Reflective Inquiry in Design Reviews: The Role of Question-Asking During Exchanges of Peer Feedback

Design reviews are common educational practice in domains engaged in project-based learning approaches. This is the 'learning space' where students meet with instructors, their peers and other stakeholders to discuss the progress of their work. Anumber of research studies have looked into various phenomena taking place during design reviews. In this study, we adopt an inquiry-driven framework to investigatehowquestion-asking influences the quality of the feedback exchanged between peers working in different teams during design review meetings. Building on previous work, specifically in design research, we extend previous contributions not only on the role of questions as influencing the design thinking process, but also on their perceived value (by the respondents) and thus their general benefit for constructing valuable feedback in design reviews. We find that high performing student teams provide more and better feedback during peer-to-peer design reviews. Further, deep reasoning and generative design questions are perceived as more valuable than low-level questions.