Peer feedback helps to increase the amount of feedback that students get during their programme, but it also helps students learn how to give and receive feedback. Being able to give and receive feedback is an important skill that needs to be acquired during a longer time period. So, together with colleagues Hans Risselada used peer feedback in several courses of the marketing programme. A key lesson learned was the significance of engaging in peer feedback dialogues.For this to work, students need to own the feedback they give, and discuss it with their peers. The effectiveness of peer feedback hinges significantly on the presence of this feedback dialogue.

Why?

Please tell us about the motivations behind the practice. What issues and challenges did you identify that inspired you to develop this practice?

It was a combination of factors: For my Senior Teaching Qualification (STQ) I wanted to use blended learning to improve the MSc Marketing programme. I frequently heard complaints from students about the lack of good feedback. This is also an issue that often shows low scores on the course evaluations, and has been discussed for many years in the program committee meetings, and in the year representatives meetings: students would like to have more and better feedback that could be used to improve their next assignment. However, it is often the case that the feedback on the first assignment comes too late to be processed in the second assignment. Formative feedback on one or both assignments could be a solution to this. However, it is not possible for teachers to provide more feedback within the limited time (in weeks) and allocated hours for the course. In addition, we realized that “having the ability to reflect critically on their own and other people's work, paying attention to both logical coherence and marketing relevance, and being able to adjust and give feedback or corrections if necessary” is one of the intended learning outcomes of our program, which was not specifically assessed. We decided that this should be assessed at least in one course per profile within the program.

Overview

Please provide an overview of the teaching innovation that you have developed. What are the main goals and objectives?

I implemented the peer feedback dialogue in two of our master courses.
The objective was: to improve the organization and quality of feedback and prevent free-riding in group work by using online/digital tools to organize peer-to-peer feedback for large numbers of students (all our master courses have 100-150 students).

Concrete result: In the first semester of the 2022-2023 academic year within one course of each profile: Marketing and Consumer Well-Being (within the Marketing Management profile) and Digital Marketing Intelligence (within the Marketing Analytics and Data Science profile), we implemented peer-to-peer feedback and peer evaluation and improved the quality of the feedback.

An important part of this process is the peer feedback dialogue. It's not just that students give feedback to their peers, and receive feedback from their peers in a written form. The key here is that they know upfront that they are going to have a conversation about the feedback given/received. This is a very strong incentive to give good quality feedback and to do that in a constructive way. When you know that you can get follow-up questions and that you have to face that other person, you're more likely to be respectful and constructive. So structuring it with a dialogue upfront, and not just giving the opportunity to have a dialogue, but making it a fixed part of the procedure is very important. 

It's really important to stress that it's tempting to add an innovation  to your course, but you always have to drop something else. And that's also a way that you get students on board. First of all, you explain the purpose and the benefits of the new practice. And if they know that it's not something that you add,  but you also show them that it replaces something else.

That's also how I communicated it to the students: we dropped the tutorial session, including preparation that week, and made the case they had to work on smaller. I made it clear to students that it doesn't mean they have a week off for this course, they're gonna have a pretty intensive day or a couple of hours working on the feedback. So they knew way upfront what to expect. I also limited the time of giving feedback, because I don’t want students spending days on it. I instructed them to provide feedback on three specific elements. We've had experiences earlier, for example, with take-home assignments; if you give students a lot of time, they think they have to spend all their time on the home assignment, which is not ideal. I wanted to have a sort of pressure cooker style so they would only focus on the three elements I specified.

The schedule of the assignment was as follows: Students had to upload to Feedbackfruits a draft version of their PowerPoint or a video of the presentation on the study case at noon. They had to provide feedback to another team during the afternoon and plan the meeting for the next morning to discuss the feedback given/ received.  And then they had two working days to deal with the feedback and hand in a final version, which would be graded by the lecturer.

Material:

To ensure that the process runs smoothly, students are informed extensively in advance. This is something that is also constantly mentioned in the literature. The students receive the following information:

1. Explanation in class about why we have introduced peer feedback.
2. Instruction about the process (as described above).
3. Instruction on how to give good feedback.
4. Instruction on the points on which feedback should be given to frame the assignment and provide direction to students:
   • the visual aspects of the presentation
   • the structure
   • the key takeaways
   • the clarity of the supporting evidence of the takeaways

Process

If applicable, please briefly describe the process that you went through to design, test, and implement the teaching innovation.

Because I was doing the SKO, I had time to do a literature study first and research the tools available for this. Then I made a rough planning of the assignment and checked if it would fit at all. I decided first that I would do a pilot for one of the two assignments in each of the courses. 

Then I started working on the planning. It is important to spend quite some time explaining to the students why we will do this, why giving feedback is important, and what it is based on. So I gave them a 20-minute lecture on this at the beginning of both courses, a few weeks before they would actually work on it. I gave very specific instructions on the elements that they needed to give feedback on and what the feedback elements should look like. So they should start with a positive remark and explain why they thought something was good, or why they liked something and then they had to provide three elements to improve, that would be feasible to improve in two days. And I linked those elements to the rubric that is used for grading.

Evidence informed

How is your innovation based on existing studies, or have you conducted any study to support your practice?

The literature shows that peer feedback leads to a more active attitude (active learning) and also ensures that by looking critically at the work of others, students not only develop a new skill (namely giving feedback) but also learn to look critically at their own work (Carless 2016; Nicol et al. 2014), which is exactly in line with the ILO of our course. In addition, the meta-analysis by Huisman et al. (2019) supports the goals of this project, because peer feedback leads to better education ("learning benefits") and has a number of practical advantages ("logistic and economic benefits").

