Revision in the PBL Process...Part 2

As I said in my earlier post, revision is a necessary part of project-based learning. In fact, its even embedded into the Minarets Cs, the skills and goals we that emphasize for our students at Minarets:







This is why I continued improving the ways my students revised their work even after I found success with Student Completion in Schoology. Since I had students participating more readily in the scaffold project process, I found another weakness in my process: Peer Reviews.

I love peer reviews because it allows students an opportunity to get feedback from their peers in order to help them improve the quality of their project. It also gives them the opportunity to dissect the rubric and gain a better understanding of what the final expectations are. 

At the start of the year, students filled out a Google Form that was based around the rubric for the project. There would be spots for comments, but students wouldn't always get to see the feedback. I wouldn't share the sheet with them for privacy so then I tried having students put in each other's email addresses so they could see the feedback, but students would make typos or the emails wouldn't send correctly.
Example of earlier peer review. 
When I took a looker at the process I created, I found that students were doing the same thing that they did with the scaffold project process; if they did it, they would rush through to get it done and, if they got the feedback, they wouldn't really take into account any of the comments and feedback. Of course, the purpose is for students to take this feedback to heart in order to improve their overall project and this clearly wasn't happening.

I decided to move away from using Google Forms and used Docs so that students would focus more on verbalizing their feedback instead of checking a box and be able to easily view the feedback that they received. I also adjusted the layout so the criteria descriptions were clear and students could better understand project expectations. I even benefited from this process because I spent less time formatting spreadsheets, searching for student submissions on a sheet to give them participation points. or having them take a screenshot to submit evidence of their participation.   

Full layout here.


Since it was the end of the year, I only got to try this new layout once, but students definitely spent more time giving honest feedback to each other and their final products were of a higher quality than in the past. Overall, I found this was a valuable improvement for everyone and I plan on implementing throughout next year. I would, however, separate the third column so that the letter grade is one column and the explanation in another; some students would just put a letter grade and no explanation. 





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