Set up FeedbackFruits Group Member Evaluation
The FeedbackFruits Group Member Evaluation activity allows students to assess their peers’ collaboration skills. You can specify the criteria students use to evaluate their peers’ contribution to group work. Students can allocate grades and feedback for their peers and an optional step can be added for students to reflect on their own feedback. This tool also has built-in features to address the problem of free-riding.
The Group member evaluation activity can also be set up to allow students to review their peers in scenarios where students do not hand-in work, for example oral presentations or musical performances. If you would like students to provide feedback on peers' submissions, see FeedbackFruits Peer Review.
Watch the video below to learn how to set up the Group Member Evaluation activity
This guide goes through the steps to set up the FeedbackFruits Group Member Evaluation. To add the FeedbackFruits activity, see add a FeedbackFruits activity.
Copy from existing template
If you have previously created a FeedbackFruits activity, you can use a past FeedbackFruits activity as a template for your new activity or create activities with templates that are suited for specific learning activities.
- Click Copy from existing in the top right corner.
- Saved templates will appear at the top of the menu. You can scroll down to view recently accessed FeedbackFruits and FeedbackFruits templates that have been sent to you below. Templates and copies appear with their date and the name of the creator.
- Select the template you would like to use and click Use template. The activity settings and grading configuration will be copied across to your new FeedbackFruits activity.
Note: Templates do not include the groups that were in the previous activity, so you will be prompted to set up your Moodle groups.
Step 1: Instructions
- Fill in instructions for the activity for students. You can format and structure your text using markdown elements. For more information about essential Markdown elements you can use to format your instructions, see here. You can click on Add items to record an audio or video clip, or attach a file, if desired.
Note: You will not be able to publish/save the assignment if you leave the instructions field blank.
- In Student collaboration, specify whether students will hand in work individually or as a group, and review their peers individually or as groups. Click Change to change the collaboration options.
- Select from the Collaboration options below:
- Students work:
- Individually
- As a group
- Review:
- Individually: Students are individually assigned to anyone.
- Within groups: Students individually get assigned someone within their group.
- Outside of their group: Students individually get assigned to someone, not in their group.
- As a group: All members of a group get assigned the same work
The table below provides examples of scenarios for collaboration options
Students work individually Students work as a group Review individually
Students are individually assigned to anyone
All students work individually, for example an individual presentation, and you would like the students to review other students individually Students have collaborated on a project as a group, and need to review another group individually. Within groups
Students individually get assigned someone within their group
Students will individually review members of their group, for example, on collaboration skills and group participation. This is the most commonly used option for assessing teamwork and team performance within a group. This option is disabled when students work as a group is selected.
Outside of their group
Students individually get assigned to someone, not in their group.
Students will individually review members outside of their group. For example, groups have been sorted by presentation topic and students need to review someone with a different presentation topic. This option is disabled if students work as a group is selected.
As a group
All members of a group get assigned the same work
This option is disabled if students work ‘individually’ is selected.
Students have collaborated on a project as a group, and you would like the students to all review the same other group. - Students work:
- If you choose a collaboration option where students will work in groups, you will be prompted to choose which groups will participate. Your Moodle groupings will be automatically synced from your Moodle unit.
- Select all groups within a grouping using the checkbox.
- You can expand a grouping to view all groups within a grouping. You can further expand groups to view all students within a group.
Note: You choose specific groups within a grouping without selecting all groups within the grouping.
- The bottom left corner will display the total number of students within your chosen groupings that will be assigned to the FeedbackFruits activity.
- When finished, click Done. If you wish to change assigned groups, click Configure groups.
Step 2: Given reviews
In Given reviews, specify the feedback criteria that students will use as a guide give their peers feedback, set a deadline for when students should complete their reviews and select whether students will be able to read their received feedback instantly, or at a scheduled date.
In Feedback criteria, click Configure to specify the criteria that students will use to give peer feedback. You can choose to create new feedback criteria, or use existing feedback criteria from high-level templates or previous activities.
- Click Create new criteria.
- Select Rubric, Scale rating or Comment criterion. You can use a combination of different criteria within your FeedbackFruits activity.
