SURF PROJECT GROUP-PEER-FEEDBACK (17th January 2017)
During this 19th seminar Alma Schaafstal (Program Director Creative Technology and Human-Media Interaction) gave an introduction to the presentation of Robin Aly (lecturer Human-Media Interaction). She let us know that it’s a great opportunity to have Robin Aly with us today, because he is for the last time at the University of Twente. There were seventeen teachers present at this seminar.
The title of Robin’s presentation was “Group Feedback - Is there a wisdom in the crowd?” and was based on experiments of himself and Yuri Engelhardt. This presentation describes a group feedback teaching experiment conducted in Module 8 of the Creative Technology bachelor program.
In previous years, the Data Driven Applications and the Data Visualization courses used individual peer feedback to improve students’ learning. Because many feedback items were poor in quality, e.g. personal, not constructive and/or misleading, Aly and Engelhardt hoped that groups of students will give higher quality feedback due to the self-correcting nature of groups. To test this hypothesis, both teachers developed an open source group feedback tool, called Groufty, and conducted experiments with the 2015/16 generation of the mentioned module, with students being at the end of their second year. Besides the lessons learned in setting up such a course, their presentation concludes that - at least for this generation- groups do not improve feedback significantly. However, Aly and Engelhardt believe it would be worth trying group feedback sessions with older students.
Feedback teaching experiment subjects (for more details see the presentation sheets) :
- Two courses within Create M8
- Why peer feedback?
- Group Feedback, Motivation & Goals
- (Gr)oup (f)eedback (t)ool uy
- Process
- Findings
- Student Survey
- Conclusion
- Discussion
- References
After the presentation the group had a meaningful discussion of the following questions:
- Should we implement more peer feedback in our modules/courses?
- Should we teach how to give feedback?
- Do we need a digital tool for the organization of peer feedback?
- What next in module 8?