I chose to read ‘Formative Assessment and self-regulated Learning: a model and seven principles of good feedback practice’
I was especially drawn to the segment about the benefits of peer feedback, the text spoke of the recorded benefits of peer conversations about their academic studies but my lived experience was vastly different. During my primary and secondary education at school, I struggled to keep up academically, the paper speaks about the disenfranchisement caused by high-stakes grading and I felt this growing up.
I would score very badly on tests and didn’t make a lot of my milestones with mathematics and basic spelling/grammar ect. This was a huge source of pain for me as a child, I would feel inadequate, and less valuable than my peers intellectually, and frankly, I didn’t understand why I couldn’t just do what they did. But worse than that was the peer interactions about this, any time I had to talk about academia with my peers I was shunned, and made to feel inferior to the other children (as children often do) would love to establish themselves as higher up than me, the whole system gave me a lower social credit.
I remember that any assignment that made me work with another student just killed me, I would be nothing more then a burden to them and I would spiral into a negative mental health space, as to not trauma dump here I’ll sum this up as ‘talking to other children about school was the absolute worst’. Even during this PGcert I dread any ‘team up’ esc exercise, so I was shocked to hear all the positive data points that this article referred to!
My students certainly seem to enjoy talking about their studies collectively and sharing information, a mystery to me, but I wonder if this only really works if the students are either kind by nature OR if they’re on a similar page academically in regards to grading. We as a species tend toward forming hierarchies, does this positive data transfer to students of lower grades talking to students who grade higher? Would it be a good idea to have this peer review section in the formal curriculum? Or would it leave students like me, to share a source of pain?
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