Preparing students as effective assessors
Enabling learning beyond graduation
David Nicol
Professor of Higher Education
Centre for Academic Practice and Learning Enhancement (CAPLE]
Director, Peer project (www.reap.ac.uk)
Project Facilitator, QAA Enhancement Themes: Assessment
University of Strathclyde
Enhancement Themes Conference: March 2nd 2011
Feedback in higher education
Mainly thought of from teacher perspective
Students [NSS] – timeliness, detail and clarity
Teachers: workload, student engagement
Peer feedback innovations - more feedback, timely,
no extra workload with software support, mimics
feedback receipt in employment settings
But thinking about delivery still locks us into seeing
feedback as transmission
Students as feedback constructors
Constructivist perspective – the benefits
Producing is cognitively more demanding than receiving: you
cannot be passive
Students process/reprocess criteria from multiple perspective
See how others tackle work and learn that quality can be produced
in different ways
Develop disciplinary thinking – constructing explanations
Enables students to better assess own work: same skills
Develop judgement – necessary for employment and life beyond
university.
All graduate attribute development requires that student learn to
make evaluative judgements
Examination of module and
course approval documents
Rare to find a learning outcome of the following type:
At the end of this module:
…you will be able to evaluate critically the quality
and/or impact of your own work
…you will be able to evaluate critically the quality and
impact of the work produced by others
see
http://www.enhancementthemes.ac.uk/documents/G21C/Assessment_1509
10.pdf
Example of peer feedback
Psychology class
•
Students write an essay on one topic from three related to
child development
•
Each student provides feedback on three essays in another
topic anonymously using a set of questions and ratings provided
by the teacher.
•
The rubric: write a short summary of the essay, comment on
and rate (four point scale) the structure, arguments, evidence,
writing, and suggest ways of improving the essay.
•
Students receive peer reviews of their own essays
•
They then review, comment on and rate their own essay using
the same or similar rubric.
•
Students given marks for participating in the task, for their
essay and for their own review of it.
•
Finally, students provided with 3 reviews from other students
and asked to rate them and comment on how useful they
thought this would be to an author.
•
All activities supported by peer review software (e.g. Aropa)
Principles of effective peer feedback
TASK
If you were asked to compile a list of principles to
guide academics implementing peer feedback what
would be on that list? To clarify the principle you might
wish to provide an example of its implementation.
How might you apply these peer review
ideas in your own context?
Discussion
What might you do to implement these ideas?
What issues do you anticipate?
Peer Review in Education Evaluation [PEER]
Peer project is funded by JISC (till July 20110 and led
by the University of Strathclyde. The aims are to:
Review evidence base for peer review
Develop educational designs for peer review (and
self-review)
Identify software support for peer review
Pilot implementations of peer review with large
student numbers
Produce guidelines for HE/FE – why do it, how to do
it, pitfalls and solutions and software possibilities.
see http://www.reap.ac.uk/peer.aspx