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Jayme Jacobson

Evaluating the effect of peer feedback on the quality of online discourse - 0 views

  • Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality.
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    Abstract: This study explores the effect on discussion quality of adding a feedback mechanism that presents users with an aggregate peer rating of the usefulness of the participant's contributions in online, asynchronous discussion. Participants in the study groups were able to specify the degree to which they thought any posted comment was useful to the discussion. Individuals were regularly presented with feedback (aggregated and anonymous) summarizing peers' assessment of the usefulness of their contribution, along with a summary of how the individuals rated their peers. Results indicate that continuous, anonymous, aggregated feedback had no effect on either the students' or the instructors' perception of discussion quality. This is kind of a show-stopper. It's just one study but when you look at the results there appears to be no effect whatsoever from peers giving feedback about the usefulness of discussion posts, nor any perceived improvement in the quality of the discussions as evaluated by faculty. It looks like we'll need to begin looking carefully at just what kinds of feedback will really make a difference. Following up on Corinna's earlier post http://blogs.hbr.org/cs/2010/03/twitters_potential_as_microfee.html about the effectiveness of short immediate feedback being more effective than lengthier feedback that actually hinders performance. The trick will be to figure out just what kinds of feedback will actually work in embedded situations. It's interesting that an assessment of utility wasn't useful...?
Gary Brown

Ranking Employees: Why Comparing Workers to Their Peers Can Often Backfire - Knowledge@... - 2 views

  • We live in a world full of benchmarks and rankings. Consumers use them to compare the latest gadgets. Parents and policy makers rely on them to assess schools and other public institutions,
  • "Many managers think that giving workers feedback about their performance relative to their peers inspires them to become more competitive -- to work harder to catch up, or excel even more. But in fact, the opposite happens," says Barankay, whose previous research and teaching has focused on personnel and labor economics. "Workers can become complacent and de-motivated. People who rank highly think, 'I am already number one, so why try harder?' And people who are far behind can become depressed about their work and give up."
  • mong the companies that use Mechanical Turk are Google, Yahoo and Zappos.com, the online shoe and clothing purveyor.
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  • Nothing is more compelling than data from actual workplace settings, but getting it is usually very hard."
  • Instead, the job without the feedback attracted more workers -- 254, compared with 76 for the job with feedback.
  • "This indicates that when people are great and they know it, they tend to slack off. But when they're at the bottom, and are told they're doing terribly, they are de-motivated," says Barankay.
  • In the second stage of the experiment
  • it seems that people would rather not know how they rank compared to others, even though when we surveyed these workers after the experiment, 74% said they wanted feedback about their rank."
  • Of the workers in the control group, 66% came back for more work, compared with 42% in the treatment group. The members of the treatment group who returned were also 22% less productive than the control group. This seems to dispel the notion that giving people feedback might encourage high-performing workers to work harder to excel, and inspire low-ranked workers to make more of an effort.
  • The aim was to determine whether giving people feedback affected their desire to do more work, as well as the quantity and quality of their work.
  • top performers move on to new challenges and low performers have no viable options elsewhere.
  • feedback about rank is detrimental to performance,"
  • it is well documented that tournaments, where rankings are tied to prizes, bonuses and promotions, do inspire higher productivity and performance.
  • "In workplaces where rankings and relative performance is very transparent, even without the intervention of management ... it may be better to attach financial incentives to rankings, as interpersonal comparisons without prizes may lead to lower effort," Barankay suggests. "In those office environments where people may not be able to assess and compare the performance of others, it may not be useful to just post a ranking without attaching prizes."
  • "The key is to devote more time to thinking about whether to give feedback, and how each individual will respond to it. If, as the employer, you think a worker will respond positively to a ranking and feel inspired to work harder, then by all means do it. But it's imperative to think about it on an individual level."
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    the conflation of feedback with ranking confounds this. What is not done and needs to be done is to compare the motivational impact of providing constructive feedback. Presumably the study uses ranking in a strictly comparative context as well, and we do not see the influence of feedback relative to an absolute scale. Still, much in this piece to ponder....
Gary Brown

Struggling Students Can Improve by Studying Themselves, Research Shows - Teaching - The... - 3 views

