How Formative Peer Feedback Improves Collaboration

The theoretical foundation for formative peer feedback comes from the broader literature on formative assessment. Black and Wiliam's (1998) influential review found that formative assessment — any assessment designed to provide feedback that improves learning while it's still in progress — produces significant learning gains across a wide range of educational contexts.

The mechanisms are straightforward. Formative assessment gives learners information about the gap between their current performance and their goals. It does so while there's still time to close that gap. And it motivates effort by making progress visible and actionable.

When applied to peer evaluation, these principles suggest that feedback delivered mid-project — when teams still have time to adjust their dynamics — will be more effective than feedback delivered after the project is complete. This is exactly what the research shows.

Not all mid-project feedback is formative. For peer feedback to drive genuine improvement, it needs several characteristics. First, it must be specific. "You should communicate more" is vague and unhelpful. "I'd appreciate a quick update in our group chat when you finish your section" is specific and actionable.

Second, formative feedback should focus on behaviors, not traits. Telling a teammate they're "not a leader" is a judgment about their character that's likely to provoke defensiveness. Telling them that the group would benefit from someone taking the lead on setting deadlines is a suggestion they can act on without feeling personally attacked.

Third, formative feedback should be timely. Feedback delivered weeks after the relevant behavior has occurred loses its power. The closer feedback is to the behavior it addresses, the more likely it is to drive change. This is why mid-project check-ins are so important — they create natural moments for timely feedback.

The elephant in the room with peer feedback is that students are often reluctant to give critical feedback to teammates they'll continue working with. This reluctance is understandable — negative feedback carries social risk, and students are rightly concerned about damaging working relationships.

Anonymization helps, but it's not sufficient on its own. The broader context matters: Does the course treat feedback as a normal, valued part of teamwork? Has the professor modeled how to give and receive feedback constructively? Do students understand that the purpose of feedback is growth, not punishment?

When these conditions are met — when there's psychological safety around feedback — students provide more honest and more useful evaluations. They're willing to name problems because they trust that the feedback process is designed to help, not harm. Building this culture takes intentional effort, but the payoff in feedback quality is substantial.

The most effective use of formative peer feedback follows a cycle: receive feedback, take action, reflect on the results. This cycle can be facilitated through structured processes. After receiving mid-project peer feedback, students identify one or two specific behaviors they want to change. At the next check-in, they reflect on whether those changes were effective.

This cycle turns abstract concepts like "be a better teammate" into concrete, measurable goals. A student who learns from peer feedback that they tend to dominate group discussions can set a specific goal to ask more questions and speak less in the next meeting. At the next evaluation, they can see whether their peers noticed the change.

Over the course of a semester, students who go through multiple feedback-action-reflection cycles develop a level of self-awareness about their collaboration tendencies that's difficult to achieve through any other means. They graduate not just with domain knowledge but with genuine interpersonal skills — skills developed through practice and feedback, not just instruction.

The collaboration skills that formative peer feedback develops are directly transferable to professional settings. The ability to give and receive feedback, to reflect on one's impact on a team, and to adjust one's behavior based on others' perspectives — these are competencies that every employer values.

By embedding formative peer feedback into team projects, professors are doing more than improving team dynamics in their courses. They're preparing students for a professional world where collaboration is the default mode of work, and where the ability to learn from feedback is one of the most important skills a person can have.