Colleague Swap – Nuggets
I chose the Colleague Swap article which discusses the relative importance of sustained communication skills and practice through a program for students, and outlines the use-value of a peer review activity as part of courses.
I narrowed in on this passage:
“Allowing students to critique each other’s papers also creates a more cooperative learning environment and increases student involvement in the content and flow of the course. It is only natural that students develop a greater vested interest in a class in which they believe their feedback matters.”
I think incorporating peer review formally into a course is a fantastic idea for developing student-course investment as well as better quality writing, though what seems to be somewhat challenging is the mechanics of assigning this in a way that is easy to manage and fair to students. While services such as PeerGrade, Feedback Fruits and Arora do work well to manage the mechanics of peer review, they can be somewhat challenging for new instructors to use and manage. Another issue we’ve run into is how to both assign peer review activities for completion but also respecting the issue of accommodations. Often these solutions don’t have an easy way to add in extra time for completion for those with documented accommodations and the solution is to group those students needing accommodations with other students needing similar accommodations, which may not be as helpful as finding a way to incorporate them into the larger, broader student group. While this process of peer review might be anonymous so students are unaware of this method of grouping, I am curious about the quality of the feedback they receive as a result. Some of this can be mitigated through good assignment directions and assessment design, however. I’ve built this text out into a Rise module here as well: https://rise.articulate.com/share/v0iE-9X5xwekb10nDYPRukqSmOv6KOkl
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