1. 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)www.reap.ac.uk Project Facilitator, QAA Enhancement Themes: Assessment University of Strathclyde Enhancement Themes Conference: March 2 nd 2011

2. 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

3. 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

4. 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

5. 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)

6. 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.

7. 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?

8. 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.aspxhttp://www.reap.ac.uk/peer.aspx