Supporting Peer and Group Learning with FeedbackFruits
Collaboration is a highly desirable graduate attribute, and peer and group learning are both effective means to achieve it.
However, the reality of implementing collaborative pedagogies within assessment can be challenging at the best of times; there are so many ways it can go wrong. Are students skilled enough to critique their peers’ work? How do I ensure that members working in a group are all pulling their weight? How can I engage students in this process and it not turn into a workload nightmare for me?
To address this gap between desire and reality, Learning Enhancement and Innovation (LEI) commenced discussion in November 2020 with the company FeedbackFruits to pilot two tools: Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation.
The Peer Review tool enables educators to structure and streamline the process of students reviewing their peers’ work and can integrate with groups set in MyUni. Customisable and structured criteria and rubrics are set within the tool to provide a scaffold for student feedback, which can be anonymised, and there is an option for students to respond to the feedback they are given.
Dr Susan Hazel was the first to join the pilot, using the Peer Review tool in her summer semester course. Listen to Dr Hazel as she shares her experience using the Peer Review tool and how it provided high quality peer assessment and saved a lot of time in marking within her course.
Similarly, the Group Work Evaluation tool intuitively guides and scaffolds the expectations for student participation in a group setting, thereby encouraging the optimal results for using group work as an assessment strategy. Students decide on the effectiveness of their peers in the group task using rubrics or scales, and this assists students to make the right decisions in terms of pulling their weight in the task. All responses can be anonymised, and tutors decide if students should respond to comments made about their progress. All results can be moderated by the tutor if necessary.
For more information about joining the pilot of these tools, please see visit the LEI FeedbackFruits Pilot website.
Paul Moss, Learning Design and Capability Manager, and Colleen Ortega, Manager, Learning Enhancement, LEI