Specification:

Assessment type:

Authentic

Learning outcome:

Skills

Peer feedback for responsible designers is an authentic assessment method that offers a structured learning process for students to critique and provide feedback on each other's work as responsible designers.

Peer feedback for responsible designers is an authentic assessment method that encourages the students to actively engage with the results of a teaching activity. As an authentic assessment method, it resembles the critiquing and feedback professional designers use to self-assess and improve their own work.

By giving peer feedback in review rounds the students’ deep learning to become responsible designers, is supported. Based on the assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity, the students share their reflections so that new meanings and understandings appear. When the students reflect upon each other’s work and decide what constitutes “good work” as a responsible designer, they also apply their own acquired skills.

This assessment activity thus allows the teacher to see whether the intended learning outcomes of the teaching activity have been achieved by asking the students to give peer feedback based on the suggested assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity.

By asking students to give peer feedback on the basis of the specified assessment criteria, the teacher can assess students' acquired skills in relation to values in design, such as, value tensions in their design, identified harms and benefits, stakeholder analysis, etc.

After the teaching activity, ask the students to provide feedback on their peers' work by using the specified assessment criteria.

Instructions to the students:

Step 1:

• Upload and share your work, that is, the outcome of the teaching activity that is to be reviewed by your peers.

Step 2:

• Read though and analyse the shared work, and specifically the work that you are assigned to peer review.

Step 3:

• Review the work based on the assessment criteria provided by the teacher. The review builds on your own reflections and thoughts from what you have learned from the teaching activity. The peer review could be documented in text, as a video, or any other relevant format.

Step 4:

• Return to your own work and the feedback given by your peers, to deepen and broaden your knowledge. If necessary, revise the peer-reviewed material, that is, the outcome of the teaching activity.

In this assessment activity, it is important to focus on the students' abilities to capture and address the “visible signs of learning” to become a responsible designer. When doing an authentic assessment, the focus is on whether the students are able to reflect upon their learning through an authentic dialogue in relation to the intended learning outcomes and assessment criteria. Authentic assessment provides the teacher with information on the depth and breadth related to the students’ abilities to unfold, put in perspective, and visualize their learning in an authentic context or authentic community. That is, are the students able to demonstrate and make visible the new skills that they have acquired through the teaching activity.

When reviewing the students’ peer feedback, it might be helpful to pay attention to the following optional proposals for focus points depending on the content of the related teaching activity:

• To what extent do the students meet the assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity?
• To what extent did the students' peer feedback on each other’s work meet the assessment criteria listed in the teaching activity?
• To what extent were the students able to have a dialogue about values, and values in design, when proving the peer feedback?

For further professional development consider:

• Are there any specific learning outcomes or assessment criteria that students are particularly successful/unsuccessful in demonstrating?
• Are there any exemplary peer feedback that work particularly well in addressing the learning outcomes and assessment criteria (consider sharing these with the students)?