Support Student Integration of Multiple Peer Feedback on Research Writing in Thesis Circles

The setup of thesis circles at the exit level of undergraduate programs expects students to co-supervise each other’s work and multiple peer feedback is used to replace supervisor formative feedback. Integrating multiple peer feedback requires students to be able to make evaluative judgements by identifying relation patterns among different feedback givers and make a reasoned decision for improving their own work. Unfortunately, most undergraduate students find it difficult to deal with this high degree of multiplicity. Therefore, teachers should support feedback receivers through sufficient training materials and well-designed instructional activities to effectively make sense and integrate multiple peer feedback. Increasingly diverse research on peer feedback makes it difficult for teachers to interconnect all aspects in their instructional design. In this chapter, we develop a conjecture map to structure the design of instructional activities and to advance the current literature in four ways: 1) we use a combination of analogical/holistic and analytical comparisons to guide students throughout the peer review process, 2) we engage feedback receivers in epistemic reflection so that they grasp intra- and inter-feedback, 3) we describe the mediating processes on how these activities result in intervention outcomes of evaluative judgements and improved thesis work, and 4) we propose how to structure a feedback dialogue and generate a self-feedback report. Our instructional design demonstrates how to apply various design principles from multiple text integration and feedback literature to student integration of multiple peer feedback.