Relevance of student motivation for providing high-quality peer-feedback: Results of two field studies

The prevailing interest in peer-feedback practices in higher education is grounded in their potential to foster students' learning, understanding, and performance while reducing 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. However, barely any research has investigated these relations. We aim to explain differences in peer-feedback quality based on feedback providers’ motivation in terms of mastery goals (task and learning goals), work avoidance goals, expectancies for success, task value, and cost. To answer these questions, we conducted two field studies in higher education 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: criteria-based rating by trained raters, receiver-perceived quality, and feedback length. Consistently across both studies, path models showed that particularly task goals and utility value mattered for high-quality peer-feedback. Expectancies for success and cost were partly positively associated with feedback-quality. The motivation of students providing peer-feedback seems to be relevant for the quality of the peer-feedback they provide and is thus a crucial factor to consider in instructional settings implementing peer-feedback. Within this, particularly the effects of cost warrant further investigation. • Students' goals, expectancies and values matter for peer-feedback quality. • Students' task goals for providing feedback relate to peer-feedback quality. • Students' utility value for providing feedback relates to peer-feedback quality. • Cost of providing feedback seems to positively relate to peer-feedback quality. • Students and instructors' views on peer-feedback quality seem to differ.