Engaging students in peer review: Feedback as learning

There is a growing interest in tertiary education in Australia in developing the capacity of learners to evaluate and improve both their own work and that of others (Boud & Falchikov, 2006; Oliver, 2011). In order to successfully direct their own learning beyond university (and engage in lifelong learning), students need to be able to evaluate their performance in relation to a standard, identify gaps and determine how to bridge them in order to achieve the desired standard. One strategy that can be employed to achieve this is that of engaging students actively in the feedback process, so that feedback becomes an integral part of learning. In this paper the authors define feedback as a loop, meaning that feedback can only be said to have occurred when there is some identifiable influence on the recipient of the feedback (Boud & Molloy, 2012). When feedback results in improved performance we can say that learning has occurred. This paper describes how peer feedback was embedded in the teaching, learning and assessment cycle of a third year social studies unit. Pre and post surveys of students reveal their response to the requirement that they actively engage in evaluation and feedback. This paper explores how engaging students in peer review as part of a major assessment task affected their learning, their capacity to direct their learning, and their self-efficacy in relation to academic and real-world tasks