The pedagogical purpose of Group Member Evaluation is covered from 0:25-1:30 in the video.

Introduction

In this article we will walk you through the intended purpose of Group Member Evaluation.

Group Member Evaluation provides teachers with transparent insights into the collaborative process, eliminating free-riding.
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It encourages critical thinking among students by assessment of both their own and their peers’ contribution on group assignments. This leads to a transfer of ownership of the assessment process, increasing motivation, engagement and deeper learning.

Here you can find our user guides for Group Member Evaluation:

• Group Member Evaluation: For Teachers

• Group Member Evaluation: For Students

How It Works

Group Member Evaluation introduces an engaging environment for groups of students to collaborate together and receive feedback based on the given criteria for the assignment.

With Group Member Evaluation, you can easily create group peer assessment activities, with options for instructions, rubrics creation and automatic synchronization of groups and grades.

Activities can be turned into either summative or formative assessment tasks by deciding which steps are graded and how much weight they carry for the final grade - with our built in analytics, you can quickly and easily detect outliers in the given cohort.

By focusing on peer feedback as a key component, rather than feedback given from a teacher ('top-down'), students are also introduced to the concept of giving quality feedback and how to be self aware, positive, specific and honest.

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

Feedback is useful when it reduces the gap between where the student/group is/are and where they are meant to be. Feedback should therefore be useful when it helps students navigate this gap, by addressing 3 fundamental feedback questions including “Where am I going?”, “How am I going?”, and “Where to next?”

Where am I going? - The feedback should inform teachers and students about the attainment of learning goals.

How am I going? - This entails feedback relative to student progress and is often expressed in relation to some expected standard, to prior performance, and/or to success or failure on a specific part of the task.

Where to next? - Feedback can assist learners in choosing the next most appropriate challenges, enabling more self-regulation over the learning process, as well as developing different strategies to work on the tasks.

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.

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 Group Member Evaluation 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 Group Member Evaluation

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

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

• Scalability of online group 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 Group Member Evaluation 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 customise Group Member Evaluation 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