Discussing work and its evaluation with others
What opportunities are there for feedback dialogue (peer and/or teacher-student) around assessment tasks in your course?
Why?
- Interaction and dialogue are important determiners of academic success
- Dialogue uncovers differences in viewpoints which leads to perspective shifting, integration and elaboration of ideas, and inner and external feedback processes
- Research shows that peer and group dialogue are especially beneficial as there are many viewpoints and students learn to talk in the language of the discipline
- Peer dialogue helps attenuate teacher control, and it can give students a sense of control over their own learning and increase their motivation
- Dialogue can enrich any of the other principles, for example, students might jointly formulate the criteria for a task (P1), collectively evaluate a peer’s performance (P2) plan for further use of feedback in groups (P4)
- Learning to work with others is a valued professional skill
How to begin
- Have students individually, in pairs, or in groups produce an assignment then ask them to evaluate and comment on the work, individually or in pairs or in groups. Suitable permutations of individual work and dialogue during the production and evaluation stage can enhance learning and motivation and reduce teacher workload.
- Have students swap assignments in tutorials and review each other’s and then share or discuss their reviews. Follow this up by asking them to write down what they would do or would have done now to improve their own assignment.
- Ask students to formulate question for peer reviewers when they submit their assignment, then ask the reviewer to respond to those questions while also providing their own perspective or points
- Use this strategy in any class for any complex task. Ask students to carry out a task individually and produce a written response then ask them to do the same task again in groups of four.