How do you motivate students to pay attention to presentations by their peers? And more importantly, learn from those presentations?
You assess their participation.
Assessment ideas
These assessment ideas will prompt students watching a presentation to pay close attention and play an active role in their learning:
- Ask the presenter to create a short quiz on their presentation topic. Assess the results.
- Ask the presenter to create two or three questions on concepts from their presentation. Observers will answer the questions in writing after the presentation, and the instructor can assess the responses. The content of the responses also measures the skill of the presenter. If most learners misunderstand the major concepts, it may indicate the presenter was unclear.
- Create a peer evaluation form for observers to fill out after every presentation. Develop the criteria together and teach the class to provide effective feedback (e.g., "I" sentences, suggestions, non-evaluative comments).
The forms can be graded in two ways: for participation and the ability to assess effectively. Copies can be given to the presenter. You can choose to ask learners to give a numerical value to the presentation and average the class grade with your own to arrive at the presenter's grade.
Benefits of assessing observers
Assessing students on the content of their peers' presentations has these benefits:
- All learners are actively involved in the presentations of their classmates.
- Faculty have a reliable way to measure participation during presentations.
- Observers learn more from presentations.
- Learners take more responsibility for their learning.
- Learners learn how difficult it is to assess fairly.
- The experience helps learners develop analytical skills.