Rubric (recommended)
Rubrics allow you to provide detailed explanations for each level of the criterion, for example, what qualities an "excellent" or "poor" performance of a criteria look like.
Click the plus icons to learn more about building rubrics in FeedbackFruits
- Modify the blank default rubric to suit your requirements:
- Criterion:
- Add criterion by clicking the +Add criterion button
- Delete criterion by clicking the X
- Reorder criterion by clicking the up or down arrows on the left of the criterion.
- Allow comments by clicking the Allow comments checkbox. Specify the minimum number of comments students are required to write by clicking the up and down arrows in the required field.
- Rubric levels:
- Add levels by clicking on the purple plus icon on the right of the screen or by clicking the three dots for an existing level and inserting a new level to the left or the right.
- Delete levels by clicking the three dots and selecting Delete level.
- Reorder levels clicking the three dots and selecting Move level left/right.
- Specify the number of points allocated to each level by clicking the up and down arrows in the points field.
- Descriptors: Click on each blank field to add a description per level for each criterion.
- Criterion:
- When finished, click Done.
Scale rating
The scale rating allows students to evaluate each other's work on a numerical scale. You can also allow students to add comments so they can provide a rating and additional reasoning to support their given rating.
- Enter a title and an optional explanation of the criterion to provide a guide for students.
- From the Rating dropdown list, choose the type of rating you want to use. The 7 point scale is recommended by FeedbackFruits as it allows enough structure for students to give detailed feedback, while still allowing students to maintain oversight.
- If required, you can adjust the lowest rating on scale to 0 by selecting the Adjust lowest rating on scale to results in 0 grade points checkbox at the bottom of scale criteria.
- Customise the beginning and end of the scale by entering text into the Scale begin and Scale end fields. By default, these are set to “improvement needed” and “excellent” respectively.
Note: Only the beginning and end of the scale are named. When students move the slider, they will see numbers that indicate the grade.
- Tick the Allow comments checkbox to allow students to provide an additional supporting comment. You can specify the minimum number of comments students are required to write by entering a number in the required field.
- When you are finished, click Done.
Comment criterion
Use comment criteria when you want students to give qualitative feedback only, without assigning a grade as a part of their feedback.
- Enter a title and an optional explanation of the criterion to provide a guide for students.
- Specify the minimum number of comments students are required to write.
- Click add another criterion to add another comment criterion.
- When you are finished, click Done.
Institutional level rubrics have been validated and are supported by research.
Click on the title of the rubric to preview it. To use the rubric, click Use this rubric.
If you have previously created a FeedbackFruits activity, you can reuse feedback criteria from a previous activity.
From the Use copy from recent list, select the FeedbackFruits activity you would like to use and then click Copy.
Once created, your feedback criteria will be displayed as a section. You can:
- Click Edit section to continue editing the feedback criteria within that section.
- Click on the three dots to delete feedback section or rearrange the order of sections.
- Continue to add additional Feedback criteria (Rubric, Scale rating or Comment criterion).
- Enable section headings. This will allow you to customise the title of the section.
Once you have finished adding feedback criteria, click Done.
Given reviews settings
Expand the accordion items below to learn more about each configurable setting for Given reviews.
Required number of peers to review
Specify how many peer reviews a student is required to give to peers/group members/groups to complete this section of the activity. If you want all peers to review each other, select All.
Note: It is recommended that you set this to at least 3, as this provides students with a more diverse exposure to ideas and perspectives, compared to receiving just a single review.
Students also do self-assessment
You can toggle the switch to Enable(Purple) or Disabled(Grey) this setting. If enabled:
- Students review themselves based on the same criteria set.
- Self-assessment is visible side by side with their peer reviews for contrast.
- When working as a group, assessment is also on the performance of the group, and visible to all group members.
Automatic outlier detection
This feature flags outliers based on how students rated themselves and their peers so you can quickly identify and review students in teamwork assignments. You can toggle the switch to Enable(Purple) or Disabled(Grey) this setting.
Use the Detect outliers feature to:
- Further investigation: look at the student’s overview of received reviews ratings, compare it to the team average and their self assessment and browse through comments left by students before drawing any conclusions.
