Wageningen University & Research is a collaboration between Wageningen University and the Wageningen Research foundation.‘To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life’ is the mission of Wageningen University & Research. Over 7,600 employees, 13,100 students and over 150.000 participants to WUR’s Life Long Learning from more than hundred countries work everywhere around the world in the domain of healthy food and living environment for governments and the business community-at-large.
Dr. Cora Busstra is a lecturer and instructional designer at Wageningen University & Research
Wageningen University & Research is a collaboration between Wageningen University and the Wageningen Research foundation.‘To explore the potential of nature to improve the quality of life’ is the mission of Wageningen University & Research. Over 7,600 employees, 13,100 students and over 150.000 participants to WUR’s Life Long Learning from more than hundred countries work everywhere around the world in the domain of healthy food and living environment for governments and the business community-at-large.
Dr. Cora Busstra is a lecturer and instructional designer at Wageningen University & Research
This bachelor course from a Food Technology programme introduces bachelor students to the principles of food quality management over four weeks. Each week, groups of four students study this topic from a different angle, resulting in a report prepared by the whole group. Researchers at Wageningen University and the team at FeedbackFruits opted to enable a beta function of Peer Review: Participation Grading.
This involves grading only the ‘best contribution’ that students themselves provide for the peer review assignment. A research project exploring the feature was carried out across several other courses. The use of the Peer Review tool and the implementation of the newly designed approach, Best Contribution Grading (BCG) had four aims: to increase the quality of peer reviews; to increase student participation, to offer a safe learning environment; and to deliver a scalable teaching method.
Students produce and upload a report as a group, and individually give feedback to the work of another group using Peer Review. After giving feedback, students are asked to select those contributions (feedback comments) that they themselves judge as their best piece of work for the instructor to grade. As students select their best contributions themselves, this guarantees that their errors or mistakes do not influence their course grades as long as they do not select those as their best contribution.
Learning activities based on the Bloom taxonomy are mainly at the level of:
BCG was used to assess students’ learning. Students’ contributions come in the form of qualitative review comments. The students make numerous comments on each other’s work and choose themselves which comments they’ve made which they think best represents their work and abilities. These chosen comments are relayed to the instructor whereupon they are assessed for adherence to the grading rubric.
Students felt they had improved their understanding of the topic by giving feedback using BCG.
Using the tool in this way creates a safe learning environment for students, where they can learn by making mistakes and errors as well as asking questions without feeling every action is being graded. The BCG feature was co-created with the WUR to enrich the possibilities within Peer Review.
FeedbackFruits optimised both the selection of the best contribution(s) and the grading process.
Group dynamics were an important factor in overall performance and quality of work: the class will now be using Group Member Evaluation in order to give more focus to the way that groups are set-up and work with each other.
Improve student autonomy and feedback skills by asking them to evaluate their best contributions
Using technology-enhanced peer review to improve student final work and save instructors time
Learn how instructor at the Hague University of Applied Sciences enhanced student engagement with study materials