Peer feedback as a professional competence: Students’ experiences of practicing feedback literacy in professional settings.

Introduction
This paper ties to Sub-theme 1 learning for the future, and informs the question: What learning assessments holds most promise?
The paper focuses on Peer feedback (PF) and investigates how it holds promise for HE learning, both as activities that facilitate learning in the HE ecosystem, and as competencies that our graduates need in their future practice. As such, the paper also speaks to sub-theme 2.
The context of the paper is professional HE, e.g. teacher, nursing, social work etc. We ask: How does peer feedback hold promise to students as competencies that will support their future practice?

Methods
We inform the study by analyzing two cross-professional focus-group interviews with students from a variety of professional fields (Nursing, physiotherapy, occupational therapy, nursing, pre-schooling, nutritionists). Participants were recruited from a cross-professional course where PF plays a central role both as a learning activity and as a goal.
The interviews were analyzed, first through open coding to identify themes related to students’ experiences of feedback in professional practice. Subsequently the themes were analyzed to gain a sense of the sophistication of the students’ reflections on PF. To this end, we made use of a feedback literacy framework developed by Molloy et al (2020) to characterize the role of the learner in utilizing feedback for their own learning.

Results and discussion
Overall, the focus group participants saw great promise, using PF to forge their own future in professional practice. Especially, did the students see a potential for PF in creating necessary change when transitioning into shaping their workplace’s practice. We divided students’ reflections on using and having use for PF competencies in practice into four themes:
• Authentic PF in the professions
• PF as a bridge to change
• PF practices
• Barriers to PF
Using Molloy et al’s (2020) feedback literacy framework we found students particularly invested with reflections on how emotions are important in both giving and receiving feedback. Conversely, we rarely saw students reflect on how they work to process and consequently act on feedback.
The first aspect, we find, nuances the ways in which PF holds promise vis a vis students’ futures. The second aspect points to ways in which PF activities can be further developed and focused.

References:
Molloy, E., Boud, D. & Henderson, M. (2020). Developing a learning-centred framework for feedback literacy. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education 45(4), 527–540.