Call for contribution to an edited book on peer learning

We are working on an edited book on the topic of “peer learning” which we aim to publish in the Springer book series of “Social Interaction in Learning and Development”. If you wish to contribute to this edited book and committed to work with the deadlines (see below), please kindly fill in this form before November 1^st, 2021. Feel free to also forward this open call to other colleagues involved in peer learning research.

We look forward to receiving your submission. For your information: your paper will still be subjected to blind peer-review by two reviewers to safeguard the quality of the book which implies that the final decision is based upon our recommendation. Please see the timeline below for details.

Guest editors

• Omid Noroozi; Wageningen University and Research, the Netherlands
• Bram De Wever; Gent University, Belgium

Timeline and Submission/Review Process

Title of the book

The power of peer learning: Technology-supported peer feedback and peer assessment to foster students’ learning processes and outcomes.

Scope

Despite vast scientific research on the importance and the effects of peer learning processes on students’ learning outcomes, many crucial issues in this field of research are still left under investigated especially in online learning settings. In this book, we aim to study how peer feedback processes in the broad sense (including written or oral peer feedback, peer assessment, peer review, peer dialogue, etc.) can stimulate learning processes and outcomes. Technology-enhanced learning environments and tools provide learners with the opportunity to engage in reflective criticism of the work and/or performance of their peers using given criteria and providing feedback or feedforward to them. The feedback event can contain information about the peers’ actual work and/or performance. It can be a quantitative score by one or more peers, or it can hold written feedback, or a combination of both. The feedback can be standard feedback (how am I going/doing?), or indicate a direction by delineating a goal to be achieved.

Scientific evidence points out various challenges and issues for peer learning next to its benefits for learning. First, students, if not guided, typically provide surface level feedback, since they are not trained on how to give critical and constructive comments to peers’. Second, some students may be concern on validity and reliability of peer feedback compared to teacher feedback. This may result in distrust in learning peer's quality of feedback which may not only have consequences for learning but also creation of a negative attitude that can also result in negative emotional reactions and further complications during peer learning process. Third, providing and receiving critical feedback from peers may bring out psychological and emotional effects such as fear of losing face, and treating critiques as somewhat personal attacks. In addition, holding a sense of grading is emotionally fraught for students and can disrupt their abilities to provide useful feedback. As a result, feedback may remain at the surface level lacking well-founded justifications for promoting critical thinking and elaborative learning. These challenges suggest that implication of peer learning in classrooms situations in real educational settings needs to be supported to fully guarantee its effectiveness. Such complexities form a major challenge for the learning sciences in their quest to understand these peer learning processes to facilitate successful learning.

Furthermore, although peer learning and its effects on learning features has been studied from a number of perspectives, much questions remains to be answered regarding what leads students to act (or not) on their peers’ feedback and feedforward in revisions. For peer learning processes to positively influence learning outcomes, students need to engage in depth in order to make the most of it. Scientific literature suggests that students often find translating feedback and feedforward into action and implementation to be complex, multi-dimensional, and challenging. Students’ implementation of peer feedback and feedforward in revisions can be influenced by various factors such as feedback content/features, individual characteristics, as well as students’ psychological state of mind such as attitudes and perceptions towards peer feedback. Questions remain regarding critical feedback and feedforward features, their argumentation quality, and the mechanisms by which peer learning does or does not result in students implementing peer comments in revisions. 

To advance the field of peer learning, we need to present cases on how best to design peer learning processes in relation to peer feedback and feedforward features and students’ perception and individual characteristics to enhance students’ learning outcomes. The aim of this book proposal is to report cutting-edge pedagogical and technological developments in the field of peer learning. For this book proposal, we welcome both methodological, conceptual, theoretical, and empirical articles that create links between educational science, educational technology, learning sciences, educational psychology, computer science, learning analytics, machine learning, and computational thinking with peer learning processes and outcomes. The scope of the empirical articles is not restricted to any specific setting and can include formal, informal, non-formal, and workplace learning environments. We also welcome submissions on peer learning that go beyond peer feedback or peer assessment (such as peer review, peer tutoring, peer collaboration, peer dialogue, and peer argumentation), as long as the processes involve some kind of feedback activity and exchange between peers.