Tuesday, March 9, 2010
Effective Peer Resposnse Groups
I think the Barron article did a very good job of explaining how to set up and maintain effective peer response groups. This is something that I have never set up. I set up lab groups and expect students to work collaboratively on their experiments. I do think I could include some of these ideas about peer response groups to help improve student writing of lab notebooks. I would particularly like to focus on improving the writing of conclusions. I think following the format of McQuade and Sommers and using the three steps: observations, evaluations and end comments would be a good start to teach students how to evaluate each others work. Peer review is a very important process in the publication of scientific papers. It would be good to get students used to receiving and giving peer reviews. Here is a humorous youtube video about scientific peer review. It also an example of digital remixing.http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-VRBWLpYCPY
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Pat...I wonder...do most of your students succeed in working collaboratively? (you wrote "I set up lab groups and expect students to work collaboratively") It makes me wonder how skilled kids are at working in groups once they reach the high school level. Because it's definitely an emerging skill even in the upper elementary grades :)
ReplyDeleteI was reminded today about the inability of older students to give each other useful feedback. One idea a teacher shared was to require students to give feedback in the form of questions. Instead of "I'm confused here" they would ask "What are you trying to say here?" Another idea was to have students give statements but add "because," such as "I liked the way you said... because..." Maybe these ideas could help your groups with the revisions of their conclusions?
ReplyDelete