The assumption behind the use of peer feedback in disciplinary courses in teachers’ colleges is that it can help pre-service teachers to learn, to develop reflective skills, and to train professional skills pertaining to assessment situations or to peer collaboration. In fact, as the authors show in a review of the literature on the topic, there is little evidence that pre-service teachers succeed in transferring the skills they acquire in disciplinary peer feedback to other fields, and that the behaviour of students in disciplinary peer feedback is a valid predictor of their abilities in those fields. Indeed, the peer feedback situation is loaded with psychological factors which do not exist in the other situations: sensitivity to social relations; beliefs about the expertise of peers as assessors; motivation; and gender-related factors. Therefore, special care should be employed when using disciplinary peer feedback in teachers’ colleges.

Parenting style affects self-regulation in school pupils, yet its long-term influence on academic behavior is rarely studied. A pilot study was conducted on 83 teacher college students, who filled in a questionnaire measuring recollections of parenting styles (Parental Authority Questionnaire [PAQ]) and self-regulation in learning (Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire [MSLQ]). Unlike in results known about adolescents, authoritative parenting was not significantly associated with students’ present self-regulation skills, except for human resources. Authoritarian parenting was the only parenting style correlated with motivation, self-efficacy, and cognitive strategies and strongly correlated with critical thinking. These results suggest new ways of evaluating the relationship of authoritarian parenting with academic skills.

In the context of the efforts to reach equity in the classroom, peer feedback (PFB) is used, among other participative learning methods, as it is considered to minimize gender differences. Yet, recent studies have reported gender discrepancies in students’ willingness to provide feedback to their peers. Building on Gilligan’s theory of moral development, we tried to refine the source of this difference. We conducted a semi-experimental study during which education students of both genders performing a PFB activity in a face-to-face course were asked to fill out a questionnaire. This allowed us to estimate the link between, on the one hand, the comfort in providing PFB and the willingness to provide PFB, and on the other hand, personal characteristics like self-esteem, self-efficacy, and empathic concern, and intellectual characteristics like self-efficacy in the learned discipline and the proficiency to write and understand feedback. The linear regression analysis of 57 students’ answers to the questionnaire did not reveal gender differences in comfort in providing PFB and willingness to do so, but showed that the comfort in providing PFB was linked to cognitive proficiency in students of both genders, whereas the willingness to provide PFB was independent of any other variables in men and linked to self-esteem, empathic concern, and comfort in providing feedback in women. This result indicates a differential sensitivity to social factors in male and female students, aligning with Gilligan’s model of women’s ‘ethics of care’. Possible applications in education would be the use of PFB to train women in self-esteem or, inversely, the improvement of psychological safety in PFB exercises in groups including female students.

Linking between pedagogical content knowledge and high-level subject-matter knowledge in science teacher training remains a challenge. This paper analyses the reaction of beginning student teachers to an activity designed for this purpose, peer lecturing. This activity was a part of the requirements of an introductory zoology course, and included students’ literature inquiry processes oriented to answer a question linked to the course’s contents, followed by whole class presentation of the knowledge acquired in the inquiry. According to students’ view, it seems that the inquiry component and the peer learning component of the activity induced original characteristics in the activity concerning student teachers’ self-concept, students’ beliefs about the level of knowledge needed to teach science, their treatment of prior conceptions, and multiple sources of reflective thinking on science teaching. On the basis of these results, the further development of teacher training activities is envisioned.

As a contribution to the efforts to understand the influence of peer presence on self-regulated learning, this paper studies students’ reaction to a project-based activity, the final product of which was a scientific communication to peers. In this activity, peer lecturing, the students formulate a question on a topic linked to the course, search scientific information in order to answer the question, and teach the result of their investigations to their class in the form of a whole-class communication. The paper draws on the qualitative analysis of 23 interviews of first-year student teachers involved in peer lecturing in the framework of an introductory zoology course. In this study, the expressed gains in self-regulated learning described by the students are compared to the gains reported in the literature in other project-based methods and in peer teaching. Original gains in motivation (social goals), cognitive processes and self-regulation, are highlighted, while stressing differences between student types. Further development of the method is suggested.