
produced and that it does not necessarily push the student to think beyond the con-
fines of their own production, to open up new avenues of inquiry, new perspectives
and ways of thinking about the work they have produced. This argument is cap-
tured in the following student comment:

For me it would probably be to give feedback because I think seeing what other peo-
ple have done is more helpful than getting other people’s comments on what you have
already done. By looking at other people’s work you can see for yourself what you
have forgotten or not even thought about. When people give feedback on yours they
generally just talk about what is there. They don’t say, well I did this on mine and
you could put that in yours.

Exposure to others’ work through reviewing was also seen as motivational to some
students, incentivising them to improve the quality of their own work, as the fol-
lowing extract shows:

Seeing the quality of other’ work was a bit of a shock, I was, yes, I really need
to step mine up, but then it was fine because we could then go and improve on
it.

The results presented in this sub-section are very important. They suggest that,
through reviewing the work of peers, students can learn to take control over
their own learning, to generate their own feedback and to be more critical about
their own work. As students themselves reported, reviewing not only puts feed-
back processes in their hands, but it also reduces their need for received feed-
back from others. In addition, some students in the focus groups went further,
as shown in the quote above, by noting that reviewing brings into view new
perspectives on their own work, perspectives that might not become available
through received feedback. Overall, these findings suggest that peer reviewing
offers great promise as a method through which students might develop their
capabilities as independent and self-regulated learners, seen as one of the main
114 D. Nicol et al.

goals of higher education (Nicol and MacFarlane-Dick 2006; Boud and Associ-
ates 2010).

Cognitive processes activated when producing reviews: survey and focus group
findings
In the survey, students were asked to comment on how they carried out the peer
review, that is, ‘how they evaluated the quality of the work to provide responses to
the peer review questions’. Thirty-seven students answered this question. Over 50%
of them wrote about how they had used their own work as the benchmark for the
reviewing activity. The actual word ‘compare’ was used by 32% of the students
who responded to this item (e.g. ‘I compared it against my own work and examples
given by the lecturer’, ‘I compared the reviews to my own to see if it was better or
worse and what they could do to change it’).
In the focus groups, students were also asked how they carried out the review
activity. The following comment made by one student and confirmed by others pro-
vides deeper insight into this comparative process:

I read it through and compared it with what I had done to see if they had put something
I had not … The four questions were useful as they provided a framework for the
review. If we hadn’t had the questions it would have been difficult. I did the reviews
separately and then answered one then the other. The first was a better standard than
the other – so I used the ideas from the better one to comment on the weaker one. I
also read the guidelines … [the review questions] … when I did the peer review. There
were ideas from the good one that I hadn’t even thought of in mine.

As in the survey responses, this student talks about ‘comparing’ the work of others
with what she has produced. It appears that because she has produced work in the
same domain as her peers, she already has an ‘internal’ standard with which to eval-
uate the peers’ work. Hence this comparison of the peers’ work against this standard
inevitably results in a backward reflection on the student’s own work. However, the
process is more complex than this. This student also reports making comparative
judgements across the reviews using her evaluation and interpretation of one assign-
ment to comment on another, with the review questions informing the written feed-
back responses. This demonstrates the value of requiring multiple reviews.
In the survey, students also commented on the use of the review questions as a
framework for their analysis of the peer assignment or for their commentary (e.g. ‘I
analysed the assignment in the context of the review question’, ‘I used the review
questions to help formulate my commentary’). In the focus groups, the effects of
the review questions were probed further. The following are typical comments from
students in different focus groups about the impact of those questions:

You compare it [the other student’s work] to the criteria, but then in the back of your
mind you’re comparing it to your own at the same time. So you’re kind of seeing the
bad points compared to yours and the good points where you can do better on your
own.

I went down the questions and compared it to my own … I was trying to think what
has this person done. Have they put in more effort or more knowledge than me?
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 115

I went through the questions keeping my own in mind.

You’ve got what you’ve done in the back of your mind whilst you’re going over
theirs so you see where you’ve gone wrong without anyone pointing it out so you
learn it yourself.

Tending to mark theirs as if they were trying to do a product like yours.

What is notable here is that, even whilst discussing the use of the review questions,
all students still allude, in different ways, to a background reflective process involv-
ing an active comparison of the other’s work with their own. Arguably, this reflec-
tive process, which depends on students having produced work in the same domain
as their peers, is one of the defining features of peer reviewing. Indeed, this type of
reflective comparison would not occur if students were merely asked to review a
published article or to provide an explanation of ideas to other students as in peer
tutoring (Roscoe and Chi 2008). This suggests that the benefits of peer reviewing
do not just derive from producing explanations, one of the interpretations offered
by Cho and MacArthur (2010), but rather from students producing critical reviews
which are grounded in comparison with their own work.
Further insight into the reviewing process emerged from a discussion in one
focus group where members compared peer reviewing with the receipt of teacher
feedback.

