Helping Students to Provide Effective Peer Feedback

Abstract

Peer assessment is becoming more common across the curriculum. If it is to be effective, students need to know how to provide meaningful feedback. It is important to construct a rubric that draws students' attention to the important points of the work they are reviewing. But that is not enough; students also need instruction in how to provide comments that their peers can and will use in revising their work. This involves learning how to provide constructive suggestions. It also means understanding the way the author will react to the review, and using gentle enough terminology so that the words do not get in the way of understanding the reviewer's advice. Authors can also help reviewers learn the ropes by giving them feedback on the effectiveness of reviews of their work.

Work in Progress: First-time Use of CATME in a Design Course

“…It seems that CATME plus ILIW is more instructive than either one alone for generating constructive feedback in areas important for teamwork. Given that students placed more value on shared, written feedback, teaching students how to give constructive and actionable feedback to each other (Gehringer, 2017) would be a helpful addition to the course.…”

Board 26: Work in Progress: Technical Scientific Writing across the BME curriculum

“…Because some of our students felt unqualified to assess others' work, they similarly reported that they felt the feedback was not useful. Teaching students how to provide feedback has been shown to further improve both the author's and reviewer's learning [7], and while this prior work was consulted, future iterations of the writing modules will spend more time on the peer-review process.…”