Education Commons^™

Tipping The Balance Towards 21st Century Skills Through Peer-To-Peer Learning: A Cross-Disciplinary Pilot Of Peer Review Software, John Mccormick, Liv Cummins, Lisa Spitz

Staff Scholarship

There is growing recognition that many college students enter the workplace lacking “21st Century Skills” such as critical thinking, collaboration and communication. Peer-to-peer feedback provides a large number of benefits, including these “lifelong learning” skills valued by industry. Peer review, however, poses many challenges: for instructors; these include management of the process and poor quality of peer feedback; and for students, socioemotional barriers. Key socioemotional challenges are learners’ lack of trust in the process, in their peers, and in themselves as reviewers. This paper describes a pilot of a web-based peer review software called “Peergrade”, which was found highly effective …

Seeing Is Believing: Peer Video Coaching As Professional Development Done With Me And For Me, Kate M. Cassada, Laura Kassner

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

As part of their graduate education, in-service teachers identified an area of instructional focus, video recorded their classroom instruction at two intervals in a semester-long course, formed peer groups, and shared their videos for the purpose of obtaining feedback for professional growth. After the conclusion of the course, participants were contacted and presented with a summary of four benefits of the peer video review process, as identified in a recent professional article. Through online survey, participants were asked to share their perceptions of the peer video review experiences in the course and address any evidence related to the benefits raised …

Chat It Up: Backchanneling To Promote Reflective Practice Among In-Service Teachers, Laura Kassner, Kate M. Cassada

School of Professional and Continuing Studies Faculty Publications

In a graduate education course geared toward developing reflective teaching practice in in-service teachers, backchannels, in the form of chat rooms, were employed in small groups to facilitate peer feedback during viewings of video recorded instruction. This study examined the nature and quality of peer feedback exchanged in the digital medium and gauged graduate students’ impressions of the technology, with potential for carryover into their professional practices in P-12 instruction. Results revealed that the backchannel was perceived as an easy-to-use tool that promoted rich, real-time, high-quality feedback and a space to collaborate and exchange ideas, while improving engagement. Backchannel comments …

Students’ Perspectives On The Use Of Peer Feedback In An English As A Second Language Writing Class, Kavitha Sukumaran, Rozita Dass

Research outputs 2014 to 2021

Peer assessment and peer feedback are considered alternatives to teacher-based feedback and their effects on writing have been substantially researched. This study aims to examine the perspectives of a group of university students, who are mainly second language learners, on peer feedback in an English writing class. Many of the studies conducted on the perspectives of students regarding peer feedback provided conflicting findings. While some found that peer feedback was viewed with doubt and encouraged little revision, others found it helped learners to recognise their strengths and flaws in writing. This study aims to better understand students’ perspectives regarding peer …

Computer-Supported Peer Review In A Law School Context, Kevin D. Ashley, Ilya Goldin

Articles

Legal instructors have been urged to incorporate peer reviewing into law school courses as a way to provide students much needed feedback. Peer review can benefit legal education, but only if law school instructors adopt peer review on a large scale, and for that, computer-supported peer review systems are crucial. These web-based systems orchestrate the mechanics of students submitting written assignments on-line and distributing them to other students for anonymous review, making it considerably easier for instructors to manage.

Beyond the problem of orchestrating mechanics, however, a deeper obstacle to widespread acceptance of peer review in legal education is the …