Kelly Learn more

Feedback and achievement Kelly Home Learn More Standards Inspiration About the Author

What was I hoping to learn?

When I started this process, I needed to look for different ways to support my kids in their development of writing and critical thinking skills. As I had mentioned previously, I had just been introduced to the high effect size that feedback had on student achievement through some professional development courses I had attended. Peer feedback gave me a strategy to implement in my classroom that had been shown to be effective and was the focus of my action research. The question that I had was what was different than the research was what the impact would be in a middle school science classroom that was transitioning to new expectations. New expectations or writing, or critical thinking, and an ability to analyze and make sense of data that they collected. And what role would digital platforms play in this process? I got the answers I was looking for, but they weren't quite what I expected.

What role would digital platforms play in this process?
Over the course of my time in the program, my use of technology in the classroom has increased quite a bit. We have gone from using it every once in a while for presentations, to almost daily use. I have also moved from a substitution phase to an augmentation phase in the way that the students are engaging with the technology. I wanted to use my action research to further my growth as a teacher in the way that I integrate technology while specifically looking for students to build the skills that I mentioned above. When I finished both rounds of my research I had the answers I was looking for. And I hope that my findings will be beneficial for teachers who read this and are looking for effective ways to help students improve their critical thinking and writing skills.

What did the first round of research show? Significant gains.
As you can see below, the gains from my control group were fairly small (less than a point on a 1 point on a 16 point scale). My treatment group showed a roughly 2.5 point gain on the same scale. As a middle school science teacher, those are improvements that really sold me on the power that digital platforms and feedback can play in my classroom.

Round 1 pretest (using Peergrade)

Round 1 post test (using Peergrade)

Are all digital platforms equally effective? Not quite. With middle school students, anonymity is important.

Peergrade gives students the ability to upload their work anonymously. Teachers then put in a prompt that they want the students to follow prior to giving peer feedback. Once this process is completed, students receive their original work with 3 different pieces of feedback from other students in the class. All of this is done anonymously, which removes the risk factor that I talk about when discussing Flipgrid. The process was highly effective as the results below show.

Flipgrid gives students the ability to create videos based on a prompt from a teacher. My assumption was that in the world of middle school, Snapchat, and Instagram that this was a no-brainer. Of course they want to make videos explaining their content knowledge... What I found out during this process surprised me. They don't like being on camera. Too much risk in a middle school setting. Here is a great example of what I see from almost every video. If there is risk, they want to be as far away from the camera as possible.

Does that mean that Flipgrid shouldn't be used? Round 2...
In my second round of research, I wanted to expand my understanding of the feedback process itself. I knew from my original research that students benefited from being able to view other students work, and the opportunity to get multiple people to view their work before re-submitting it. And of course anonymity was important to middle school kids. But what was the effect that being the reviewer had on the process? While Flipgrid wasn't effective due to student concerns about not being anonymous, it was helpful when they explained how the feedback process helped them. They were then asked the following questions:

What kinds of things did you focus on when giving feedback?
Did giving feedback change the way you approached your own conclusion when given the opportunity to fix it? How?
Think about when you are given the opportunity to fix your own work. Which is more helpful, giving someone else feedback and then revising your work, or having someone else review your own work and then fixing it? Why?

Check out the videos below to see an example of students talking about how being a reviewer of their peers' work changed their own writing. Click on my "how to" page and "lessons" pages to see a more in-depth description of how the process works.

Other students shared their responses as well:

Student 1: "It helped me look for errors before comparing it to my own."
Student 2: "I realized what was wrong about my own response."
Student 3: "I saw how my report was missing so much data."

LESSONS

HOW-TOs

REFERENCES

ASSESSMENT