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participants were accustomed to using peer feedback before, so that it helped them to create positive perception toward peer feedback. For those who were
accustomed to using peer feedback, they already knew the procedure of giving feedback to their peer, so that they tried to give feedback as seriously, honestly,
and objectively as possible.
2. Peer Feedback Gave the Students some Advantages
The result of the study revealed that peer feedback brought some advantages for the participants, both as peer feedback receivers and evaluators.
a. The Advantages for Participants as the Evaluators
For the participants as the evaluators, peer feedback helped them to be more critical toward their peer performance. If they were accustomed to doing
peer feedback, they would become more thorough to find what should be commented on from their peer performance. It could be seen from statement
number 18. There were 94.4 participants saying that they became more critical toward their peer performance by doing peer feedback. This activity doing peer
feedback would lead them toward autonomy Lewis, 2003. In addition, they could identify their friends’ strengths and weaknesses and this habit would help
them to identify their own strengths and weaknesses.
“It’s very useful. We can know our strengths and weaknesses. We can evaluate and even improve our teaching. We can know what we have to do
in the next teaching.” Participant 48, See Appendix 4
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Moreover, by doing peer feedback students could also learn from their peer performance. According to Harmer 2007: 150,
peer review or peer feedback has positive effect. Through peer feedback, students could monitor each
other and that action helps students to become better at self – monitoring. From
the interview, they admitted that while doing peer feedback, they also could adopt something from their peer performance, such as adopt a good teaching method,
teaching media or teaching technique that can help them in their own teaching.
“Waktu pas observasi tu kan kita lihat temen kita yang lagi ngajar, nah di situ kita juga bisa sekaligus belajar metode- metode atau teknik-teknik
yang baik saat ngajar. Misalnya nih, temen kita itu ngajar pake flash card, nah kita bisa mempelajari gimana sih cara menggunakan flash card yang
baik sekaligus bisa lihat permasalahan yang timbul dari situ.
” When we did observation, we could see our friends’ teaching and we
could learn the teaching methods or techniques they used. For example, they used flash cards in their teaching. We could learn how to use flash
card in a good way. Besides we could also learn from the problems aroused during the use of flash cards Participant 1, Appendix 6
b. The Advantages for the Participants as the Peer Feedback Receivers
For the peer feedback receivers, peer feedback also gave them some
advantages. The first, it helped them to evaluate their teaching practice.
“The use of peer feedback helped me in evaluating my teaching practice and also seeing my strength and weaknesses in order to improve my
teaching performance”. Participant 29, Appendix 4
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Through reading the feedback given, they could make evaluation whether their teaching was good or not. From the evaluation, they could identify their
teaching strength and weaknesses. After they knew their strengths and weaknesses, they were motivated to teach better for their future teaching. This
advantage fulfills one of the purposes of feedback, that feedback is a form of motivation Lewis, 2003.
According to Lewis, feedback is more motivating than marks or grades. Marks and grades will set students’ mind to achieve high grade and sometimes
they ignore the process of achieving good grade. Woolfolk states in her book Educational Psychology 1987: 540
that “if some assignments count toward the grade and others do not, students are likely to put their effort where the grades
are”. It means that students tend to think that grade is the most important thing and it can bring negative effect. Students will try to achieve high grades with
many ways; it can be positive ways or negative ways. If students are only obsessed with obtaining high grade, they will easily forget what they have
learned. However, feedback is more than grades. Through feedback, students can obtain detailed information that could not be achieved from grades. Feedback
provides not only criticism but also provides the solution so that students will not easily forget the feedback. In teaching learning activity, students need clarification
why their answer or their performances are incorrect Woolfolk. 1987. Students could get the clarification through feedback which grades could not give.