I think when you are reviewing (the work of peers), it’s more a self-learning process,
you’re teaching yourself, well, I can see somebody’s done that and that’s a strength,
and I should maybe try and incorporate that somehow into my work. Whereas getting
(teacher) feedback you’re kind of getting told what to do. You’re getting told this is
the way you should be doing it, and this is the right way to do it. You’re not really
thinking for yourself … I think it [reviewing] would help you not need so much of
teacher feedback if there was more of this. Whereas, I think if you’re not being able
to do this [reviewing] then you will always be needing more. [teacher feedback]

From this comment, it is clear that this student perceives reviewing as an active and
self-regulatory learning process, in contrast to receiving feedback reviews, which
instead is characterised as a telling process. This perception resonates with argu-
ments in the research, that transmission is a flawed way to think about learning
from feedback (Sadler 2010), and with the findings reported earlier that reviewing
gave students a sense of control over their own learning. This student also locates a
key benefit deriving from such regulatory feedback activities, namely, a reduced
dependence on the teacher for feedback.

Discussion
As mentioned in the introduction, recent research has identified peer review as a
fertile context for enhancing student learning through feedback processes. However,
whilst that research has demonstrated performance improvements, both when stu-
dents receive feedback reviews from peers (Cho and MacArthur 2010) and when
they produce feedback reviews for peers (Cho and Cho 2011), little is known about
the learning mechanisms that might account for these improvements. The study
reported here advances this research by exploring, from the students’ perspective,
116 D. Nicol et al.

how receiving and producing reviews differ and, importantly, by teasing out the
cognitive processes activated by reviewing, the most under-researched aspect of
peer review, and by highlighting the role of these processes in the enhancement of
student learning.
From the results reported, it is clear that students are keenly aware that receiving
feedback reviews involves different learning benefits and processes from producing
feedback reviews. Receiving reviews is seen by students as beneficial primarily
because it alerts them to deficiencies or gaps in their work, or because it sensitises
them to the different ways in which readers might interpret what they have written.
Providing reviews, instead, is viewed as beneficial because it engages students
actively in critical thinking, in applying criteria, in reflection and, through this, in
learning transfer. These latter cognitive processes, activated through reviewing, and
their theoretical and practical implications, are discussed below.

Evaluative judgement and vicarious learning

This study shows that producing reviews engages students in multiple and
overlapping acts of evaluation or critical judgement, both about the work produced
by others and, in many different ways, about their own work. First, students
reported that reviewing involves a comparative process wherein they evaluate each
peer assignment against an internal representation of their own work. According to
the students, this comparison triggers a reflective process, where they use the
feedback they generate for others to update their thinking about their own assign-
ment. Second, students reported that reviewing involved them in comparing one
peer’s work against another and using the feedback generated from one to comment
on the other. This process also generates internal feedback that students use to
inform their own work. Third, as required in the peer review task, all students eval-
uated the work of peers against the review criteria – the questions provided by the
teacher – in order to produce a written feedback response. Once again, however,
students reported that, even in constructing this written response, they were
conscious of concurrently making background comparisons of others’ work with
their own work.
These complex evaluative processes have not been identified in earlier research,
which has primarily interpreted reviewing as a process that calls on and develops
problem-solving or explanatory skills (Cho and Cho 2011; Cho and MacArthur
2011). Yet these findings are important, not just because they expand our under-
standing of the reviewing process, but also because they resonate with recent calls
by writers on assessment and feedback that more attention be paid to developing
the students’ capacity to make evaluative judgements (Boud and Associates 2010;
Cowan 2010; Sadler 2010; Nicol 2013). For example, Sadler (2010) has proposed
that, if undergraduate students were given regular opportunities to engage in acts of
critical appraisal, then this would significantly enhance their ability to produce qual-
ity work themselves. In turn, Cowan (2010) maintains that learning to make sound
evaluative judgements is a professional skill that must be explicitly developed as it
underpins both critical thinking and reflective capabilities. Findings from this
engineering design study suggest that producing feedback reviews, which gave stu-
dents experience in making judgements both about the work of others and, through
a vicarious reflective process (Mayes et al. 2001), also about their own work, could
be a productive platform for the development of these essential professional skills.
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 117

One question arising with regard to these evaluative processes is to what extent
the requirement that students produce a self-review after completing the two peer
reviews acted as the driver for the students’ backward reflection on their own work.
This is difficult to establish, as in the focus groups students did not indicate this as
a causal factor. However, in two further investigations of peer review by the lead
author conducted since this study, students reported engaging in the same reflective
processes, even though there was no requirement for self-review. This latter finding
suggests that peer review on its own does indeed encourage reflection; however, it
does not establish what added value, if any, is realised by having students consoli-
date their reflections by writing them down. This issue warrants further research. In
the meantime, however, it might still be wise to include self-review in peer review
designs, given that maximising reflection on students’ own work is a fundamental
learning objective.

