Supervising master students’ theses is one of the tasks of many higher education instructors. Feedback helps students achieve outcomes of better quality and supervisors have been the main source of feedback on master students' theses. However, peer feedback is now more and more often recognised as an important, supplementary approach to supervision. Peer feedback can be regarded as part of a process-oriented writing activity, in which students 1) provide reviews on peers’ work and 2) receive feedback on their own work. Although some students may not be keen to offer and receive feedback from peers, this kind of feedback may be beneficial to students’ academic writing; apart from content and language-related benefits, peer feedback may provide emotional support. As student learning depends on the uptake and use of the provided feedback, review sessions need to be well-structured. In designing such sessions in higher education seminar classes, the framework of collaborative peer feedback may be useful. As described by E. Er, Y. Dimitriadis, and D. Gašević in Collaborative peer feedback and learning analytics: theory-oriented design for supporting class-wide interventions, the learning activity consists of three phases:
In this post, I explain how I implemented peer feedback in my seminar class for first-year TEFL MA students. This semester, the students are working on drafts of their MA theses. Instructions were created and made available through Moodle, the in-class phase was conducted synchronously through MS Teams. BEFORE CLASS PHASE ONE TASK 1. Peer review. For this task (Steps 1-3 below), you will review your partner’s MA thesis literature review (completed last week). Your goal is to help your partner improve the text in the following areas: content, organisation, language, in-text citation, referencing. Step 1. Assess your partner’s literature review by underlying one of the categories: Poor / Fair / Good / Excellent. Assessed work: ………[title of the thesis / literature review]........ Note: If the title is not provided, give it a name, e.g. “L2 anxiety and L2 learning”
Step 2. In this task your goal is to provide the feedback on your partner's literature review by suggesting:
Step 3. Publish the assessment (step 1) and the feedback (step 2) in “Research Writers’ Forum - Peer review” on Moodle. Do not use the author’s name. TASK 2. Self-assessment. Step 1. For this task, you will assess your own work - the literature review for your MA thesis. Use this rubric to self-assess your work:
Step 2. Declare the weaknesses that you see in the current version of your literature review. Is there anything, in your view, that:
Step 3. Publish the self-assessment (step 1) and the declaration of weaknesses (step 2) in “Research Writers’ Forum - Self-assessment” on Moodle. IN CLASS (Student conference through MS Teams) PHASE TWO TASK 3. The discussion of feedback. Step 1. Read the review of your work - see “Writers’ Forum - Peer Review” on Moodle. Step 2. Compare the review with your own self-assessment. In what ways is your self-assessment different from the peer review? Is there anything you need to know more from your reviewer? Step 3. Talk to your reviewer about her feedback to decide how you can move forward, i.e. how you can improve your literature review before you submit your MA Thesis proposal for final assessment by 14th June 2020. Step 4. Write a list of all actions you need to take before submission. PHASE THREE TASK 4. Your action plan. Write your action plan: write when you plan to complete each action that you listed in the previous step. Publish your action plan below (Moodle forum). TASK 5. Reflection on giving and receiving feedback. Finish the sentence stems below: 1. Giving the feedback on somebody’s work (MA thesis literature review) was / is …. 2. Self-assessment of my own MA thesis literature review was / is ... 3. Receiving feedback on my own work (MA thesis literature review) was / is ... Publish your thoughts below (Moodle forum). References: Er, E., Dimitriadis, Y., & Gašević, D. (2020). Collaborative peer feedback and learning analytics: theory-oriented design for supporting class-wide interventions. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 1-22. Zhang, Y., Yu, S., & Yuan, K. (2020). Understanding Master’s students’ peer feedback practices from the academic discourse community perspective: A rethinking of postgraduate pedagogies. Teaching in Higher Education, 25(2), 126-140.
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