Peer review: Maximising engagement and feedback literacy

How peer review activities transformed the teaching and learning experience in a Bachelor of Commerce subject.

Peer review in the Bachelor of Commerce Internship

Semester 2 has marked the first run of the Bachelor of Commerce Internship subject, a subject which allowed students to gain University credit for attending an internship in Australia or overseas. Subject Coordinator Sharon Soltys had a unique set of challenges: to provide academic rigour in an off-site internship, to provide feedback at scale, and to find a way to engage students in disparate locations. Soltys summarises it this way:

Students are longing for engagement, but too exhausted to engage.

Peer review, combined with regular reflections using an ePortfolio tool, provided her students with engagement, feedback, and a way to build self-efficacy while on internship. As an instructor, she reviewed students’ reflections, but mid-way through the internship students sourced peer reviews from each other. Students were unable to provide each other with feedback about their internship performance as the locations were individually sourced, but they were able to provide each other with feedback on the quality of their reflective writing. Using the acronym “PQP”, students found something to praise in their peer’s work, something to question – something they would like to learn more about, or see expanded – and one change to propose for future work.

The requirement encouraged students to engage on the discussion board to exchange peer reviews, enabled them to read about each other’s experiences, and scaffolded their feedback literacy at the same time.

Using peer feedback to supplement teacher feedback

Peer review can take the load off exhausted tutors, and provide engagement for isolated students, while building the feedback literacy skills that are crucial – whether students want to enter industry or research.

One way to improve students’ receptivity is to provide frameworks for feedback, like PQP, and resources on reflecting. Another technique is to reassure students that peer review is not being used to replace teacher feedback: "If students see peer generated feedback as a process that augments teacher comments, rather than replacing teacher inputs, they are more likely to be receptive to the process" (Molloy et al., 2019).

Using peer review in low-stakes, early assignment can supplement feedback provided by tutors, and provide peer interaction. You might even choose to have students submit work to peers for review first, and then tutors to review second – and incorporate students’ response to peer feedback as part of the assignment criteria.

Ways to use peer review

As an example, if your summative assessment is a creative design:

  • Ask students to begin in Week 3 by posting an early sketch or wireframe. Students could upload their wireframe to Feedback Fruits, and the tool will automatically allocate peer reviews.
  • Then in Week 5, ask the student to submit a further draft of their design, along with a brief reflection explaining how they addressed their peer’s feedback. Allocate marks in the rubric to the quality of the student’s reflection.

To prepare students for this activity, model good-quality feedback and good-quality reflection in Week 1, either in a lecture, a webinar, or a video you upload to the LMS.

Similarly, if the summative assessment is a research proposal, students might:

  • Write an early draft of their unique research aims
  • Exchange their drafts for peer review, then
  • Submit an early, low-stakes assessment including both their draft and a reflection explaining how they integrated peer feedback.

Peer review can be similarly implemented for most presentations, reports, designs, and even coding assignments, as long as the prompt allows enough breadth for students to all have unique responses.

University-supported tools like FeedbackFruits, or even Padlet or the LMS, can facilitate peer reviews. FeedbackFruits is a particularly strong tool for peer reviews, with a clean interface for both staff and students, and a few different rubric options. Because it’s such a flexible tool, however, your assignment in FeedbackFruits can look very different from other assignments in other subjects. For your subject, ask yourself:

  • Do you want authors’ work to be identified, or anonymous?
  • Should peer reviewers be anonymous?
  • Do you want students to use criteria or a rubric to evaluate their peers’ work?
  • Do you want students to write a reflection following the peer’s evaluation?
  • Do you want to allocate marks purely off the instructor’s mark? FeedbackFruits enables you to assign some marks based on peers’ ratings, for completing the hand-in or peer review steps, if you wish to.
  • Are other subjects in the same course using FeedbackFruits, and if so, how? Students value consistency, so if it is possible to structure peer review assignments similarly throughout a course, that can reduce their cognitive load.

References