Engagement with assessment criteria

A specific issue in the published literature on assessment and feedback relates to
assessment criteria. Research has shown that when students have a poor understand-
ing of criteria, and hence do not share their teacher’s conceptions of what is impor-
tant, they are less likely to produce quality work themselves (MacLellan 2001).
Also, the feedback that the teacher provides often does not result in improvements
as it does not ‘connect’ (Hounsell 1997). Various strategies have been proposed to
address this issue, including engaging students actively in discussing criteria before
beginning an assessment task and having students derive the criteria themselves
through analysing assignments produced by student cohorts from previous years
(Nicol 2010). Peer reviewing, however, might offer a new way of conceptualising
such engagement with criteria.
In reviewing, students are by necessity creating criteria themselves as they
compare others’ work with their own. This is an inductive, and even holistic,
process, as it is the students’ own work that acts as the standard or reference
for the comparison. In reviewing, students also use the explicit criteria supplied
by the teacher to construct a feedback response. This is a more analytical and
deductive process, as the peer’s work is evaluated against formally-defined crite-
ria. Indeed, in creating this response, students gain experience in applying formal
criteria to real instances of practice; earlier work suggests that this should facili-
tate their internalisation (Price and O’Donovan 2006). Importantly, both these
inductive and deductive processes were described by students as taking place
simultaneously. Whenever they talked about the evaluation of the work of peers
against the supplied criteria they also, often in the same sentence, talked about a
reflective process whereby they compared their own work with that of peers.
This is perhaps unsurprising, given that students, before carrying out the
reviews, would have already spent considerable time producing an assignment in
the same topic domain as their peers. Hence, it is likely that the primary bench-
mark that students use to evaluate others’ work derives from the work that they
have produced themselves.
What is important in this analysis, however, is not just that reviewing calls on
two sets of criteria, one set implicit and deriving from the student’s own experience
in producing an assignment, and the other explicit and deriving from the teacher,
but also that these two sets overlap in use. This has interesting implications; first,
118 D. Nicol et al.

that students might be able to use the teacher-provided criteria to help calibrate and
strengthen their own evaluative capabilities; second, that engagement with the
teacher-provided criteria might be enriched through their use alongside student-pro-
duced criteria. Speculating further, it might be argued that, through reviewing,
students generate richer criteria than those provided by the teacher, but sounder
criteria than those they might be able to formulate themselves.

Students as feedback producer: reflection and learning transfer

The findings reported in this paper provide a new perspective on what might consti-
tute good feedback practice in higher education, one which moves thinking away
from a sole concern with how students learn from constructing meaning from
received feedback, to a concern with how they might also learn through becoming
better feedback producers.
In reviewing, students construct feedback ‘meanings’ for themselves as they pro-
duce it for others; that is, the catalyst for meaning construction is not an external
input, rather it is an input generated directly by the students themselves as they
engage in making critical judgements. When students become the source and gener-
ators of feedback then a number of benefits ensue, as identified by students in this
study. First, in the focus groups, students maintained that reviewing, or more specif-
ically the reflective process it engenders, gave them more control over feedback
processes and hence over their own learning. It resulted in their ‘teaching them-
selves’, to paraphrase their words. This form of control goes well beyond students
becoming better users of teacher feedback, as it puts feedback processes firmly in
their hands. Students also maintained that, were they to be given more control in
this way, their need for the receipt of feedback from peers or even the teacher might
actually be reduced. Some students also reported that reviewing might enhance the
range of feedback perspectives they were exposed to, beyond those provided
through received reviews. Whilst good teachers will always try to alert students to
alternative perspectives, the range of possibilities is likely to be greater through stu-
dents reviewing the work of peers, and especially, if they produce a number of
reviews. Such exposure to examples of work of varying quality is, according to
Sadler (2010), what is required if students are to learn to recognise and produce
high-quality work themselves.
This focus on learning through reviewing and providing feedback is important
from both a theoretical and a practical perspective. First, it highlights the impor-
tance of inner feedback processes, an often neglected consideration in feedback
research. Whenever learners produce a piece of work, they generate internal feed-
back, even in the absence of a teacher. This feedback is a by-product of task
engagement; it derives from the learner’s inner monitoring and evaluation of dis-
crepancies between current and intended performance (Butler and Winnie 1995).
Also, when external feedback is provided it does not operate alone – it triggers and
also adds to learner-generated feedback, at times confirming, supplementing or con-
flicting with it. For the most part, research on feedback has ignored the complexity
of these inner feedback processes. For example, little has been written about how
these inner processes might be harnessed so that the need for external feedback is
reduced, or specifically about how students might develop the ability to cope with
discrepancies and conflicts between external and inner feedback. This paper begins
to address this gap by highlighting how producing feedback reviews might
 Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 119

