Exploring students’ peer feedback quality in an anonymous synchronous peer assessment setting in Secondary Education

This study attempts to provide a better understanding of the peer feedback content quality that 11th grade secondary education students generate when participating in a synchronous peer assessment setting in which anonymity for the assessors is provided through the use of Mobile Response Technology. In a quasi-experimental design the impact of structured processing of an intermediate peer feedback (PF) report on students’ own PF skills in a successive peer assessment session was investigated (i.e. active handling). This was compared to a control group that only received the intermediate report without further structuring (i.e. passive handling). Content analyses on the PF style and the type of the PF messages revealed that due to multiple peer assessment practice opportunities students’ PF messages contained significantly more negative verifications and informative elaborations at the end of the peer assessment sessions, compared to the beginning. However, no significant differences between the active and passive handling of the PF report could be found