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Online Course Peer Review

Providing meaningful feedback to students

Rubric standard III.3 reads: Assessment and measurement strategies provide appropriate feedback to the learner.

When I think back to my undergraduate years, I honestly don’t remember getting much instructor feedback on my coursework. Of course, I attended a fairly large state school and I oftentimes sat in packed lecture halls with hundreds of classmates. Still, in some of my smaller-sized classes, the only feedback I received on my work was the grade at the top of the assignment. I feel fortunate to work at a community/technical college that promotes theimportance of instructor-student interaction. Most of my students expect feedback on their work and take me to task if I don’t provide enough!That’s absolutely the way it should be. Instructor feedback helps students learn and improve their skills. Although itcan betime-consuming, weneed to focus onits effectiveness andlook to provide frequent and meaningful feedback to students in various ways. Some ideas:

  • Participate actively in discussion activities.
  • Make specific suggestions for improving papers and other assignments.
  • Make it a point to tell students what you especially like about their work.
  • Provide opportunities for students to critique each others’ work — peer review!
  • After an online testing period is over, allow students to see their corrected tests.
  • Build feedback directly into quizzes.

Fortunately, D2L allows instructors to provide feedback to students easily in various places. Now, if only those assignments and papers didn’t pile up so quickly week after week… Providing feedback can be hard work — but the student improvements make it, oh so worth it!

Posted: April 13th, 2007 under Peer Review.
Comments: 3

Comments

Comment from Kent Richards
Time: April 14, 2007, 8:22 am

Here are a couple additional suggestions, for what they’re worth:

1. Provide students with a specimen paper or answer for open ended assignments. Rather than suggesting “this is what your paper should have looked like,” let students know that although there were many different ways to do the assignment, “here’s one example of what a good paper might look like.” Encourage students to compare what they submitted with the sample.

2. Rather than repeating much the same feedback individually to multiple students, offer “general” grading comments to the entire class in addition to the specific comments for each student. Not only is this more efficient for us as instructors, but it also promotes a sense of community and lets students know that many of their classmates had the same difficulties, insights, etc.

Comment from Susan Brashaw
Time: April 14, 2007, 10:10 am

Great information, Kent!

Comment from Todd Johnson
Time: May 29, 2007, 11:46 am

Here is a cut-and-paste on how to provide group feedback, rather than individual. It comes from a pilot study done in Australia. The link toe the 10 page full review is provided.

Group Feedback – How it works: To reduce the teacher workload, it was decided to use a group feedback process as follows. Students emailed their essays to the teacher. The teacher removed the students name from the essay and from their Word document and relabeled as of the essays documents as: ‘Essay 1’, ‘Essay 2’ and so on. The teacher kept a record of which essay number related to each student. When the essays were all graded, each essay was placed on a web discussion forum using the labels ‘Essay 1’ and so on to ensure confidentiality. Once placed on the web, every student could examine other students’ work.

Also placed on the web was feedback to the whole class. Students did not receive separate individual feedback. The teacher provided one piece of general feedback to the class about each of the assessment criteria. However, the general feedback also included specific comments about essays that student were directed to consult either because they were particular good or poor examples. For instance, on the criteria for ‘correct structure – (introduction, body and conclusion)’, the teacher provided the following feedback:

Essay 1 would have been improved with the inclusion of an introduction and a tighter conclusion.
You will notice that people tried different approaches to starting their essay such as using a quote or definition to spark interest (Essay 2, 4); being as brief and direct as possible (Essays, 3,5, 7) or by moving from the general to the specific (Essay 6). Most people opted for a short conclusion. Starting the conclusion with the words ‘In conclusion’ is a very clear way of signposting where you are taking the reader.

http://conference.herdsa.org.au/2005/pdf/refereed/paper_429.pdf

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