strengthen inner feedback processes and enable students to compare and calibrate
inner and external feedback, in ways that support their learning.
Second, reviewing addresses a development need that, arguably, is not fully
tackled through higher education curricula. In their future careers, most graduates
are likely to encounter situations where they are required to appraise and comment
on the work or performance of others. Hence, one would expect feedback practices
in higher education to echo these requirements. Yet, this is not the case; most
students neither receive practice in producing feedback nor, indeed, practice in mak-
ing sense of feedback when it is received from multiple sources (Nicol 2011).
Teachers could, however, easily address both these issues by ensuring that peer
review activities are given a more prominent role, than currently happens, in higher
education curricula.

Future research and implementation

There is no doubt that more research is required on peer review and its different
components, including more studies of students’ experiences, perceptions and
responses to the different feedback arrangements that are possible during its imple-
mentation. Whilst one must be cautious about inferring mental processes from self-
reports, our understanding of peer review processes and their effects on learning
will be much weaker without the analysis that such reports enable, as the present
study has shown. Future research, amongst other things, might usefully focus on
establishing whether the results found in this study would generalise to, and be
applicable in, other situations and in other disciplines. In that context, it should be
mentioned here that such work has already begun. Indeed, one of the authors of this
paper has just completed two further implementations of peer review, one with over
250 first-year sociology students and another with 30 biochemistry students. This
research also involved, amongst other measures, focus groups and the use of a
survey instrument with items that overlapped with those used in this study. The
findings of these studies confirm and extend those reported here.
Many readers will have practical concerns about the implementation of peer
review, for example, about the students’ ability to provide meaningful feedback,
about fairness and biases in reviewing, about collusion and plagiarism and about
the implications for teacher workload. Arguably, however, most of these concerns
can be addressed through well-designed peer review tasks, as some researchers have
recently suggested (Pearce, Mulder, and Baik 2009). As discussed earlier in this
paper, it is also apparent that many implementation problems can be circumvented
if students are not asked to mark each others’ work when they engage in reviewing
activities. What is important, however, is that such practical concerns do not act as
a barrier to the increased implementation of peer review in higher education, given
the potential educational benefits that this practice offers.

Conclusion
The research reported in this paper throws new light on the theory and practice of
feedback in higher education. It shifts the focus of analysis firmly away from old
delivery models of feedback, which cast the teacher as the transmitter of feedback
messages to students conceived as passive relays. However, whilst it takes on board
more recent theoretical positions which recognise the importance of an active role
120 D. Nicol et al.

for learners in constructing meaning from received feedback, it goes further than
those positions in that it identifies conditions which would make these processes of
construction even richer and more productive. These conditions involve the staging
of feedback in peer review contexts, where feedback production is recognised as
just as valuable for learning as feedback receipt. Such staging will not only result
in students gaining a deeper insight into subject matter but, crucially, it will also
enable them to acquire skills which are currently not explicitly developed through
the curriculum, even though they constitute an important requirement in profes-
sional life beyond university. These skills include the ability to engage with and
take ownership of evaluation criteria, to make informed judgements about the qual-
ity of the work of others, to formulate and articulate these judgments in written
form and, fundamentally, the ability to evaluate and improve one’s own work based
on these processes.

Acknowledgements
The authors would like to thank Dr Michela Clari of the University of Edinburgh for her
many perceptive and constructive feedback comments which helped improve the quality of
this manuscript. We would also like to thank JISC UK for funding the PEER Project which
allowed us to research this topic, and for their further funding for the PEER Toolkit project.
Details of these projects can be found at www.reap.ac.uk Last, and not least, we thank the
Design Engineering students for providing such deep insight into the mental processes
elicited by peer review activities. This went beyond what we had anticipated when we
designed the survey and focus group protocols.

Notes on contributors
David Nicol is an emeritus professor of Higher Education at the University of Strathclyde.
He has published extensively on assessment and feedback in higher education from a
pedagogical, technological and institutional change management perspective (see www.reap.
ac.uk).

Avril Thomson is a senior lecturer in Engineering Design at the University of Strathclyde.

She is the departmental director of Teaching and Learning and the Engineering Faculty
Learning Manager.

Caroline Breslin is a learning technology advisor for the Faculty of Engineering at the
University of Strathclyde. Her research publications are in the area of technology-enabled
teaching and learning.

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