Social+Learning+and+Feedback

// Mr. S. Merry // // Thursday, 30 August // // Verslag door: Caspar Groeneveld // Mr. Merry looks at the role of student communities of practice* in guiding students’ learning.
 * Students’ Social Learning and its Implications for Feedback **
 * Korte Samenvatting **

He examined how students among themselves distribute and interpret feedback. Students help each other figuring out what the tutor meant (interpretation and translation), but they also showed each other subsequently how they solved the assignment and which routes there are to successfully completing an assignment. The community is diverse, and the CoP will provide a wider array of possible routes, solutions or answers than the tutor will. Finally, peers’ assessment of a student’s work helps a student to learn to better assess their own work. Again, self-assessment is a good predictor of study success. “Realizing that there is a CoP has important implications for the learning process.” What the implications are, is left to the imagination of the audience. The talk, however, is useful to adopt a new view on feedback or to challenge your conceptions. It’s not clear what the proportions of students are who assess each other work, how we can influence them, and to which extent the model is based on observation wishful thinking.
 * Toepasbaarheid **
 * Review **

* Mr. Merry eagerly engaged in a semantic discussion on what a community of practice actually is, but the intricacies were unfortunately lost on me.