Making Meaning from Written Feedback Through Peer-to-Peer Interactions: A Case Study

Writing constitutes a central component in the assessment of knowledge at the university level, as it enables students to demonstrate disciplinary understanding and academic performance. Given the frequency with which learning is evaluated through written assignments, feedback provided through written comments becomes especially relevant. Although numerous studies (Prado & Pérez, 2021; Tapia-Ladino & Correa, 2022) position feedback as a valuable and necessary pedagogical practice there is still limited research in Latin America examining how students engage with and make use of the feedback they receive. This study aims to examine how university students construct meaning from feedback through peer interactions at a regional university in Chile. The research was conducted with fourth-year students enrolled in an English as a Second Language Teacher Education program. Participants completed a written assignment in pairs and subsequently received feedback from their teacher on their work. For data collection, feedback encounters (Esterhazy & Damşa, 2019) were organized, during which general guidelines were provided to support student interactions. These interactions were audio-recorded, transcribed, and analyzed through category coding using Nvivo15 software. The findings revealed that students construct meaning from feedback through two recursive and iterative interaction sequences. The first, an extended sequence, is organized around the stages of idea generation, revision, discussion, decision-making, and elaboration. The second, a shorter sequence, includes idea generation, revision, and elaboration. Both sequences contributed to students’ decision-making and following actions in the task.