Peer Feedback as a Classroom tool
Here is my Literature Review:
Implications of Peer Feedback
Information gathered through a recent survey revealed whanau want; more homework for students,
easier communication between school and home about day to day learning, as well as more visible
learning intentions and artefacts. The main concern for our community leaders (principals, head
teachers and facilitators of the Manaiakalani program) is raising achievement across all curriculum
areas. Our staff indicated that improved quality of work over time needed to be addressed also. The
Manaaiakalani program assists our community in facilitating 1:1 chromebooks in the senior school.
In order to meet these needs I propose looking into using peer feedback on blogs to increase writing
achievement. Personally, writing has historically been the hardest thing to teach and starting here will
help boost achievement the most, then we will be able to take these reviewing skills across the
curriculum.
The focus on feedback arises from the need to raise achievement and quality of work. J Hattie and
Timperley (2007) proposed “feedback is one of the most powerful influences on learning and
achievement” yet in my classroom it is underutilised. The focus for our class will be not just be writing
but building the class culture to include more specific review and feedback in all areas.
Using the blogs to develop these feedback skills will help to give the whanau access to more learning
with a specific focus on learning intentions. It will also develop the skills of the students to talk about their
learning which will take learning home. The asynchronous attribute of blog commenting means that this
can also be given as a homework task or an in class activity for those students whom homework is not
possible.
Peer review leads to enhanced self review
Reinholz, (2018), Sackstein (2016) and Kitchakarn (2013) agree that students own work benefits from
the ability to critique the work of others. These skills are developed by learning to analyse work through
the lens of finding ways to improve. As these skills are being developed through looking at others work
(which is less threatening to the learner) they can then apply them to their own work without the sense
of judgement.
It is of particular interest that these results align as they are from a board array of students. Sackstein
(2016) focused his study across the curriculum in primary aged students, Reinholz (2018) focused his
study in college calculus, including both face to face and online facilities, and Kitchakarn(year)
concentrated on University students in the English Language Learning setting. Despite this, all showed
a specific correlation between the focused peer review and an increase in self review, even when the
connection was not explicitly taught.
Kitchakarn (2013) also found that once reviews and revisions become the norm students perform
better in their own revisions than before, whether or not peer review is still taking place.
This information cannot be ignored when thinking about how to raise achievement and quality of work.
It is undisputed that feedback and feedforward are the key to raising levels with a learner of any kind.
By taking away the limitations associated with waiting for a facilitator to be ready and making self review
innate, we can increase the opportunities to reflect and improve and make these moments available
exactly when the student is ready.
Classroom Culture must support Constructive Criticism
It may seem obvious that the classroom culture must support constructive criticism before it works well,
but once implemented it also happens that the more peer feedback is used the more supportive the
culture becomes (Reinholz., 2018, Riley et al., 2018 Kitchakarn, 2013). Benefits that have been
identified in the initial stages of studies include improved communications (Reinholz, 2018) and a
more supportive, positive and respectful learning environment (Riley et al., 2018 Kitchakarn, 2013).
Although increased achievement directly correlated with an improvement in class culture, each group
used different ways to develop the conventions for giving and receiving constructive criticism with
effective results. The college calculus group were given opportunities to eliminate fear surrounding
judgement. Their students had the opportunity to decide what they received feedback on and and the
process was introduced using a hypothetical student (Reinholz., 2018). The primary school setting
used jigsaw activities and planned reflection time to make the process a normal part of the day and
gave each student the opportunity to be the expert and the learner (Sackstein 2016). The year 5 /6
class of students developed their feedback process in all directions, including from student to teacher
on how engaging their lessons were. The argument was that the students needed to see their opinion
had value and therefore would be useful for other students to hear (Riley et al. 2018). All of these
studies showed peer feedback resulted in raised quality of work and achievement.
It is evident that building a supportive and reflective culture gives students room to take risks, but does
it also conclusively result in raising levels of academic achievement? If every study does this, how do
we know it is necessary as an antecedent and is not just a product of teaching students to be
reflective? Furthermore, it is not known if the method chosen was based on the needs of the class or
the assumptions of the educator.
It is important to understand that the increased risk taking behaviour in learning as well as supportive
environment will strengthen the students ability to communicate about their learning with whanau.
Students will become less reluctant to show their blogs or work at home because they identify their
voice as valued. It is inevitable that caregivers will ask questions and critique the work of students.
If they are familiar with constructive criticism this will not deter them from sharing work and ideas in
the future, consequently making learning and learning intentions more visible to whanau.
In order to be effective the skills must be explicitly taught
Reinholz (2018) suggests as human beings we instinctively act to preserve relationships, therefore
when given the opportunity to feedback to others students innately give positive feedback. In order to
develop critical thinking skills around other people’s work, explicit training is necessary (Reinholz 2018,
Sackstein, 2016, Riley et al., 2018 and Kitchakarn 2013). The ways in which these were taught differed
among groups. Riley et al. (2018), Reinholz (2018) suggest in order to keep groups honed in on the
deep skills necessary, success criteria (SC) need to built with students and teachers, Then students
should be expected to justify their responses with details that correspond to the SC.
