Promoting Pre-Service Teachers’ Evidence-Informed Reasoning Through Peer-Feedback: Effects of a Feedback Provision Scaffold and a Feedback Integration Scaffold

Peer-feedback can be an effective way to improve pre-service teachers’ evidence-informed reasoning skills (= EIR skills). However, because learners often struggle to provide high-quality feedback or to make sense of the feedback they receive, they need scaffolding. In this study, N = 254 pre-service teachers analyzed an authentic classroom case from the perspective of two educational theories and related evidence, provided feedback to two peers, and processed two feedback messages they received to revise their initial case analyses. In a 2 × 2 factorial between-subjects design, we investigate the effects of a feedback provision scaffold and a feedback integration scaffold, and their interaction on pre-service teachers’ feedback quality, their evidence-informed reasoning recognition skills (= EIR recognition skills), and their evidence-informed reasoning application skills (= EIR application skills). The results show that feedback quality was significantly improved by the feedback provision scaffold. For EIR recognition skills, we found a negative interaction effect of the two scaffolds, indicating that they should rather be presented alone instead of in combination with each other. For EIR application skills, we found no significant effects of the two scaffolds. Thus, the study shows that providing low threshold prompts and sample illustrations of good feedback already is sufficient to raise feedback quality greatly. However, more research is needed on how to optimally combine these two scaffolds.