Effects of different online peer-feedback approaches on students' performance skills, motivation and self-efficacy in a dance course

• An online peer-feedback system for dance education was developed.
• An experiment was conducted to compare the effects of different peer-feedback modes.
• The integrated peer scoring and peer comments approach was effective.
• The approach improved the students' dance skills.
• The approach improved the students' learning motivation and self-efficacy.

It has become common practice to video record students' in-class dance moves. Such a teaching strategy is able to help students reflect on their dance performance by providing them with visualized feedback. Therefore, in this study, an online peer-feedback system for dance education has been developed in order to compare the effects of different modes of online peer-feedback on students' dance skills performance, learning motivation, self-efficacy, peer review quality, peer assessment correctness, and online learning behaviors. Moreover, interviews were also conducted to elicit the students' opinions regarding this teaching method. The participants were 100 college students from three classes who learned with different online peer-feedback modes: videos with peer comments, videos with peer ratings, and videos with a mixed mode (i.e., peer ratings plus peer comments). A 12-week experiment was conducted to evaluate the performances of the three approaches. The experimental results show that, in terms of dance skills, peer ratings could improve the students' group performance, while the mixed mode improved individuals' learning performance. In terms of learning motivation and self-efficacy, the correlation analysis shows that the students' intrinsic motivation, self-efficacy and dance skill performance were positively correlated. Via analyzing the peer feedback content, it was found that the feedback provided by the mixed mode group was of better quality than that provided by the “peer comments” group; that is, the former provided more detailed feedback to individuals than the latter. Furthermore, it was found that the scores provided by the mixed mode group were highly related to those provided by the teachers, while those provided by the “peer ratings” group were not. The online user behavior analysis further shows that the integration of peer commenting and peer rating is able to promote students' willingness to participate in online learning activities. The interview results also confirm these findings. To sum up, the integration of both peer rating and peer comments is an effective approach that can meet the students' expectations and help them improve their dance skills, peer-feedback quality, peer-scoring correctness as well as their willingness to participate in online learning activities.