It is important to remember also that these types of skills take time to develop, slowly introducing the
logistics over a term to begin with is advised with college students (Reinholz, 2018). In which case, it
may be necessary to develop these skills over a longer period with younger students. Riley et al. (2018)
successfully used the explicit modelling technique to coach primary aged students towards giving and
receiving feedback. This technique has gone on to be used in many other schools, not only for the
students but for the teachers also. Conversely, Kitchakarn (2013) discovered that when using blog
platforms to increase achievement in writing with university aged students, he needed to deliver more
training for effective results. The target language necessary for feedback was the largest gap, although
this research included English Language Learners. This may give an insight though into what is
necessary for primary aged students that may lack some of the same vocabulary.
In order to be able to meet our community needs it is important the students are able to articulate the
learning and feedback they have given and received, therefore it is important for this particular research
to ensure we use the proven techniques to explicitly teach and model the language and structure
needed to communicate with whanau, ensuring it is developed well over a long period of time.
Face to face VS online
Out of the 8 scenarios investigated all but one established the need for face to face discussion in order
to fully see the positive effects on achievement. For the primary aged group, it was important to use the
feedback to generate a discussion based on a particular structure (Riley et al., 2018). This model has
been developed and continued amongst the teachers and students in many school as the program has
been implemented across the region. After the initial research helped Balarang School “consistently
meet benchmarks around learning” other schools have found similar results. Although this research
does not include online commenting, it does exemplify the need for clear guidelines, especially with
children.
Kitchakarn’s (2013) study has extensive quantitative data, adjusting variables to find best practice using
3 different types of feedback. Face to face (FtF), Online comments with follow up discussion (O+F), and
exclusively online (EO). Surprisingly, the data showed FtF alone had the least impact and the O+F and
EO both led to increased rates of achievement in writing. The difference in this study of EO was the
prescriptive guidelines that were introduced with the EO. Leading to the conclusion that with clearly
set parameters, feedback that can be referred to once the conversation is over, is most effective.
Reinholz (2018) also looked into 3 approaches to Feedback. Each of these approaches found that a
discussion around feedback was beneficial, if it was in conjunction with written notes that they could
refer to after the conversation.
Community needs dictate the need for more homework. The use of online feedback and reversible
commenting facilitates the ubiquitous nature of using devices for school work, lending itself to
homework successfully. It will be key to this homework activity to ensure there is a space for
conversation as well if desired. Although it is possible to have equal achievement results with solely
online in university students, the possibilities for learning with school age students may be increased
due to lower comprehension skills in both reading and writing the feedback. With a school that is 80%
Maori, it is also important to consider tikanga, learning as a community with plenty of discussion is an
important part of our kaupapa.
It has become clear that more research needs to be done to understand the needs of a year 5 & 6
group of students. Specifically, what guidelines must be used to develop the feedback structure for
students at year ⅚ level in writing to accelerate learning, how to best implement feedback into writing
so it is easily transferable to other curriculum areas and how does the implementation of online peer
feedback result in increased homework and communication with home about school work.
It is understood that from previous research reflective learning in writing will increase if peer review
is introduced. Therefore, if I can implement an easily transferable structure, this process will be
accelerated. Despite this, The current research does not address the idea of transferring feedback
across curriculum areas in primary school students. It shows a shift from peer to self, but will it convey
easily between curriculum areas. Developing research in other curriculum areas without explicitly
teaching feedback skills in maths will give an insight into whether this happens organically or the link
must be made explicit.
It may be inferred that positive, supportive classroom culture had an influence on students ability in
this instance, although without it being a factor alone, one can never know. In saying this, a negative,
unsupportive classroom culture will definitely not help. No matter the type of learning or feedback in a
classroom this will be a factor in building a cohesive learning environment. It will be important in the
beginning to get student voice as to how they want to be supported and compare with what they found
most useful. As the research demonstrates so far, it doesn’t matter how this is done. I suggest some
ways will work better than others.
No information from any study found suggested that peer feedback led to an increase in discussion in
the homes of students. Essential to our community needs, homework and communication about
learning in the home will be a focus of our research.
References
Hattie, J., & Timperley, H. (2007). The Power of Feedback. Review of Educational Research, 77(1),
Kitchakarn, O. (2013). Peer feedback through blogs: An Effective Tool for Improving Students’ Writing
Abilities. Turkish Online Journal of Distance Education 14(3) 152-164. ISSN 1302-6488 retrieved from:
https://www.researchgate.net/publication/286816423_Peer_feedback_through_blogs_An_effective_tool_
Sackstein, S. (2016). Peer feedback in the classroom : empowering students to be the experts.
Retrieved from http://ebookcentral.proquest.com Created from unitec on 2019-01-08 18:06:15.
Reinholz, D., (2018). Three Approaches to Focusing Peer Feedback. International Journal for the
Scholarship of Teaching and Learning 12 (2)
Retrieved from:
https://digitalcommons.georgiasouthern.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1745&context=ij-sotl
Riley, N., Riddell, S., Kidd, E., & Gavin, R., (2018). Feedback in a future focused classroom: Literacy
Learning: The Middle Years 26 (1) Retrieved from: https://search.informit.com.au/documentSummary;
dn=321765538693318;res=IELHSS;type=pdf
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