- Provide learning opportunities: If an indicator turns out to be accurate, you may wish to get in contact with the student to hear their side of the story and discuss how the situation occurred. Helping students understand the "why" unlocks a powerful learning experience to recalibrate their self perception and motivate them to set self-development goals.
Do not use the Detect outliers feature to:
- Draw conclusions: Outlier flags are simply indicators of patterns only, you should always investigate flagged outliers and read comments for context in order to exercise your own judgement. Don’t use labels for grading without investigating individual contexts.
NoteTo enable this feature, the following conditions must be met:
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Scheduling deadlines - Choose when students must complete their written feedback
Set the time and date that students must complete their written peer feedback. Reviewers will not be able to view or edit their reviews after the deadline passes. You can leave the deadline blank to allow reviewers to view and/or edit their feedback indefinitely.
Allocations - Choose how students will review their peers
In Allocations, click Change to change the allocation method. Select your preferred method of allocation, then click Done to save your changes.
Note: You can manually assign allocations, if required. For more information, see Manual allocations.
The table below provides an explanation of allocation options
Allocation method | Use case | Limitations |
---|---|---|
Automatically - One by one | Students will be assigned a review one by one, a peer will only be allocated when the student starts each subsequent review, and so on. This is the default and recommended method of allocation as it ensures the fairest distribution of reviews in case some students don’t participate in the activity. | Students are not able to see all the peers they are allocated to review in advance. In situations where students having prior knowledge of their allocations is desirable, for example if students are required to review their peers for a group presentation, automatically - all at once may be more suitable. |
Automatically - All at once | Students will be assigned all the reviews they'll have to complete at once. This option is only recommended when the required amount of reviews is set to All, as students will be able to see all the peers they're required to review at once, rather than having to complete the first review before continuing with the second. | If students only complete 1 review, the others can no longer be assigned to someone else who does complete all the reviews. |
Manually | Manually allocate someone for each student to review. If you do not assign a student someone to review, they will not be able to participate in the activity. | A significant amount of manual work is required for this allocation. For more information, see Manual allocations. |
Students choose who to review | Once the review process has started, students will be able to select the student or group they want to review at the review step. If multiple reviews are required, students will select the allocations one after another. | This allocation method cannot be enabled if:
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To learn more about how peers are automatically assigned, see FeedbackFruits: How are peers assigned?
Anonymity - Choose whether students can see the names of their peers
Note: You will still be able to view the student's name. Reviewers will appear to their peers anonymously.
Recommended use case | |
---|---|
Enable reviewer anonymity | Students are new to giving feedback to their peers. This provides a safe learning environment that lowers the threshold for giving honest and valuable feedback. |
Disable reviewer anonymity | Students have grown familiar with giving feedback anonymously. This helps prepare them for life after studies, where feedback is expected to be given without the protection of anonymity. |
Visibility - Choose when students are able to see their feedback
Choose when the students can see their feedback from the following options:
- Instantly: As soon as a student has posted their peer feedback, their peer will be able to read it.
- After release date: Once the deadline has passed, students will be able to read peer reviews.
- A certain date: Set a date other than the deadline when students will be able to read peer reviews.
- Never: You can view peer reviews but students will not be able to read the peer reviews they have received. You can manually publish feedback at any time.
Guiding students - Additional instructions and tips to guide students
You can toggle the switch to enable(Purple) or disable(Grey) the following settings.
Feedback tips for reviewing
Students will see a randomly selected tip from the following default tips while they write feedback:
- Be sure to make your feedback actionable (concrete suggestions for improvement)
- Remember to link it back to the main criteria of the assignment
- Try to balance your review; recognise both strong and weak points
- Remember to ask for clarification, or elaboration on points you don’t understand
- Try to ask questions that encourage reflection
- Remember to critique the writing, not the writer
- Before critiquing someone’s worldview or arguments, consider their statements in the most rational way possible, and interpret their strongest arguments
- If you think a worldview or opinion is wrong, try probing questions
- If you were receiving this feedback, would you find it helpful?
- Remember to keep the tone of your feedback motivational
- Try to use a tone of feedback that you’d also like to receive.
You can click the X beside the tip to delete a tip or click Add another tip to enter your own tips.
