When discussing peer feedback with faculty, sometimes they question if students know how to give feedback to other students. In the classes I taught, I’ve seen some students giving feedback in different ways: good, not so great, and some going off topic; clearly not all students know how to give quality feedback to their peers. John Spencer shares a failed attempt with peer feedback and seven helpful strategies.
If you have group work in your class for a project or a big assignment, it makes sense to incorporate peer feedback. When students take time to reflect on how to evaluate their peers, they are reflecting on the work they have done at the same time as they are being exposed to their peer’s ideas. This is an opportunity for your students to receive comments from their classmates about their work, which means someone other than yourself is saying things students need to improve that are important for the completion of the group work.
As when doing many other things for the first time, students are not going to give perfect feedback to their peers the first time they do it, but they can learn to do it. You need to provide a structure for giving and receiving peer feedback, especially if this is not something your students do very often. You need to assign partners, explain the process, prepare a form with guiding questions, give examples of quality feedback, and assign points for this activity. Sometimes it is good to have dedicated time during class to practice giving feedback to students. Students need to learn what are the expectations, see a few examples of good feedback and then be able to practice a few times. Students need to practice how to give and receive constructive feedback. In any case, building trust in the classroom helps students to respond better when receiving feedback. You can share with your students the ideal characteristics of feedback before they give comments to their peers.
Characteristics of Good Feedback
- Be Specific: Avoid vague sentences that do not help other students improve like “good job” or general critiques like “you’re disorganized”. Instead, give specific comments, such as: “the presentation slides were difficult to read”.
- Be Concise: Get to the point that you need to say; the other student don’t need very long comments
- Be Realistic: When you are giving comments to improve some work, look at the requirements but also the time you have to complete the work. Sometimes there is not enough time to make all the suggested changes.
- Be Constructive: Comments should be written in a polite and respectful way. You can say anything if you choose the right words.
- Give Actionable Comments: Focus on suggestions to improve a project or assignment instead of criticizing someone’s personality. In other words, critique the work, not the person. If there is a rubric look at each one of the requirements and if something was not addressed, suggest a solution that can be done before the deadline.
When to Incorporate Peer Feedback?
If your students are working in groups to complete a project, you can easily add a step to evaluate each other, but you can have several checkpoints for peer feedback. It is beneficial for the groups that work well together, but for the groups that are not very effective it is more helpful to do a checkpoint right at the beginning when they have plenty of time to improve things. Bruce Maxim usually incorporates peer feedback in group projects giving students multiple opportunities to peer review. He shares in his blog post several examples of evaluation forms you can customize to fit your project or your assignment.
Resources
Teaching students to evaluate each other – by the Cornell University Center for Teaching Innovation. Ideas to incorporate peer review in your class, planning for peer review and what to do before the first session.
Peer Feedback – by the Oxford University Center for Teaching & Learning. Tips for peer feedback and sample prompts.
Seven Strategies for Getting the Most Out of Peer Feedback in the Classroom by John Spencer. It gives you suggestions for an effective peer feedback process.
Engaging Asynchronous Online Students Using Peer Review, Peer Evaluation, and Peer Teaching. Blog post by Bruce Maxim.
Follow the instructions from the Canvas Instructor Guides to set up peer review in your course:
–How do I use peer review assignments in a course?
–How do I create a peer review assignment?
–How do I automatically assign peer reviews for an assignment?