  • "We're trying to document the role of processes that are different from standard student-outcome measures and standard ability measures,
  • We're interested in various types of studying, setting goals for oneself, monitoring one's progress as one goes through learning a particular topic."
  • Mr. Zimmerman has spent most of his career examining what can go wrong when people try to learn new facts and skills. His work centers on two common follies: First, students are often overconfident about their knowledge, assuming that they understand material just because they sat through a few lectures or read a few chapters. Second, students tend to attribute their failures to outside forces ("the teacher didn't like me," "the textbook wasn't clear enough") rather than taking a hard look at their own study habits.
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  • That might sound like a recipe for banal lectures about study skills. But training students to monitor their learning involves much more than simple nagging, Mr. Zimmerman says. For one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • or one thing, it means providing constant feedback, so that students can see their own strengths and weaknesses.
  • "The first one is, Give students fast, accurate feedback about how they're doing. And the second rule, which is less familiar to most people, is, Now make them demonstrate that they actually understand the feedback that has been given."
  • "I did a survey in December," he says. "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • "Only one instructor said they were no longer using the technique. Twelve people said they were using the technique 'somewhat,' and eight said 'a lot.' So we were pleased that they didn't forget about us after the program ended."
  • And over time, we've realized that these methods have a much greater effect if they're embedded within the course content.
  • "Once we focus on noticing and correcting errors in whatever writing strategy we're working on, the students just become junkies for feedback,"
  • "Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection," Mr. Zimmerman says. "We're trying to help instructors and students see errors not as an endpoint, but as a beginning point for understanding what they know and what they don't know, and how they can approach problems in a more effective way."
  • Errors are part of the process of learning, and not a sign of personal imperfection,"
  • Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's
  • "Self-efficacy" was coined by Albert Bandura in the 1970's,
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • The 1990 paper from _Educational Psychologist_ 25 (1), pp. 3-17) which is linked above DOES include three citations to Bandura's work.
  • What I am particularly amazed by is that the idea of feedback, reflection and explicitly demonstrated understanding (essentially a Socratic approach of teaching), is considered an innovation.
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    selected for the focus on feedback. The adoption by half or fewer, depending, is also interesting as the research is of the type we would presume to be compelling.
Gary Brown

Would You Protect Your Computer's Feelings? Clifford Nass Says Yes. - ProfHacker - The ... - 2 views

  • why peer review processes often avoid, rather than facilitate, sound judgment
  • humans do not differentiate between computers and people in their social interactions.
  • no matter what "everyone knows," people act as if the computer secretly cares
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  • users given completely random praise by a computer program liked it more than the same program without praise, even though they knew in advance the praise was meaningless.
  • Nass demonstrates, however, that people internalize praise and criticism differently—while we welcome the former, we really dwell on and obsess over the latter. In the criticism sandwich, then, "the criticism blasts the first list of positive achievements out of listeners' memory. They then think hard about the criticism (which will make them remember it better) and are on the alert to think even harder about what happens next. What do they then get? Positive remarks that are too general to be remembered"
  • And because we focus so much on the negative, having a similar number of positive and negative comments "feels negative overall"
  • The best strategy, he suggests, is "to briefly present a few negative remarks and then provide a long list of positive remarks...You should also provide as much detail as possible within the positive comments, even more than feels natural, because positive feedback is less memorable" (33).
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    The implications for feedback issues are pretty clear.
Nils Peterson

How To Crowdsource Grading | HASTAC - 0 views

  • My colleagues and I at the University of Maine have pursued a similar course with The Pool, an online environment for sharing art and code that invites students to evaluate each other at various stages of their projects, from intent to approach to release.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      This is feedback on our Harvesting Gradebook and Crowdsourcing ideas. The Pool seems to be an implementation of the feedback mechanism with some ideas about reputation.
  • Like Slashdot's karma system, The Pool entrusts students who have contributed good work in the past with greater power to rate other students. In general students at U-Me have responded responsibly to this ethic; it may help that students are sometimes asked to evaluate students in other classes,
    • Nils Peterson
       
      While there is notion of karma and peer feedback, there does not seem to be notion of bringing in outside expertise or if it were to come in, to track its roles
S Spaeth

Minds on Fire: Open Education, the Long Tail, and Learning 2.0 (EDUCAUSE Review) | EDUC... - 1 views