A surprising finding from the literature for me was that peer feedback is particularly valuable if it does not consist of just giving feedback, but consists of a so-called feedback dialogue. This means that the feedback giver and the feedback receiver discuss the feedback. In this project I therefore use the definition of feedback from Carless (2016): “Feedback involves dialogic processes whereby learners make sense of information from various sources and use it to enhance their work or learning strategies.”

Programme alignment

How does your innovation align with the course/programme ILOs?

This practice aligns with the program ILO: ”Graduates are able to reflect critically on their own and other people's work, paying attention to both logical coherence and marketing relevance and are able to adjust and give feedback or corrections if necessary”. This ILO was not specifically assessed in our program. We decided that it should be assessed at least in one course per profile of the program. 

Engagement and active learning

How does your teaching innovation promote student engagement and active learning?

The dialogue part is very activating, and it turned out to be very powerful. If it would stop at giving feedback on Feedbackfruits, you could write down some comments and you're done. Whereas in the dialogue you may be asked to elaborate on your comment or engage in discussions when the other does not agree with your comment. They have to really own their feedback, and motivate what they've written down. So I think in terms of being actively engaged,  this is sort of the ultimate form. So I think the dialogue is a form of being very actively engaged with the learning material.

Challenges

What challenges have you encountered in implementing your teaching innovation? How did you address them, and what would you do differently next time?

We’ve had a technical issue because due to privacy rules, groups could not contact each other through FeedbackFruits. So after trying to contact FeedbackFruits and looking for solutions, my student assistant had to manually create a discussion forum for each pair of groups in Brightspace because an important part of this innovation is the dialogue, so students need to know who is giving /receiving feedback and they need to communicate with each other to plan the dialogue.

Another challenge we faced was related to the course setup. I did this pilot in two courses, and there was a clear difference between courses. In my course, all student groups were working on the same case, and the end product was a presentation. The other course was challenge-based, in which the end product varies. Since the assignments of both courses were different, the elements that we asked students to give feedback on were completely different, so the materials can not be copied over easily. You need to think carefully about what the assignment is, and what the learning goals are for your course, and then adapt the elements and the feedback that you ask students to give. 

Another challenge that I found was that we expected students to be able to give feedback. We're now working on that by adding a workshop to our master's program because we should teach them before we assess them on this. And that requires time and effort. So if people want to do this in their course, they should have time or be willing to devote time to explaining what exactly giving feedback is and how you should do it, what is expected. 

At last, the timing of the assignment itself was also challenging, to make it all fit into time. The planning is crucial. That's always difficult with having seven weeks and most courses having two assignments or two formal assessment moments. It does require careful planning, if you have students drop out during the time of assignment due to sickness, or something else, you have a problem. This was the reason we chose to do it on a team level. 

Evaluation

How have you evaluated or done research on your practice? Have you gotten any feedback from your students and/or colleagues?

I sent out a survey, and from the survey, it became clear that students appreciated this practice, and that they find being able to give constructive feedback and deal with critical feedback are important skills. Students find feedback from peers very credible, and sometimes even more credible than from the lecture. Also, the opinions at this year’s representatives meetings were very positive. What was mentioned in this meeting was that usually feedback is given after the first assignment, and, because the second assignment is different from the first one (different technique, different topic), the feedback given doesn’t help students to improve the second assignment. Our setup helps students to deliver a better product and to learn something while they're working on the assignment. It’s a kind of feed-forward.

I think by doing this, and this is speculative, you clearly treat your students as adults. You let them give feedback on other people’s work because you apparently trust them to give feedback. I think that students appreciate that. Looking at the feedback given, students were very serious about it, they gave more positive remarks than they had to and they sometimes engaged in more discussion than they had to based on the items that I gave. And sometimes there were really discussions going on. And so I think students did really appreciate this practice. That's why I think that this innovation was also very positively evaluated.

Scaling up

Can your practice be scaled up and/or modified for other educational contexts? (other courses and programmes)

We are extending it to a program level. We're now setting up workshops for students and lectures on giving and receiving feedback. I really want to make it a program-wide thing and create this feedback culture where it's completely normal and default to ask for feedback and to give feedback to each other.

Sharing

Have you shared your practice/experience with other lecturers? If yes, how? (in an event, conference, paper, platform, etc.)

The pilot was implemented in my own course, and in another course, and in both courses students were very positive about it. And there is more interest in the faculty. I got in touch with a lecturer in the HRM program who wants to implement this practice. In addition, Liane Voerman (who was then the program director of the Bachelor) thinks that the peer feedback dialogue would fit very nicely in a thesis setting (bachelor and master). Furthermore, we are organizing a department Education Day, which I'm also going to pitch this practice because, in semester two, I want to start with the feedback workshops, so then that's going to be broader. It's spreading out.

Contact

Who is the primary contact person for this practice and how do they wish to be contacted?

Hans Risselada: h.risselada@rug.nl

More resources about Peer Feedback Dialogue

Articles:

• Carless, D. (2016). Feedback as dialogue . Encyclopedia of educational philosophy and theory, 1-6
• Huisman, B., Saab, N., van den Broek, P., & van Driel, J. (2019). The impact of formative peer feedback on higher education students’ academic writing: a Meta-Analysis. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 44(6), 863-880.
• Nicol, D., Thomson, A., & Breslin, C. (2014). Rethinking feedback practices in higher education: a peer review perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(1), 102-122.

Downloads:

• SKO dossier Risselada final (Word document)
• P2P Feedback MCWB - Evaluation (PDF)