Student Motivation to Peer-Feedback Quality: Two Field Studies

Background: The prevailing interest in peer-feedback practices in higher education is ground-ed in their potential to foster students’ learning, understanding, and performance while reduc-ing instructor workload. This potential depends on students’ motivation to provide high-quality peer-feedback. Within this, students’ expectancies for and the value they place on peer-feedback provision as well as their achievement goals seem to be particularly impactful. How-ever, barely any research has investigated these relations. Aims: We aim to explain differences in peer-feedback quality based on feedback providers’ motivation in terms of mastery goals, work avoidance goals, expectancies for success, and task value. Methods and Sample: To answer these questions, we conducted two field studies in higher ed-ucation courses in which 254 and 173 students provided peer-feedback on written assignments. Students reported their mastery goals, work avoidance goals, expectancies for success, task value, and cost regarding the task right before providing feedback. This feedback was assessed in terms of its quality along three aspects: feedback length, criteria-based rating by trained raters, and receiver-perceived quality. Results: Consistently across both studies, structural equation modeling showed that task goals, utility value, cost, and partly expectancies for success and learning goals were associated dif-ferently with feedback length and peer-feedback quality, both criteria-based and student-perceived.Conclusions: Fostering task goals and utility value seems promising to encourage high quality feedback and subsequently foster student learning in higher education via peer-feedback. How-ever, the effects of cost warrants further investigation.