Join our webinar: Digitizing team-based learning with FeedbackFruits
chevron_right
Pedagogy

Facilitate effective peer feedback

Optimize your peer feedback process and reduce manual work – even in large classrooms

What is peer feedback?

Peer feedback is the feedback exchanged between 'equals', according to Renée Filius, head lecturer at Utrecht University. In other words, peer feedback refers to the comments or suggestions provided by students to their classmates’ work. Usually appearing in the form of peer and group evaluations, peer feedback fosters learners' objectivity, critical thinking, motivation and engagement throughout the learning experience.

Read more about peer feedback →

Why is peer feedback important?

Usually appearing in the form of peer and group evaluations, peer feedback:

  • Fosters learners’ critical thinking and problem-solving, by providing student with examples as a frame of reference for their own work.
  • Stimulates meaningful interactions and dialogues amongst students. When it is a peer, it increases the chance that the student will respond back.
  • Fosters active learning and self-regulatory processes. By seeing examples of others' work and grading them based on the specified criteria, students gain a better understanding of what is required of them in regards to those criteria.

What are the challenges of peer feedback?

Facilitating peer/group feedback is not an easy job, as instructors often struggle with:

  • Low feedback quality: The peer feedback quality from peers differs from that of teachers.
  • Scalability of online peer feedback: Organizing peer feedback is a time-consuming and complicated task. It is possible in small groups, but it becomes a major issue with the increasing number of students and the switch to online/hybrid course settings.

Discover Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation

The best tools to make peer review easier for teachers and students
Save time setting up activities

All FeedbackFruits tools are integrated into the Learning Management System (LMS) and have a similar look and feel - which flattens the learning curve for both teachers and students. This saves instructors lots of time while creating the activities.

Follow your students' progress and performance

Teachers are provided with a dashboard that shows each student' progress in every step of the activity such as 'read instructions', 'finished self-assessment' and 'give feedback'.

Teachers can choose to grade students based on these multi-dimensional criteria.

Heat maps to detect the outliners in the class

In Group Member Evaluation tool, you can view heat maps for all student ratings and all group ratings to detect outliners in the group project.

Tailor your feedback criteria to your course design

The tools allow teachers to structure and customize peer review criteria with options such as qualitative feedback criteria, scales, or rubrics.

Create feedback loops between your students

Both Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation tools allow for feedback on feedback where students can reply to the feedback they receive.

Students can give and reply to feedback both by text and voice comment which keeps the conversation going.

GET STARTED
SUCCESSFUL PEER FEEDBACK EXAMPLE: THE WHARTON SCHOOL
Linda Lee and Dylan Fenton of The Wharton School were in charge of running a large online course with over 2000 undergraduates during the 2020 Spring term. This course was, according to Linda, “by far the largest course ever taught at Wharton”.

Linda and Dylan then wanted to find the right tool that allows for automatic allocation of peer reviewers, clear deadlines tracking, customizable peer review rubric, and ease of use with minimum student support.

FeedbackFruits Peer Review offered teachers the capacity to make these requirements happen. The tool allowed them to set up multiple deadlines, present clear steps for completing peer feedback, export the submission/ peer review data, and let students revise their given feedback.
Linda J. Lee (Director of Instructional Design)
Dylan Fenton (Former Instructional Technology Project Leader)

Best resources on peer feedback

Tips, tricks, and guides to ease and scale you peer feedback activities.

Ebook on feedback

"Feedback for learning: A comprehensive guide" – an ebook featuring teaching tips, and examples on peer feedback facilitation.

Download for free

Peer feedback strategies

Articles and case studies that help you to facilitate and optimize different steps of the peer feedback process.

Peer feedback examples

Learn from teaching success stories of other instructors, who are implementing peer feedback in their classrooms.

We help foster rigorous peer assessment practices at over 100 institutions, including:

Bring effective collaborative learning into your courses with FeedbackFruits pedagogical tools

We can help you integrate FeedbackFruits tools!

Book 1:1 session

Streamlined learning activity setup

All you need to do is to describe the assignment, choose the right settings and enjoy.

easy-to-use, uniform design

All tools have a similar look and feel – which flattens the learning curve for both teachers and students.

Co-created with educators

Tools are co-created with educators from partner universities, thus support even the most advanced use cases.