Peer Feedback

Initial situation

In this course, which has about 15 students, the teacher, who had taught for 15 years in the United States in a context where students were very involved in teaching, wanted to develop various techniques to create a participatory environment for the students in his course.

Project implementation

Interested in the innovative approach of the flipped classroom and technology (blended learning), the teacher obtained a COINF grant for 2 years to set up classroom and distance learning activities on the Moodle teaching platform.

To support student motivation and stimulate their active participation, the teacher set up a system around the texts that he asked students to read before class. First, he set up a quiz system on Moodle that gave students the opportunity to self-evaluate the revision and peer evaluation of article summaries. In this context, students were asked to evaluate a short text by a fellow student based on predefined criteria. Each student was asked to review, comment on, and finally score the work of 3 other students and self-assess their own work. Moodle was responsible for randomly distributing the texts, providing the rubrics and ensuring the anonymity of the process.

Thoughts and advice

The teacher was quickly convinced of the power of the device. Indeed, the same article that he had given for examination during the first year of his teaching in Geneva in 2013-14 was the subject of a peer evaluation process at the beginning of the second year semester (2014-15). He noticed a significant qualitative difference in the acquired notions related to this article between the 1ère flight and the 2e flight. This difference can be attributed to the fact that students were asked to evaluate the quality of the texts of some of their peers based on predefined criteria, and that they were also asked to do the same with their own texts. The fact that the students knew from the start that they would have to correct their peers encouraged them to read the article carefully.

The teacher also had fun comparing the points he gave to each of the texts written by the students. Interestingly, the points he gave were very close to the average of the points given by the average of the 3 student evaluators. It is therefore recommended that in order to engage in graded peer review, each assignment be submitted to at least 3, preferably 4, reviewers.

In a flipped classroom setting where a significant amount of work is required of students outside of class (but where the final exam workload is very light), it is recommended that students be told the maximum amount of time that each activity should take them.

Student feedback

“The basic topic is very interesting and seems a relevant approach to understanding current environmental issues. The sessions are different enough to avoid redundancy (most of the time) thanks to the different speakers. The mook is a very good way to complete the course and to prepare it beforehand in order to be able to go further in the analysis during the course without having to spend too much time on the basic notions. The different exercises, quizzes, texts and other assignments are very useful to integrate the material, to confront the difficulties which is quite different from hearing about them. There is little “rote learning” and more understanding and ideas, which allows you to maximize the content retained in the time after the end of the course. The course has a good dose of hindsight on the qualities and flaws of the ES approach. The concrete examples developed in the course (e.g. our trees) are very useful to better understand the applicability of the SE concept. The possibility to hand in the factsheet in advance for evaluation is a very good opportunity to improve it and do a satisfactory job (and offers a good motivation to do it in advance). The fact that there is no final exam, but a series of continuous assignments seems to me to be a good way to integrate the material as you go along (which stays on the long term) and not all at once at the end of the semester (often forgotten after 1 month).”