Review checklist
Checklist that will be shown to students before handing in to help improve quality. This checklist will be shown to a student at the bottom of their criteria, to help them reflect on how they formulated their feedback and if they would like to go back to edit some things.
Instructions for giving feedback
Enter additional instructions for students to keep in mind while they give feedback.
Step 3: Received reviews
In Received reviews, students read the feedback they received. You can also enable students to rate their reviewers' feedback which could motivate students to give better feedback and to improve.
In Scheduling deadlines, set an optional deadline for students to read their received reviews. Students can still view the feedback and their reflection after the deadline, however they will not receive any grades for Has read all received feedback if they read their recieved reviews after the deadline.
Once students have completed this step, you can publish student feedback for their peers to receive.
Note: If you do not set a deadline, students can write and/or edit their reflection indefinitely.
Step 4: Reflections (optional)
- Click the purple plus button below the grading section to add an optional reflection module.
- Select from Participation Grading Assignment or Reflect on the activity.
Students complete this after they have read reviews.
The Reflect on the activity module allows students to write a reflection on the FeedbackFruits activity.
You can set an optional deadline and specify a minimum and maximum word count for the written reflection. You can enter optional instructions to guide students in writing their reflection, for example try using these guiding principles:
- Context: Did you recap what happened and how it happened?
- Emotions: Which emotions influenced you the most? How did they change your opinion?
- Personal beliefs: Which actions were most driven by your personal beliefs? Did assumptions change?
- Critical stance: What were the biggest struggles you had? How would it look from an outsider’s view?
- Perspective seeking: Did you make the effort to discover ideas or opinions you might have missed?
- Lessons learned: What did you learn along the way? Were your beliefs confirmed or challenged?
- Future intentions: What would you try to learn or do differently in the future?
Students complete this after giving reviews.
The Participation Grading Assignment module allows students to choose a contribution from their given reviews and assign a rating from between 1 to 10. You can specify the number of contributions students are required to submit and set an optional deadline for this step.
Grading
In Grading, adjust the weighting to determine how much each step of the feedbackfruits activity will contribute towards the final grade. You should configure grading before students begin the activity.
- Click Configure.
- You will see each step (Grading facet) of the feedbackfruits activity.
- Use the buttons in the Include column to include (Purple) or exclude(greyed out) a step from contributing to the final grade. Excluding a step is the equivalent of setting the weighting to 0.
- In the weight column, enter your desired weighting.
- Ensure that the total equals 100.
- Click Done.
Click the icons to learn more about grading facets
Note: Weightings you have allocated for Completed giving feedback, Has written the minimum number of review comments and Ratings received on work in total will appear as the sum total weighting for the Given reviews step. For example, Completed giving feedback(40%) and Ratings received on work in total(40%) will appear to students as the Given reviews being worth 80% of the mark.
Grading settings
Click on Settings to expand the Settings accordion. Click the toggle to switch the setting ON (Purple) or OFF (Grey). You can enable:
Publish a pass/fail grade instead of a percentage grade
This setting functions as a threshold hurdle. Once enabled, set the score students must achieve to receive a pass grade by entering a number.
Use ratings students gave to individualise group project grades
This feature suggests automatic adjustments to students' grades within a group based on their contribution as rated by their peers. This feature can help eliminate free-riding. To enable this feature:
- Collaboration options must be set to Work individually, review within groups
- Feedback criteria must include at least 1 rubric or scale criterion
- Allocation cannot be set to students choose who to review
There are two methods which can be used to individualise student grades:
Grades are adjusted based on group participation.
This factor uses the average of the ratings received from criteria for a student and compares this to the average rating received from this student’s team members and assigns a factor between 0 and 2.
Note: A student’s contribution factor will change when new ratings for other students come in later and will go up or down depending on the scores the other student received.
Contribution factor | Suggested adjustment to student grade |
---|---|
0 - 0.49 | The project grade for this student will be reduced to zero. |
0.5 - 1 | The project grade multiplied by the received contribution factor if their contribution factor is between. the project grade gets multiplied by the contribution factor the student receives. |
1.01 - 2 | The project grade will stay the same, no marks are deducted or added. |
Note: You can configure these values for your activity, if desired.
For more information, see Group Contribution Factor.
Grades are adjusted based on performance.
