In this blog post, Katy Guthrie, Teaching Assistant Professor in the College of Food, Agricultural and Natural Sciences (CFANS), shares her insights on using FeedbackFruits Peer Review to enhance student engagement and learning. Her experience provides valuable perspectives for other educators looking to enrich their teaching practices with technology-driven solutions.
FeedbackFruits (FbF) offers a suite of academic technology tools that supports a variety of peer learning activities. The University is currently licensing four FbF tools, integrated in Canvas, that support self-assessment, peer review, and group member evaluation.
Peer Learning Strategies: Efficient and effective
Professor Guthrie is a strong advocate for teaching students how to provide constructive feedback on their peers' writing. FbF makes it seamless for her to integrate peer feedback activities into her classes. She particularly values the FbF Peer Review tool in her writing-intensive courses, where students write their own papers and also engage in reviewing their classmates' work. This approach fosters a collaborative learning environment while enhancing critical thinking and writing skills.
She also values the tool's advanced capabilities for handling more complex peer review scenarios. For instance, in group assignments where four students collaborate on a single paper, FbF automatically configures the process so that students evaluate another group’s work. She highlights, “The great thing about FeedbackFruits is you can group students and specify that they review papers from individuals outside their group.” This flexibility streamlines peer assessment in collaborative projects, ensuring fairness and efficiency.
Another way that Guthrie uses Peer Review is for general labs reports. Again, Guthrie states flexibility as a major reason she uses the FbF Peer Review tool. Canvas allows her to add all of her lab sections within a single course site, and FbF allows her the ability to assign peer reviews across the different sections or to keep the reviews within the same lab section. By using Canvas Groups in the FbF interface, she can quickly assign group work and group-based peer reviews. She explains, “There's a little bit more back end on doing it [Peer Review] with multiple different labs, but I think it's absolutely worth it.”
Additionally, Guthrie makes frequent use of an optional step in the FbF Peer Review assignment set-up which asks students to reflect on the feedback they have received from peers. According to Gurthrie, “The art of critical feedback is knowing what feedback to take and what feedback not to take.” Incorporating this final step into the writing process stretches students’ critical thinking skills around their writing and helps guide them in moving forward with revising their writing.
Guthrie appreciates the customizability and ease of grading student work using FbF. TAs are able to add comments into the FbF interface, ensuring that students can find all their reviews and feedback in one area. Regarding the options FbF affords her in grading, Guthrie says,“the great thing is that the grading is baked into FbF, all the math is done on this end. . . it's just so customizable. You can literally do anything in your class.”
Effects on student learning
When asked to reflect on how peer learning has affected students' learning, Guthrie mentions the value she sees in using a tool such as FbF to share assignment details and rubrics. She says, "I feel like it really empowers students to see what we think is important. Peer review is not [only] about learning how to give reviews, it's about learning how you can improve your own writing. When students are evaluating other people's writing based on a rubric item, they know how they've addressed that rubric item in their own paper and see how others address it in their papers. I think that's the most powerful thing."
Due to their complexity, peer learning activities can be challenging for students to understand and manage over time. Guthrie says that from an instructor perspective, FbF helps her efficiently manage assignments and that her students typically do not have issues using the tool or understanding the assignment. Early on in her use of FbF with students, she would hold a practice assignment to allow for practice with the tool. She discontinued that activity when realizing students didn’t need the practice - they were using the tools fine.
Integrated AI features
FeedbackFruits offers AI-enabled features that can help enhance student learning and instructor efficiency. On the student side, the AI “Feedback Coach” can be enabled to provide AI-generated feedback to students as they write feedback to each other on their work. The AI Feedback Coach can also be set to provide students with AI-generated feedback on their writing, encouraging students to reflect and refine their work prior to submission.
One feature that Guthrie is very excited about is “Insights,” an AI-generated display of the most frequently mentioned words extracted from student contributions (reviews, comments, and discussion threads). While the “Insights” tool is still in Beta, Guthrie sees its potential for use in writing instruction. In her own teaching, she uses it to check student understanding of course concepts and assignments. If she sees many keywords indicating student confusion or lack of understanding, Insights will eventually have “the power to pull out meaningful phrases so that I can see by the next class period, you know, 100% of the students are saying clarity is an issue… it will help us intervene quicker than we might otherwise”.
What’s next?
For those who may be thinking of incorporating FbF into their own assignments, Guthrie offers a couple of recommendations. First, seek out an academic technologist for guidance. When she was setting up FbF for the first time, Guthrie worked closely with an instructional designer/academic technologist who talked her through the configuration process. Second, use the FbF support chatbot. She says that every time she gets confused on something, she visits the (support) chat, and with a maximum wait time of 15 minutes, she can access customer service assistance.
To learn more about using Peer Learning strategies or tools, contact your local academic technologist or atss@umn.edu.
Contributors
This post was co-written with Annette McNamara. We would like to give a special thanks to Katy Guthrie for her time and willingness to share how she uses FeedbackFuits.