What’s Wrong with Student Peer Feedback?
The studies cited above enumerate the common shortfalls of student peer feedback: too lenient or uncritical; focused on whether the evaluator likes or agrees with a work rather than its quality; overly critical and harsh; inaccurate; superficial; focused on trivial problems and mechanical errors; focused too much on content alone; unrelated to the assignment’s requirements; and not referenced to specific instances in the work. A brief analysis of this list suggests three main causes for these weaknesses, two of which are supported in the literature. 1. Emotions and loyalties intrude, making most students reluctant to find fault with a fellow student’s work and inducing a few to trash the work of someone they don’t like (Strachan & Wilcox, 1996; Pond, Ulhaq, & Wade, 1995). 2. Students lack the disciplinary background to know, let alone to apply, professional expectations and standards, so they don’t know how to give helpful feedback (Svinicki, 2001). No doubt if they did know how to wri
