A conference paper on using peer review to enhance student engagement.

1. Eating your neighbour’s cat food:
having students provide blind peer
review to their colleagues
Dr. Marcus Leaning
Jane Dipple
School of Media and Film

2. Introduction
• Detail the evolution and design of a
module developed to encourage greater
student engagement with their own and
others’ work.
• The project arose out of a discussion I had
with a student in 2014…

3. Feedback
• Student tutorial following
feedback on an essay he had
submitted for which he got
48.
• Various advice:
– Answer the question;
– Check against marking
criteria;
– Argumentation, referencing,
criticality etc.
– Multiple revisions etc.
• Student response:

4. Student Response
“I don’t read my work once
I’ve written it. It’s like cat
food isn’t it? Once you put
it out you don’t taste it do
you? The cat eats it. The
cat likes cat food.”

5. Multiple issues…
• Aside of the problems of being a
viewed as a cat this statement offered
insight into an the issue of engagement
and why the nature of the assessment
activity plays a large part in student
engagement.
• Poor assessment / module design
design leads to low engagement which
leads to low attainment.
• This was a good example of a lack of
engagement and problematic course
‘design’.
• Poor assessment design.
• Student not engaging with the work.
• Producing it is like putting food out,
something you do but not care about.
= Something wrong with the module.

6. Module / assessment design
• Module had ‘gaps’
between:
• marking criteria,
• subject matter,
• student ‘work’
• feedback.
• Instead they should
overlap.
Marking
criteria
Subject
matter
Feedback
Student
work
Interaction between aspects on the
module but this should be a ven
diagram…

7. Student engagement
• I am interested in engagement to assist the student better
achieve the LOs – different from the HEAs (2013) much
larger meaning.
• Perspective adopted here is that “student engagement
represents the time and effort students devote to activities
that are empirically linked to desired outcomes… and what
institutions do to induce students to participate in these
activities.” (Kuh, 2009: 683) (my bold).
• Engagement is at the “the intersection of student behaviors
and institutional conditions” (Kuh et al., 2006: 8)
• Needed to do things that would drive students to engage
more, these need to be part of the assessment.
• Assessment ought to be engaging.

8. How to make activities engaging…
• Leach and Zepke (2011) identify (amongst 6
aspects in total):
– Activities should be active and constructive - students
should be:
– “doing things and thinking about the things they are doing”.
(Bonwell and Eison, 1991);
– and be “involved in experiences that involve actively constructing
new knowledge and understanding.” (Radloff & Coates, 2009:
17).
– Activities (and lecturers) should be challenging (Kuh,
2006);
– Peer interaction is vital - social activities very
engaging (Lambert, Terenzini, and Lattuca, 2007);

9. Contemporaneously…
• At the time we were developing a level 5 module
for preparing students for the final year Extended
Independent Study.
• Students had already done a research methods
module but we wanted something on
– research design;
– lit searches and reviews;
– research management;
– developing an understanding of academic research
practices.
• Undertaking Media Research.

10. Learning and assessment strategy
• Two parts to the assessment
• 2. a summative report at the end of the module
of a research proposal consisting of various
section:
– Title
– Area of research
– Lit search.
– RQs
– Information needed to answer their question
– Methods.
– Critical issues - ethics and access issues.

11. 1. Formative assessment
• Gateway – not scored but must be
completed.
1. Classroom presentation of their proposal to
determine (fake) if it should proceed – week
7-8; not all sections, work to be revised for
final submission.
2. They must anonymously score at least 4 of
their peers’ presentations.
– Equally and randomly assigned.

12. Student peer-review
• Derived from journal
review and grant
application scoring
forms.
• Revised to measure
the LOs and marking
criteria of the
module.

13. Review feedback reports
• Reviews collated and checked (for problematic
comments).
• A brief feedback report produced summarising
main points of guidance and areas to address.
• Each student gets a report and at least four
peer-reviews of their work.
• More importantly, each student completes
four reviews.

14. Rationale
• The act of reviewing is equally if not more
important / challenging than presenting and
being reviewed.
• Reviewing involves active engagement, critical
evaluation and social engagement.
• It involves the students understanding and
applying the module marking criteria themselves.
• In doing so they gain a deeper understanding of
the practices of evaluating student work (at least
four times) and can use this to enhance their own
work.

15. Evaluation
• Student feedback very positive – lots of
positive comments and students also report
being better prepared for EIS.
• No direct like-for-like comparison possible on
this module to test achievement, however the
approach is being extended across other
modules and a year on year measure should
be possible in future.

16. References
• Bonwell, C., & Eison, J. (1991). Active learning: Creating excitement in the classroom (ASHE-ERIC
Higher Education Report No. 1). Washington, DC: George Washington University.
• Coates, H. 2006. Student engagement in campus-based and online education. London: Routledge.
• Higher Education Academy. 2013. Students as partners. http://www.heacademy.ac.uk/students-as-
partners
• Kuh, G., J. Kinzie, J. Buckley, B. Bridges, and J. Hayek. 2006. What matters to student success: A
review of the literature. http://nces.ed.gov/npec/pdf/kuh_team_report.pdf
• Kuh, G. D. (2009). What student affairs professionals need to know about student engagement.
Journal of College Student Development, 50(6), 683-706.
• Lambert, A., P. Terenzini, and L. Lattuca. 2007. More than meets the eye: Curricular and
programmatic effects on student learning. Research in Higher Education 48, no. 2: 141–68.
• Leach, L., and N. Zepke. 2011. Engaging students in learning: A review of a conceptual organiser.
Higher Education Research and Development 30, no. 2: 193–204.
• Radloff, A., & Coates, H. (2009). Doing more for learning: Enhancing engagement and outcomes –
Australasian Student Engagement Survey. Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER),
Camberwell, Victoria, Australia. http://research.acer.edu.au/ausse/12 viewed 7/6/17.