Peer Critique Instructional Aid

Audience: Students and faculty in higher education

Instructional Problem: Students were not implementing oral feedback shared in class sessions.

Intervention: Students need help learning how to craft and implement oral feedback which is a large component of visual design pedagogy. This document outlines traits of good feedback with examples. High quality feedback is frequent, specific, balanced, provides an opportunity to revisit the comments, and includes opportunities for dialogue with the instructor. In order to use feedback well, students need help learning best practices for capturing and processing the feedback. The action steps at the bottom outline a systematic procedure for successful consideration and implementation of oral feedback.

Design: I used backwards design, learning research and goal analysis to design a scaffolded approach for students to use with oral feedback. For students to effectively use research, they must apply it to their work and assess the effectiveness of the change. In order to apply it, they must know what it means. In order to understand it, they must have a record of it.

Several classes used this framework in the past year. We started by assigning students to record feedback for each other. At the next critique, student spent ten minutes at the end of class summarizing their feedback notes without adding opinions. Later, students followed previous steps and added two actions that they could take based on their feedback. They were held accountable in class for evaluating and articulating how previous feedback influenced revisions of their work.

Impact: Using this guide, students showed a pronounced improvement in sharing constructive feedback instead of only cheering on their peers’ work and in implementing feedback so that revisions were thoughtful and strategic.