IMPROVING STUDENT PEER FEEDBACK Linda

Instructors use peer feedback to afford students multiple assessments of their work and to help them acquire important lifelong skills. However, research finds that this type of feedback has questionable validity, reliability, and accuracy, and instructors consider much of it too uncritical, superficial, vague, and content-focused, among other things. This article posits that the typical judgment-based feedback questions give students emotionally charged tasks that they are cognitively ill equipped to perform well and that permit laxness. It then introduces an alternative that encourages neutral, informative, and thorough responses that add genuine value to the peer feedback process. ollege-level faculty are relinquishC ing control of their students’ inclass activities and assignments as never before, increasingly holding students responsible for not only their own learning but that of their peers as well. The popularity of cooperative learning reflects this sweeping trend, and we commonly find it coupled with other studentcentered methods, such as problem-based learning, the case method, service learning, and creative multimedia assign-