For university instructors, late July and August signal the transition from flexible, grading-free weekdays into long (re)orientation sessions and faculty meetings. Amidst city buses full of brightly colored T-shirts and the U-Hauls plaguing one-way campus streets, instructors often retreat to their cramped offices to
As a practitioner of learner-centered instruction, I am always looking for new ways to engage students in the learning process. Keeping true to the old adage “whoever is doing the teaching is doing the learning,” my instructional style often engages students in dialog, conversation, and
In last week’s column, I cautioned that while peer review has many benefits, these aren’t automatic, and there’s also the potential for harm. Here’s a rundown of the challenges that come with the strategy and ways to minimize them. The peer-review activities themselves can be
Students can learn a lot from peer assessment, whether they look at each other’s written work (papers, lab reports, informal reaction papers); presentations (speeches, panel participation, online discussion facilitation); performances (art, athletics, theatrical musical); or other contributions (group work). The ultimate responsibility for grading remains
Sometimes it’s good to step back and take a look at something from a distance. Meta-analyses provide some of that perspective. They take a bundle of individual studies, combine their findings, and offer an empirical view of a phenomenon—in this instance, students reviewing their peers.
There’s advice and there are activities that can help develop students’ abilities to offer constructive feedback and use the feedback they receive from peers to more accurately self-assess and improve their work. Those aren’t skills that college students today widely possess, but they’re skills that
Getting a handle on the effectiveness of widely used instructional strategies is a challenge. They’re used in different fields and with broadly divergent design details. Moreover, studying the effects of strategy as it’s being used in a classroom presents research challenges and an array of
Learning takes place when students solve problems beyond their current developmental level. Often peer support is needed for the student to get over the hurdles to accomplish a task (DePew & Holt, 2018; Schell, 2016; Vygotsky, 1978). Peer assessment is one means of support that
The peer review processes for promotion and tenure and for continuing appointment provide committees with what’s needed to make overall judgments about the quality of instruction. For teachers, however, peer reviews usually don’t contain the diagnostic, descriptive feedback they need to continue their growth and
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