Who gives the most valuable feedback?

Recent changes in some higher education contexts include increased enrolment and larger class sizes and limitations on the time instructors have for grading and assessment. This has led to an increased focus on alternative approaches to assessment such as formative assessment. One important aspect of formative assessment is feedback, which allows learners to receive information from various sources about their work and make use of this information to improve their learning. As such, there is a need for research that compares different sources of feedback and their effects on learning, and this gap is addressed in a recent study in Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education. Specifically, the study addresses previous research showing a potential mismatch between student presumptions about different modes of feedback and the learning support that these different modes can provide. Consistent with previous research, this recent study found that students rated teacher feedback significantly higher than either peer feedback from other students or self-feedback. Feedback on short essays led to improved essay quality, but interestingly only for the peer feedback condition. This pattern has important implications for feedback in higher education and for future research in this area.

As highlighted in this special issue of Aktuell högskolepedagogisk forskning, there is a clear need to focus on and expand research on formative assessment in higher education. In addition to changes in class size, the advent of AI underscores this need. One particularly promising form is online assessment, which can take different specific forms but which is typically delivered via online learning platforms. For example, students can upload first drafts of an essay assignment to a learning management system and then receive feedback from the instructor or from their fellow students. Online assessment is promising both because of easier accessibility and flexibility but also because it provides digital features that offer several pedagogical possibilities. For example, assessment data can be acquired and used to analyze and potentially predict the learning process for both instructors and students. The authors of this study note that, despite this promise, feedback in online assessment has not been extensively researched.

With this focus on online assessment, the study addresses several research gaps specific to feedback. The authors note a recent shift in the study of feedback toward more focus on students’ active participation in the feedback process, for example by both providing and receiving feedback. Previous studies in this area have shown that students clearly prefer feedback from instructors, but this process can be quite time-consuming. While students assume that feedback from instructors is more valuable and helpful for learning, and are critical of feedback from their peers, evidence also suggests that the content of instructor and peer feedback tends to correlate. This might suggest that both types of feedback might be helpful for learning, and some limited evidence suggests this may be true.

Another important aspect of feedback examined was the role of feedback literacy, the capacity to act upon feedback received to improve learning processes. Research in this area has identified four concepts that are central to developing a student’s feedback literacy: appreciating feedback, making judgments, managing affect, and taking action. Students who have higher feedback literacy are those who can better accept, process, and act on feedback. The study used a feedback literacy scale with five sub-components: seek feedback, make sense of the information, use the feedback, be able to provide feedback to others, and manage one’s affect towards it.

The study used a quasi-experimental design to examine these questions in a group of students in a Business and Economics Education course at a European university. Students came to a computer lab for two one-hour sessions a week apart and were given access to a short course on veganism within the university learning management system. In the first session, students engaged with the material and wrote a short essay, after which they provided feedback on two essays written by other students in the study. To support them in providing peer feedback, students were given a rubric for evaluating short essays based on four aspects: content, formalities, sentence flow, and organization. Students could give 1-5 points for each aspect, and each possible point level included a descriptive example. They concluded the first session by writing a second essay on a different question from the material. In the second session, students received peer feedback on the first essay and instructor feedback on the second, and revised both essays based on this feedback. They also wrote a third essay, which they then assessed themselves with a provided template, and revised. Students also completed questionnaires that assessed their perceptions about different sources of feedback, as well as their level of feedback literacy. All essays were evaluated for quality by two independent graders based on the same rubric.

The results replicated previous studies, as teacher feedback was rated as higher than peer feedback. All essays improved with revision after feedback, and individual levels of feedback literacy partially explained this improvement. Contrary to the authors’ predictions, all sources of feedback did not equally improve essay scores. Interestingly, it was only peer feedback that led to a statistically significant improvement. The authors also examined whether the students’ perceptions about sources of feedback influenced the results and found no effect. Thus, even though students expressed a preference for teacher feedback, it was in fact feedback from their peers that led to the greatest improvement in essay writing. This suggests that students may undervalue input from their fellow students, when that input may be more valuable than they think.

This pattern of results has important implications for university instructors seeking to incorporate more formative assessment into their teaching. Generally, the authors highlight the need to broaden understanding of feedback as potentially valuable beyond just justification of grades. These results also suggest that students would benefit from support or specific instruction in feedback literacy to maximally benefit from, and actively engage in, feedback. Another important implication is the need for future studies to combine measures of student learning with assessments of student perceptions of feedback, because this study shows that they can differ. Finally, and perhaps most relevant for practice for many of us, these results suggest that it may be fruitful to employ peer assessment in online learning environments, either as a supplement or alternative to teacher assessment.

Comment: I have not used formative peer feedback in this way in my teaching, but I was aware that students tend to favor instructor feedback and may not value peer feedback to the same degree. In hindsight, that might have made me more biased or skeptical of peer feedback and affected my choices. Now I understand that instructor and peer feedback correlate more than I realized, and that there is at least preliminary evidence that peer feedback can affect learning as much or more than instructor feedback. This has sparked a renewed interest in how I can incorporate peer feedback into some of my teaching and has already given me some ideas I look forward to exploring. For example, a group case study project in one course would benefit from a process where groups could provide feedback to one another before the project seminar, which would potentially improve the quality of the projects, the comparison between projects in the seminar, and thus ultimately student learning.

Another interesting aspect of this study is the role of feedback literacy in partially explaining the improvement in essay writing. This suggests that students who were better prepared to use feedback benefited more from it. This in turn suggests that another important part of formative assessment is, or perhaps should be, considering how best to prepare students to benefit from the approach. It would be interesting to develop short interventions to train feedback literacy, or other aspects of formative assessment, and test whether this could lead to stronger effects of feedback on learning. A related question would be whether the act of providing feedback, in and of itself, may provide some benefit for students if doing so increases feedback literacy and/or leads students to reflect more deeply about their own work. For example, feedback literacy training modules could be incorporated into learning management systems, and completion of this training could be required before the student can begin an essay assignment that includes a peer feedback component. While more research is needed to determine whether feedback literacy can be trained and how, this is a fruitful direction for future research.

This is an ambitious study that is not without its limitations, as the authors acknowledge, and the results should be interpreted with caution. The sample size was relatively small, and the study was conducted in an artificial and limited setting. It is common in research like this to begin with a controlled environment, but it will be important to expand the research by conducting similar studies in more realistic settings like real courses.

Text: Eric Pakulak, Department of Psychology

The Article
Heil, J., & Ifenthaler, D. (2026). Effects of teacher, peer and self-feedback on student improvement in online assessment: the role of individuals’ presumptions and feedback literacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 51(2), 281-300.

Keywords: online assessment, peer feedback, self-feedback, teacher feedback