Assessment is a key component of the education process and strategies involving peer-feedback are considered beneficial to student learning. This study aims to analyse the benefits giving and receiving feedback have for students’ development of cognitive and metacognitive, affective and professional competences. One-hundred and eighty-eight students enrolled in teacher education answered a survey. Results indicate that, after providing feedback, the students perceived a better learning experience and an increased sense of commitment to their own learning and their colleagues’ progress. A key finding from this study was the role of students in their own learning. As most participants recognised, providing feedback helped them improve their learning, which is a clear indicator that students want to adopt an active role in their own learning and consider their involvement critical in the design of teaching and learning experiences. To achieve the greatest advantages, feedback must be accompanied by tutoring and mentoring to ensure positive connections with the task, address doubts and clarify the comments received.

A global push exists to bolster the connections between research and practice in education. However, fostering evidence-informed practice (EIP) has proven challenging. Indeed, this ‘problem’ requires simultaneously attending to multiple aspects/levels of education systems, and to the contexts within which they reside. As such, comparative analyses using systems approaches hold potential for achieving context-specific insights regarding how to foster EIP. However, such analyses have been scarce, and what research does exist has generally been limited relative to methods and theory. Given this, the present study executes and describes/reflects upon a novel approach for analysing and comparing EIP in/across systems. In this study, educators’ evidence use patterns are described and comparatively analysed, using a sample of four regions within high-income national settings: Catalonia (Spain), England (UK), Massachusetts (USA), and Rheinland-Pfalz (Germany). This study employs a dual analytical frame (a cohesion/regulation matrix and institutional theory) to supply a methodological lens through which to understand EIP within and across these four systems. Together, this approach not only provides a way of accounting for the macro-level differences between contexts, it also enables a comparison of meso-level and micro-level factors (via institutional theory) that might be common and distinct across systems. This study’s findings reveal substantial diversity in the extent and nature of evidence use between systems, which in turn patterned according to distinctive cultural, systemic, and institutional features. Considering these findings, this study’s discussion advances some provisional insights and reflections regarding actual and potential EIP in education. For example, variability relative to the types/extents of accountability pressures, and how this affected educators’ data and evidence use, enabled a discussion holding relevance for policymakers. We also share process-related insights—i.e., describing the advances and challenges we experienced while undertaking this new approach. These points hold relevance for colleagues wishing to emulate and improve upon the efforts described herein, which we argue are applicable both in and beyond the education sector. Relative to education, these approaches can be applied and improved with an eye toward developing context-specific (vs. one-size-fits-all) packages for fostering EIP and, ultimately, achieving high quality and progressively improving schools/systems.

Peer feedback is a strategy that allows students to be involved in the assessment process, making them more conscious about the teaching and learning activities. However, different instructional designs can influence learning in different ways. Our paper aims to identify whether peer feedback instructional designs influence students’ learning perceptions. We performed a comparative study at a Faculty of Education, tracking students during their first two years of a teacher education program. Students participated in two consecutive peer feedback experiences using different instructional designs. Results show that students perceive that long-term interventions with prior training and double-loop feedback processes are more useful for their performance than a short-term experience without face-to-face training and single-loop feedback processes. They perceive more benefits when they provide feedback than when they receive it. Lecturers should take these variables into account when designing peer feedback activities in order to maximise the impact on students’ learning.

This paper analyses the perceptions of teachers involved in postgraduate studies of the importance of their study programme for their profession, describes the benefits of postgraduate studies for their practice and examines the strategies used to enhance the impact research they undertake on their teaching. A questionnaire was administered to 161 teachers enrolled in master’s and PhD programmes in schools of education of five research universities in Romania. The results demonstrate that postgraduate studies provide teachers with a crucial link between the research conducted and reported by faculties of education and their own work in schools. A large majority recognised that research conducted in universities had a personal impact, improving their teaching. Developing research projects involving both researchers and practitioners, reading about research findings in journals and enhancing communication between researchers and practitioners were reported as useful strategies that facilitated research utilisation in practice.