Application for funding from the
Teaching Enhancement and Student Success Fund

Summary sheet

Title of project / Peer Review and Cooperative Learning in a Large First Year Methods Course
Outline of project / This year we have introduced 25% assessment by practical tasks to this course. Students are expected to post work on blackboard for peer review by a small group and these reviews are further discussed in GTA led tutorials. Whilst this strategy clearly has pedagogical potential, in practice it has proved too complicated with the numbers of students involved. This project will seek to develop more effective ways to use blackboard to incorporate peer review and cooperative learning principles into both lectures and tutorials for this course.
Name(s) of applicant(s) / Dr Ian Fairweather, Dr Karen Clarke
Contact details / Tel 0161 275 3996 Email:
Tel: 0161 275 4770 Email:
School / Social Sciences
Name of programme or unit and is it credit-bearing? / SOAN 10080 Engaging with Social Research (20 credits)
Year of study / First Year
Number of students to benefit? / Approximately 90

Please attach a page of A4 answering the following questions and providing any other information you think will be helpful. Faculty eLearning teams can be contacted at: or x65544 to provide assistance with proposals.

Outputs

What will the development achieve?

How do the outputs align with the Faculty or School’s teaching and learning priorities?

How will the outputs enhance learning?

How many students will the outputs benefit, actually and potentially, and how are you going to ensure they complete the activities?

How will the outputs be sustained after project funding ceases?

How will the outputs be evaluated, by students and by others?

Peer Review and Cooperative Learning in a Large First Year Methods Course

SOAN 10080 is a general methods course for first year students, compulsory for first year B.Soc.Sci students in Social Anthropology and optional for BA (econ) students. For the latter it offers an alternative to the maths and statistics course and is chosen by students wishing to specialize in the more qualitative social sciences. It is co-taught between politics and social anthropology.

The course was re-designed for academic year 2009-10 to respond to a perceived need for a greater element of practical study skills training and poor attendance at fortnightly GTA led tutorials, which was considered to be partly due to lack of articulation between lectures and tutorials. The new strategy was to allocate 25% of the overall course to a portfolio of tasks set in the tutorials and designed to develop particular academic skills, from using the library resources to designing a research question and taking part in an ethics committee. Small groups of 3-4 students were asked to complete these tasks and post their work in blackboard discussion forums during the first week of the fortnight. In the second week they were asked to peer review each other’s work and bring their review forms to the tutorial for discussion. The numbers involved meant that this strategy relied heavily on the GTA’s to produce discussion threads, monitor peer review and assign final marks to student portfolios.

Pedagogically this strategy is informed by the principles of cooperative learning. It encourages students to work independently and gives them experience of reviewing each other’s work according to the same criteria by which their own work is marked. This has the potential to enable them to produce better academic work and to make more effective use of the feedback they are given by markers and tutors.

In practice, however this strategy proved to be too complicated, leading to serious frustration among students, who struggled with the technological component of peer review using blackboard, and creating a large workload for GTAs who were in the front line of trying to deal with these problems, despite their own lack of experience with blackboard. The fact that students don’t have access to computers in lectures or tutorials also created a problem. Finally an unexpected side effect was that students became engaged with the practical tasks, but came to see the weekly one hour formal lecturers as contributing little to this process and so we experienced a dramatic drop in lecture attendance. The aim of this project, therefore, is to develop better ways of managing peer review through blackboard and also to further integrate the principles of interactive, cooperative learning into the weekly lecture slot so that this becomes a way of supporting the students’ independent learning. This latter aim will be challenging considering the numbers involved (potentially 90+) but if successful the pedagogical benefits outlined above will be felt by this number of students each year. There is also potential for this course unit to act as a model for other similar courses in the faculty.

The project is in line with the faculty teaching and learning priorities because it seeks to enhance the student experience through use of e-learning strategies and the blackboard VLE in particular. It also introduces innovative methods of both formative and summative assessment seeks to make better use of both GTA led tutorial time and the input of the course givers in lecture time so that students have greater personal contact with both tutors and lecturers. The teaching enhancement workshops will enable me to become better acquainted with the possibilities of the blackboard VLE to deliver these aims and also allow us to explore the possibilities of other available technology such as classroom participation systems. There is also the possibility to link participation in this course with PDP, increasing the uptake of this among social science students where it has been historically low. The outputs will be sustained after the project ceases by being incorporated into this important first year methods course. They will be evaluated by student evaluation questionnaires, verbal feedback from students and by peer review of teaching.