The group skill factor is calculated by using the ratings received compared to the maximum points possible for the criteria and assigns a factor between 0 and 1, not depending on scores the other students receive.
Contribution factor | Suggested adjustment to student grade |
---|---|
0 - 0.55 | The project grade for this student will be reduced to zero. |
0.56 - 0.8 | The project grade multiplied by the average score if they score between the project grade gets multiplied by the factor the student receives. |
0.81 - 1 | The project grade will stay the same, no marks are deducted or added. |
Note: You can configure these values for your activity, if desired.
For more information, see Group Skill Factor.
This feature suggests changes to the group grade after all students have completed the feedbackfruits activity. The system will provide suggestions in regards to the adjustments that are to be made to the grades.
You can apply suggested grade changes:
- For all students: Click on the arrow icon at the top of the table header, the suggestions can be applied for all students within the assignment. Note: a confirmation dialog will appear explaining what is to happen and that this cannot be undone (see below)
- For all students in a subgroup: Click on the arrow icon that is connected to the subgroup-row.
- For an individual student: Click on the arrow icon on the student row.
After students complete their feedback assignment, the Group Contribution Factor for every student is shown, based on the ratings by their peers.
When you have finished setting up the FeedbackFruits activity, click Save in the top right corner of the screen. To edit the settings of the FeedbackFruits activity, click Edit in the top right corner of the screen. When you’ve finished making changes as required, click Save.
Note: Some settings cannot be changed when students have made progress with the activity.
NoteIt is recommended that you familiarise students with the FeedbackFruits before they begin the activity. FeedbackFruits provides student facing resources that you can share. For more information, see Supporting your students. |
Monitor student progress
Once students have begun the FeedbackFruits activity, you can view analytics and monitor students' progress for each step of the activity. Click through the tabs and click on the hotspots to learn more. You can click the icon in the top right corner to view in fullscreen. Click esc at any time to exit full screen.
Overview of outliers
High performer | This occurs when a student received an average rating higher than 70% and their rating was more than 10% percentage points higher than the overall average of the team as a whole. |
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Low performer | This occurs when a student did not contribute to the team's success. This condition is triggered when their overall average rating is less than 50%. |
Under confident | This occurs when the overall team rating for a student is greater than 60%, but the student rated themselves at least 20% percentage points lower than this. This could indicate that the student is "underconfident" or too critical of their own contributions. |
Over confident | This occurs when the overall rating for a student is less than 60%, but the student rated themselves at least 20% percentage points higher than their average rating. |
Manipulator | This occurs when a student appears to be trying to "skew the curve" by giving themselves high ratings while rating the other team members poorly. The student has given themselves an overall rating of 80% or higher, while rating all the other members on their team at least 40% percentage points below this rating (when rating more than 5 peers, we measure the difference using average) |
Conflict | This student rated a team-member at 40% or less while the median rating from the rest of the team is 60% or more. This generally indicates that there is a conflict between 2 team members. |
Co-conflict | This occurs when a student got rated at 40% or less by one of their team-mates, while the median rating from the rest of the team is 60% or more. This generally indicates that there is a conflict between 2 team members. |
Clique | This occurs when it appears the team might have split into two non-cooperating groups, where there’s protective insider rating. This happens when there is significant disagreement between the ratings from various team members (evidenced by standard deviation of the 0-to-1 normalised ratings given by peers being above 0.23). |
Publish Grades
Once students have completed the FeedbackFruits activity, click Publish Grades to push grades to the Moodle gradebook or schedule an optional publish date. The grades displayed at the time you hit Publish grades will appear in your Grader report. You can click Publish Grades again to resync the grades if required.
NoteIf you have not set deadlines for your Feedbackfruits activity, students can continue to make changes in the FeedbackFruits activity which may result in indescrepencies between the grades shown in the FeedbackFruits activity and the Moodle Gradebook. To ensure grades are finalised, you may wish to set a deadline for your feedbackfruits activity and click Publish grades once the deadline has passed. |
FeedbackFruits support
You can access direct help via the chat function in the bottom left hand corner of the FeedbackFruits activity. The FeedbackFruits Help center and the Chat with support which is available 24 hours 5 days a week. Response times are typically under 5 minutes.