Who?
Dr Michaela Oliver, Assistant Professor in the School of Education
What?
First-year undergraduate module of over 140 students, comprised of a very diverse cohort. Students wrote short, formative blog entries in the first term, then took turns writing blogs and writing peer feedback on others’ blogs in the second term.
When?
Began in the 2022-23 academic year.
Why?
Michaela and her colleagues were well aware of the benefits of peer feedback, and had recently evaluated a 2021-22 module where students worked together on formative essay outlines for individual assessments. They found that students had several concerns about working in groups on formatives, including worries about collusion, scepticism about the learning benefits of peer versus tutor feedback, and social apprehensions around critiquing peers’ work. To address these concerns and try to increase student buy-in to the peer feedback process, Michaela and colleagues designed a new formative assessment opportunity for a first-year undergraduate module.
How?
Students were provided with an online space, one for each seminar group, in which to post short (300 word) formative blogs in response to prompts based on the most recent lecture. Students posted their blogs fortnightly in Term 1, at the end of which they were introduced to the peer feedback process that was starting in Term 2. This involved a two-hour induction to peer review session that was structured as follows:
- The rationale for peer feedback was explained, including research evidence for its value and how students could learn from peers’ feedback, but especially from the process of composing feedback for others.
- Many of the concerns that students had voiced in the past were also directly addressed, from why students were providing feedback instead of tutors to how they would be prepared to provide worthwhile comments for their peers.
- Students were then given a sample of writing to review in small groups. After initial discussion, it became clear to the students that they would need to know the assessment criteria before they could provide relevant feedback.
- This led to a wider discussion about marking criteria, as well as criteria used for the formative blog posts. Criteria were then shared and used by students to generate feedback on the writing sample.
- Key principles of feedback were reviewed, such as being constructive and critiquing the writing not the writer.
- After the first stage of induction to peer review, students then reviewed each others’ blog posts from earlier in the term and drafted feedback. This gave them the opportunity to generate their first peer reviews as part of a supportive seminar group with tutor guidance.
- After writing peer reviews, discussion focussed on how to receive feedback, how to prioritise it and how to act upon it.
In Term 2, half of the students in each seminar group were instructed to write blog posts, while the other half provided feedback. This alternated every fortnight so that all students had the regular experience of using the marking criteria to draft constructive feedback. Throughout, students were reminded to contribute to the blogs regularly, and that this would ultimately enable them to take ownership of the assessment criteria when it came to evaluating their own summative work.
How did it go?
Students were interviewed at the beginning of the module and at the end. These interviews indicated that incorporating a highly structured introduction to peer review worked very well at helping them to build confidence in using the assessment criteria to provide each other with constructive feedback. They also discussed building competence both in providing others with feedback and in their own academic literacy. Not all students got over their concerns about offending others, and some did not engage with the formative tasks as they were expected to. Overall, however, the highly scaffolded, extended process, as well as the manageable word counts associated with the formative blogs, gave students regular, reasonable opportunities to practice writing and to reflect on their own work as well as that of others.
What’s next?
Michaela has continued to develop the peer review process through each iteration of the module, and found that giving a full two hours to the introductory session allowed students to gain sufficient confidence. In future, she is considering using a generative AI tool to draft sample blog posts, both so that students do not feel that they are expected to ‘critique’ the lecturer or published authors, and to demonstrate the strengths and weaknesses of these tools in producing academic writing.
Peer review is now formally built into modules at every level of one undergraduate programme. Students, having gone through a highly scaffolded introduction to peer feedback at level 1, can now engage in a more independent way at levels 2 and 3, using assessment criteria to feedback on others’ work as well as to evaluate their own.