Peer interaction as mechanism for providing timely and accessible feedback to a large undergraduate class

Feedback to students on their work is recognized as crucially important in higher education, but as classes at universities become larger, it is becoming more and more difficult for teachers to give their students effective feedback. There is a large body of work on giving feedback on essays and postgraduate writing, but there is very little on giving feedback to undergraduate students in engineering classes. Feedback has particular value if it facilitates students’ learning. It is therefore not necessary for the teacher to give feedback – feedback from peers is equally valuable if it facilitates learning. This paper explores the comments submitted by students about a peer interaction that was introduced in a first-year engineering class. It investigates whether this intervention could comprise effective feedback by comparing the format of the intervention and the student comments to two models from the literature on feedback. The analysis shows that the intervention was successful in providing feedback that was helpful to students in the sense that it helped to draw them into deeper learning approaches.