Student peer feedback on design

Providing feedback on design projects to other students (peer feedback) helps students develop a better understanding of design and helps students practice providing feedback, which is an engineering professional skill. In this study, we analyzed first-year engineering students´ feedback on sample student design work in order to understand the characteristics of the feedback students provide and highlight the differences, if any, between students with and without prior design experience. A coding scheme for feedback on design was developed and used in this study. Feedback on Milestone 1, which focused on problem scoping, was analyzed for this work-in-progress paper. Overall, students´ feedback focused on the weaknesses of the design work and provided specific directions for change. Students with previous design experience provided more comments than students with no experience. These comments were mostly focused on weaknesses and were related to communication aspects of design.