How Guiding Questions Facilitate Feedback Exchange in Project-Based Learning

Peer feedback is essential for learning in project-based disciplines. However, students often need guidance when acting as either a feedback provider or a feedback receiver, both to gain from peer feedback and to criticize their peers' work. This paper explores how to more effectively scaffold this exchange such that peers more deeply engage in the feedback process. Within a game design course, we introduced different processes for feedback receivers to write questions to guide peer feedback. Feedback receivers wrote four main types of guiding questions: improve, share, brainstorm, critique. We found that "improve'' questions tended to lead to better feedback (more specific, critical, and actionable) than other question types, but feedback receivers wrote improve questions least often. We offer insights on how best to scaffold the question-writing process to facilitate peer feedback exchange.