Workplace feedback with peer review

I've taught into a wide range of units, from microbiology and chemistry through to genetics. Almost every unit has had an oral presentation, and in most units students only receive feedback from teaching staff. Students really value feedback, and peer feedback gives them the opportunity to get more feedback. It also encourages them to actively engage with their peer’s presentations, rather than listening passively, and develop their critical thinking skills in order to evaluate their peers in a way that is deliberate.

As the final assessment in their Science Internship unit, our interns put together a five minute reflective video or presentation that covers:

• What they got out of the experience
• Their experience working in the workforce
• Advice for future students
• What they would have wanted to know at the beginning of internship
• What they plan to do in the future

Presentations are marked on three criteria sections: content, polish of the presentation and creativity.

Students give and receive feedback from three of their peers, which contributes 25% towards their final grade.

The goal of this assessment is to improve their communication skills and to flip their mindsets from passively receiving feedback to actively providing feedback as novice professionals. Once they go out into the workforce, peer feedback will be the primary form of feedback that they will receive.

The next iteration of this assessment will focus more heavily on science communication to a generalist audience. From my experience in the area of STEM student employability, science communication skills is one of the most important skills employers look for i.e. “Does someone who is not a scientist understand what you're communicating?”

Previously, I ran the peer review assessment using the Moodle workshop, which worked sufficiently for the task, but ended up being a very long and painful process because Moodle workshop does not accept late submissions. I ended up creating multiple versions (five!) of the assignment dropbox to accommodate late submissions.

In Semester 2, 2022, I ran the peer review assessment with the Feedback fruits Peer Review tool and adapted the activity to allow students to choose (using group self-selection) whether they wanted to submit a recorded video of their presentation or present live in a later scheduled face-to-face class. I also set up a duplicate Moodle assignment dropbox as a fail safe, to be able to run both activities in parallel if needed.

To prepare students for the Peer review, I also created a H5P interactive module to introduce the principles of constructive feedback, which you can view below.

I set FeedbackFruits up so that late submissions were accepted. Then, I gambled that there would be enough late submissions that even students who had submitted late would get a chance to review their peer’s work. It worked almost perfectly! I only had to follow up with two students via email who had missed the Peer feedback activity deadline. Those students instead attended and provided feedback at the live presentations.

It was important to me that students could organise themselves into groups for the live presentation so that students could take responsibility for their own learning. All the students that attended the face-to-face presentations were split into groups of five. Students were able to easily search for the name of the other students in their group within FeedbackFruits activity, and select students within their group to review.

FeedbackFruits worked remarkably well and ultimately created a better experience for everyone involved in the unit!

Overall it was ​​a very successful experience that significantly decreased my workload. I went from using the Moodle workshop with five different drop boxes and a back-up google form - which worked well enough but is a pain to import back into Moodle - to having student marks and feedback automatically integrated with Moodle Gradebook.

The informal feedback from students was that they loved it. This assessment is the culmination of their 120 hour internship experience and most are graduating at the end of the year. The implementation of Feedback Fruits gave them the opportunity to hear about other people's experiences and learn about different presentation styles.

The scalability of FeedbackFruits is also really important to me, because although I only had 52 students this semester, I'll be running this unit again in Summer Semester A and B, and I will theoretically have up to 100 students. The ability to search within FeedbackFruits to find the person's name was also priceless!

Students were able to engage in peer review in a meaningful way that was professionally relevant to them. All science students have previously participated in peer review using FBF in the core units SCI1000 and SCI1005 and FeedbackFruits is very user friendly from the student perspective.

Students always complain that they don’t get enough feedback. Using FeedbackFruits for peer review gave students the opportunity to get more feedback, without the daunting process of trying to organise additional staff in sufficient numbers to provide feedback.

I asked the students to organise themselves into groups of five and provide feedback for three members of their group so that each student could receive at least three reviews. To my surprise and delight, I found all the students who were there on the day just marked everyone else’s presentations because they were having so much fun! Students were able to engage in peer review in a meaningful way that was professionally relevant to them.