Introduction

In this article we will walk you through the intended pedagogical purpose of Peer Review.

Peer feedback is a key determinant of student achievement, helping to foster career ready skills, stimulating meaningful learning interactions and improving learners’ self-regulatory processes.

Peer feedback is invaluable, yet it can be time-consuming to implement due to the multiple manual tasks required, not to mention students’ lack of engagement and motivation to participate. Our Peer Review is designed to help simplify this process to save you valuable time.

Here you can find our user guides for Peer Review:

• Peer Review: For Teachers

• Peer Review: For Students

How It Works

Feedback can be manifested in multiple forms, from constructive comments and advice, to behavior, social interactions, and praise. Also, it is delivered via multiple channels: written text, verbal comments, audio recordings, images, and so forth.

By addressing the discrepancy between “what is known” and “what should be known”, feedback promotes effective teaching and learning in the sense that:

• It helps students understand the subject being studied and gives them clear guidance on how to improve their learning

• It strengthens the classroom communication between teachers and students

• Feedback can improve a student's confidence, self-awareness and enthusiasm for learning, leading to enhanced retention

Peer feedback is a cyclical and interactive process and involves the contribution of instructors, students, and teaching assistants (TAs). A complete peer feedback process can consist of the following steps:

1. The instructors setting outcomes and expectations for the activity

2. Giving feedback (students and TAs)

3. Receiving feedback (students and TAs)

4. Reflecting on the feedback

5. Going beyond: Moving the skills learned beyond the classroom

Each of these steps has to be executed with care and attention to achieve the desired outcomes.

What Additional Learning Steps Can I Use With Peer Review?

The options available to you will depend on your contract with us - these are the general features that can be added to this tool:

Highlighted Features

Automated Feedback Coach (AI): AI-powered Automated Feedback Coach assists students with providing high-quality feedback to their peers within the Peer Review tool. It provides specific and actionable feedback to encourage students to provide helpful feedback that address the assignment criteria.

Configurable grading: Automatic, adjustable grading provides educators with the flexibility to implement detailed scoring without spending lots of time on grading, or turn the assignment into a summative assessment.

Turnitin integration: If the institution has a license with Turnitin, instructors can enable plagiarism check setting for students to have their submissions reviewed for plagiarism by Turnitin before the peer review activity.

Benefits of using Peer Review

Facilitating peer feedback is not an easy job, as instructors often struggle with:

• Low feedback quality: The peer feedback quality from peers differs from that of teachers.

• Scalability of online peer feedback: Organizing peer feedback is a time-consuming and complicated task. It is possible in small groups, but it becomes a major issue with the increasing number of students and the switch to online/hybrid course settings.

Through implementation of our Peer Review tool, you can address these common pain points:

• Quick and easy set up - All FeedbackFruits tools are integrated into the Learning Management System (LMS) and have a similar look and feel, which flattens the learning curve for both teachers and students. This saves instructors lots of time while creating the activities.

• Gain student oversight - Teachers are provided with a dashboard that shows each student's progress in every step of the activity, such as 'read instructions', 'finished self-assessment' and 'give feedback'. Teachers can choose to grade students based on these multi-dimensional criteria.

• Easily configure feedback criteria - The tool allows teachers to structure and customize peer review criteria with options such as qualitative feedback criteria, scales, or rubrics.

• Engage peers in the feedback process - Within the tool a configuration can be added for feedback on feedback where students can reply to the feedback they receive. Students can give and reply to feedback both by text and voice comment which keeps the conversation going.

You can read more about the application and execution of effective feedback here: Feedback: the key to better teaching and learning