Supporting Peer Feedback Formulation in a Video-Based Digital Platform in Technical Vocational Education

Vocational education and training (VET) students often have difficulties with formulating peer feedback for various reasons. This is a problem as only well-argued peer feedback positively affects learning. Thus, supporting peer feedback formulation is desirable. This study explores the effectiveness of a prompt consisting of evaluative markers and sentence openers on the quality of peer feedback formulation. 48 VET students in a technical domain in the Netherlands watched the same five videos on practice and then provided peer feedback to the performers. An experimental group (24 students) had access to evaluative markers and sentence openers to support feedback formulation. The control group (24 students) did not have access to these supports. The generated feedback was analysed on feedback quality indicators and compared using independent sample t-tests. The results indicated that prompt-based supports can improve the quality of student-formulated peer feedback. We discuss the importance of carefully designed prompts and how they can contribute to better peer feedback formulation.