Facilitating the peerfeedback process

• Teacher faculty: Social Sciences
• Tool: FeedbackFruits Peer Review

Providing feedback is often an important part of a course. In a multidisciplinary course, in which students from different fields of psychology had to solve a social issue, they had to work on a group assignment and an individual assignment in between. That assignment had to meet a number of criteria. Students gave each other feedback on whether that was okay, and if not, what was missing, and if so, what was so good. Then they could proceed with the assignment and it was graded by the teacher.

Goals

The SW teacher wanted to facilitate the process of peer feedback. To do this, she used the FeedbackFruits Peer Review tool. Students gave peer feedback twice on a writing assignment using rubrics through this online tool. The peer feedback process takes place outside of the work groups. "Previously, we did it the old-fashioned way: just pairing people up during the study group, saying what the feedback was going to look like, and posting a form on BlackBoard for them to use. That was always quite a lot of red tape, with pairing up, then submitting links, checking that it was all good. You had to follow it up a lot," says the instructor. By using the tool, the teacher hoped for less administrative work and added value in making this process more organized.

Results

The goal for the students was achieved according to the instructor; the peer feedback process was facilitated. "All those things that we hoped could be done with this program, could be done. As a teacher, you could see very clearly what the progression was, averages, whether everyone had met it nicely. You could even have students give a reflection on the feedback, which I really liked. So actually everything you would want to do in real life was possible and more. Other than that, we didn't run into anything and I was very satisfied."

"However, the goal for the teachers was not achieved. It was still a lot of administrative work and that was a bit disappointing. Because students repeatedly missed deadlines, it still required a lot of administrative work, such as manually linking students, adjusting deadlines, posting reminders and announcements, etc. I do think that once you have used it once, you can continue to use it. But it is a bit of a time investment in the beginning, in reading up and asking questions. The tool is easy though, very user friendly, everything spoke for itself. Because I wanted to apply some complicated constructions myself and wanted to know if that was possible, I called the FeedbackFruits helpdesk. They helped me in a very pleasant way.

Students also enjoyed giving feedback with this tool and found it user-friendly. But they also found that if you submitted it too late, not much was possible anymore. So the fact that it didn't quite work like that and still resulted in administration was more down to the students themselves than the tool, but yes, you have to deal with it anyway". 

The lecturer recommends this tool if you want the feedback process to take place between working groups.  Especially to lecturers who are going to use it for several years in a row and want to invest in it.