Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR courses

Guidance and resources to support EPICUR course development, cc-by-sa

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Peer Feedback

Why peer feedback?

Peer feedback can also be referred to as peer assessment or peer review. In this resource sheet we use peer feedback as the moniker. In some universities, student feedback contributes to final grades but in others, this is not permissible. Here we provide guidance and inspiration on peer feedback as part of Assessment for Learning or learning as assessment approaches.

These are benefits for students associated with peer feedback:

Seeing a peer’s work can inspire their own work.
Discussing the feedback together can lead to shared insights.
Peer feedback enhances students’ deep learning. They practise critical thinking, making connections and creating new concepts. When students compare their own work with peers’ similar assignments, they develop their critical evaluation skills and meta cognition.
Peer feedback can be an asset for the receiver, but even more so for the feedback giver. Developing the capacity to give constructive feedback is a valuable lifelong learning skill.
Peer assessment can generate meaningful, timely and effective feedback, especially if supported by a list of feedback criteria, making feedback a learning process.
Peer feedback enables ‘learning by assessing’.
Being involved in a peer feedback process can empower students to take responsibility for and manage their own learning.
Scientific studies show that peer feedback has a positive effect on students’ writing skills.
Peer feedback improves students’ self-efficacy, academic achievement, learning autonomy, learning motivation and attitude (e.g., Brindley & Scoffield, 1998; Jaime et al., 2016)

6 key points about peer feedback

Create a solid scaffolding:clarify scope, goals and advantages of peer feedback.
Pre-structure the feedback process – provide criteria checklists or rubrics to guide and professionalise the criteria focused peer feedback. By professionalising the feedback process, the teacher can help reduce risks and concerns about peer-assessment (free-rider, lack of legitimacy, conflicts, mutual collusion) .
Train students in giving peer feedback
- start with anonymised exemplars of students’ work which pairs of students learn to review by discussing and applying the assessment criteria. This makes the first engagement with peer feedback a neutral exercise.
- next you could move on to students giving peer feedback on anonymised examples of work from their peers, there are online programmes which can facilitate random distribution amongst class members of student work to be reviewed. Anonymising students’ work reduces the risks associated with personal associations.
- with these peer feedback experiences, students should be more equipped as peer reviewers who can give and receive feedback on non-anonymised examples of student work.
Have students give feedback on several pieces of work– this helps them see there are different ways to achieve the outcomes and the diversity challenges them to provide relevant feedback in different situations.
Peer feedback is more effective through dialogue – wherever possible include peer dialogue as part of the feedback process.
Implementation of peer assessment can be very rich, regarding the timing, synchronicity, means, level and organisation of the assessors/assesses, rewards.

Peer feedback in practice

Combining generic feedback and peer feedback
During a mathematics course, with more than 80 students, the students had weekly exercises to work on between classes. If they handed in their examples on a Thursday, the teacher reviewed them and compiled a one side generic feedback sheet based on the students’ work. When the students next came to class, they worked with a peer and reviewed randomly distributed non-anonymised student hand-ins from the previous week, using the generic feedback sheet from the teacher to inform their feedback. The students annotated the student work they were reviewing. The students attentively followed the peer review process. Whilst this required teacher time to review the students’ exercises and prepare the generic feedback sheets each week, the teacher had a resource which could be re-used with some edits with next year’s class. The quality of the peer feedback was higher than when the teacher had not provided a generic feedback sheet. (Example from Mathematics Course at SDU)

Links to resources for using peer feedback

in person:

Guidance from Vrije University on improving the quality of peer feedback https://vu.nl/en/employee/didactics/how-to-get-students-to-provide-and-process-peer-feedback-better
Guidance from Cornell University on peer feedback https://teaching.cornell.edu/teaching-resources/assessment-evaluation/peer-assessment
Guidance from the University of Oxford on peer feedback https://www.ctl.ox.ac.uk/peer-feedback

online:

Guidance from Utrecht University on effective online peer feedback https://www.uu.nl/en/education/educational-development-training/knowledge-dossiers/effective-online-peer-feedback

References

Gielen, S., Dochy, F., Onghena, P., Struyven, K., & Smeets, S. (2011). Goals of peer assessment and their associated quality concepts. Studies in Higher Education, 36(6), 719–735. https://doi.org/10.1080/03075071003759037
Spiller, Dorothy (2012) Assessment Matters: Self-Assessment and Peer Assessment. Teaching Development | Wāhanga Whakapakari Ako. The University of Waikato:

Spiller_assessment_matters_self-assessment_peer_assessment.pdf (1.89 MB)

Innovative Assessment

Author(s)

This resource sheet has been co-written or written by

Mario Calabrese (UNISTRA)
Jacqui Edwards (UvA)
Imme Roosje (UvA)

Related Resource Sheets

Next steps

If you need further support with developing your course, please contact your local teaching support unit.
If you need further information on offering your course for EPICUR, please contact your EPICUR institutional coordinator.

Contact Details

Local teaching support units

EPICUR Institutional Coordinators

Adam Mickiewicz University
Karolina Choczaj
karmench@amu.edu.pl

Aristotle University of Thessaloniki
Nikos Kouloussis
nikoul@agro.auth.gr

Karlsruhe Institute of Technology
Michael Zacherle
zacherle@kit.edu

University of Amsterdam
Tiffany Boersma
t.a.boersma@uva.nl

Universität Freiburg
Charlotte Langowski
charlotte.langowski@zv.uni-freiburg.de

Université de Haute-Alsace
Léa Ziri
lea.ziri@uha.fr

Universität für Bodenkultur Wien
Nicolas Fries
nicolas.fries@boku.ac.at

University of Southern Denmark
Ida Thøstesen
ilt@sdu.dk

University of Strasbourg
Pascale Nachez
pnachez@unistra.fr

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Further use as OER explicitly permitted:
This Resource Sheet within the Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses was created by Mario Calabrese, University of Strasbourg, Jacqui Edwards and Imme Roosje, University of Amsterdam.
Please attribute according to TASLL rule as follows: Peer Feedback (Best Practice Guide for Designing and Delivering EPICUR Courses), by Mario Calabrese, University of Strasbourg, Jacqui Edwards and Imme Roosje, University of Amsterdam. Any icons included are protected by copyright, © The Noun Project, used with permission.
License: This work and its contents are – unless otherwise stated – licensed under CC BY-SA 4.0 .