  • More than one-third of the world’s population is under 20. There are over 30 million people today qualified to enter a university who have no place to go. During the next decade, this 30 million will grow to 100 million. To meet this staggering demand, a major university needs to be created each week.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      quote from Sir John Daniel, 1996. The decade he speaks of has past
  • Open source communities have developed a well-established path by which newcomers can “learn the ropes” and become trusted members of the community through a process of legitimate peripheral participation.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      He describes an apprentice model, but we might also think about peripheral participation in terms of giving feedback using an educative rubric.
  • Lectures from model teachers are recorded on video and are then physically distributed via DVD to schools that typically lack well-trained instructors (as well as Internet connections). While the lectures are being played on a monitor (which is often powered by a battery, since many participating schools also lack reliable electricity), a “mediator,” who could be a local teacher or simply a bright student, periodically pauses the video and encourages engagement among the students by asking questions or initiating discussions about the material they are watching.
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  • The Faulkes Telescope Project and the Decameron Web are just two of scores of research and scholarly portals that provide access to both educational resources and a community of experts in a given domain. The web offers innumerable opportunities for students to find and join niche communities where they can benefit from the opportunities for distributed cognitive apprenticeship. Finding and joining a community that ignites a student’s passion can set the stage for the student to acquire both deep knowledge about a subject (“learning about”) and the ability to participate in the practice of a field through productive inquiry and peer-based learning (“learning to be”). These communities are harbingers of the emergence of a new form of technology-enhanced learning—Learning 2.0—which goes beyond providing free access to traditional course materials and educational tools and creates a participatory architecture for supporting communities of learners.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Kramer's Plant Biotech group could be one of these. It needs tasks that permit legitimate peripheral participation. One of those could be peer assessment. Another could be social bookmarking. I now see it needs not just an _open_ platform, but an _extensible_ one. Here is where the hub and spoke model may play in.
    • S Spaeth
       
      I infer that you are referring to this research group. http://www.officeofresearch.wsu.edu/missions/health/kramer.html I am curious to learn why you selected this lab as an example.
  • open participatory learning ecosystems
Nils Peterson

Through the Open Door: Open Courses as Research, Learning, and Engagement (EDUCAUSE Rev... - 0 views

  • openness in practice requires little additional investment, since it essentially concerns transparency of already planned course activities on the part of the educator.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      Search YouTube for "master class" Theron and I are looking at violin examples. The class is happening with student, master, and observers. What is added is video recording and posting to YouTube. YouTube provides additional community via comments and linked videos.
  • This second group of learners — those who wanted to participate but weren't interested in course credit — numbered over 2,300. The addition of these learners significantly enhanced the course experience, since additional conversations and readings extended the contributions of the instructors.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      These additional resources might also include peer reviews using a course rubric, or diverse feedback on the rubric itself.
  • Enough structure is provided by the course that if a learner is interested in the topic, he or she can build sufficient language and expertise to participate peripherally or directly.
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  • Although courses are under pressure in the "unbundling" or fragmentation of information in general, the learning process requires coherence in content and conversations. Learners need some sense of what they are choosing to do, a sense of eventedness.5 Even in traditional courses, learners must engage in a process of forming coherent views of a topic.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      An assumption here that the learner needs kick starting. Its an assumtion that the learner is not a Margo Tamez making an Urgent Call for Help where the learner owns the problem. Is it a way of inviting a community to a party?
  • The community-as-curriculum model inverts the position of curriculum: rather than being a prerequisite for a course, curriculum becomes an output of a course.
  • They are now able, sometimes through the open access noted above and sometimes through access to other materials and guidance, to engage in their own learning outside of a classroom structure.
    • Nils Peterson
       
      A key point is the creation of open learners. Impediments to open learners need to be understood and overcome. Identity mangement is likely to be an important skill here.
  • Educators continue to play an important role in facilitating interaction, sharing information and resources, challenging assertions, and contributing to learners' growth of knowledge.
Nils Peterson

Accreditor for Teaching Programs Puts New Emphasis on Research and Real Life - Chronicl... - 0 views

  • “Learning these aspects of teaching in a contrived setting just isn’t doing the job.” Future teachers should be receiving this instruction and guidance from mentors who are working
    • Nils Peterson
       
      A call for learning in community -- what is missing is any discussion of how to harvest feedback. Be a classic case for posting a lesson plan and its assessment, and its products and asking teachers, peers, parents to assess and comment
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