Beyond the Design Crit: How Students Learn Through Giving and Receiving Feedback

Formative assessment in Design and Technology requires structured peer feedback approaches to be effective. Research shows a significant gap in assessing technological knowledge, with most studies focusing on design knowledge instead.

• Design crits from higher education can be adapted for classroom use through peer feedback
• Research from the Netherlands identifies convergent feedback (clarifying ideas) and divergent feedback (promoting creative responses)
• Teachers must model feedback techniques and provide clear criteria for students
• Effective sentence starters include "I notice your design solves the problem by..." and "Have you considered how your design might work if..."
• Using exemplars (WAGOLL) can limit creativity if not implemented carefully
• Structured peer feedback reduces teacher workload while ensuring all students receive input
• Andrew Halliwell is conducting new research on formative feedback to be presented in July 2025

Resources and References from Episode 3: Beyond the Design Crit: How Students Learn Through Giving and Receiving Feedback

1. Research from the Netherlands on peer feedback in D&T education
   • Research focused on effective convergent and divergent feedback techniques
   • Research addressing how pupils struggle with receiving and giving useful feedback
2. Nuffield Key Stage 3 materials with sentence structures for convergent and divergent questions
   • Available on the D&T for D&T website
3. Chapter by Alice Shutt in the "Debates in Design and Technology" book about the Netherlands research 

Acknowledgement:
Some of the supplementary content for this podcast episode was crafted with the assistance of Claude, an AI language model developed by Anthropic. While the core content is based on the actual conversation and my editorial direction, Claude helped in refining and structuring information to best serve listeners. This collaborative approach allows me to provide you with concise, informative, and engaging content to complement each episode.

Chapters

• 0:00 Introduction to Formative Assessment
• 1:30 Design Crit in Education
• 2:40 Convergent vs Divergent Feedback
• 4:50 Teaching Effective Peer Feedback
• 7:30 Using Exemplars Carefully
• 9:00 Final Thoughts and Next Episode

Transcript

Alison Hardy: 0:06

you're listening to the talking dnt podcast. I'm dr allison hardy, a writer, researcher and advocate of design and technology education. In each episode I share views, news and opinions about dnt in design and technology, and this episode is about formative assessment and what the research says. Now this is really interesting because there's very little research again about technological knowledge or formative assessment of technological knowledge. It tends to focus more on formative knowledge around the design aspect of a design project or design knowledge. So that's where I'm going to be drawing on. So let's just have a think about what we mean by formative assessment. That's as students are going through their learning. It's not checking their learning at the end, it's they're checking their learning as they're going on. Have they got any misconceptions? Have they grasped the key concepts? Are they understanding the processes? Are they thinking about their designs in particular ways or different ways? And it's kind of partly challenging some of that. So what does the research say? Well, here I've had to draw on some stuff from higher education about the design crit, which is really if those of you who did a design degree, like myself, at university, when you were doing your design projects, you would have a tutor who would give you a crit and they would give you feedback on your designs and they would give you different perspectives you feedback on your designs and they would give you different perspectives. So there's this aspect of what the research says about using the design crit within a design activity to help children think about different aspects of what they're doing. Now, this can be really difficult in design and technology, and that's acknowledged in the literature. So what the literature goes on to talk about is actually using peer feedback, and there is quite a bit of research, particularly from the Netherlands, about using peer feedback to help pupils think about critiquing the work of others. But it needs to be, as the literature says, valuable and constructive and, as ever, appropriate to the task.

Alison Hardy: 2:31

And the research in the Netherlands have identified that pupils struggle with receiving and giving useful feedback, and so they have tested an approach to address this problem, and that's what I'm going to talk a bit about briefly. But the first thing they did in this research is they identified that there are two different types of formative feedback peer feedback for pupils, and that's convergent and divergent. So convergent pushes pupils towards clarifying their ideas, clarifying their thinking, evaluating where they've got to, and then it can be followed by divergent feedback, which promotes creative responses and different ways of thinking about what they're doing within their design. So, yeah, convergent feedback pushes towards clarification and evaluation. Divergent feedback promotes creative responses and again, as a teacher, you need to teach pupils how to do this. You need to give them a framework. And it's worth looking at the Netherlands research and what they talk about is teachers modelling, giving feedback, providing criteria for pupils to use, and again, you need to pick that criteria that is relevant and purposeful and appropriate for what it is that's happening at that moment and what learning is, kind of going through this activity or this series of activities or this unit of work and making it clear that not all feedback has to be used. I think that can sometimes be a danger if you sort of over formalize formative feedback. So encouraging children to use that criteria and modelling how to do it is absolutely key, and so those key sentence starters they talk about in the paper and I'll put the link in the show notes for both convergent and divergent feedback.

Alison Hardy: 4:25

So convergent, I notice that your design solves the problem by and that makes it specific and the children could come back and go. That's not what I meant and you can have a conversation. Okay. So what did you mean? Isn't that clear? So again, it's getting clarity, and divergent might be a pupil asking a question from it. Have you considered how your design might work if? What do you think would happen if? And that if is really crucial. There's some really good sentence structures within the Nuffield Key Stage 3 materials in the teaching resources that you can find on D&T for D&T website Again, I'll put a link in the show notes to that that framing those convergent and divergent questions is really, really important, and Alice Shutt wrote a chapter in the Debates in Design and Technology book about this research. I think you might find that really useful to pick that up and I'll try and remember to put a link into the show notes about this.

Alison Hardy: 5:28

So I think here the crucial thing is about. This is a design crit, but you're teaching pupils how to give a design crit on other pupils work. So it's drawing on this higher education activity of feedback on performance and giving different perspectives. But you're faced with a class of 20, 25 or more pupils. It's very difficult for you as the teacher to give that individual, purposeful feedback. So this idea of peer feedback is really useful, but the research says that it needs to be effective and you need to teach the children how to do it. So you know it's not a long podcast this week, but I think that's really important to kind of ground that in the research and to ground that in thinking about the bigger picture, about developing children's design and technology capability, because not by by not only teaching them how to give that peer feedback and using criteria, you're helping them do that as a reflective tool that they can use as a later date as well.

Alison Hardy: 6:37

And then, finally, another form of formative feedback is using an example of another pupil's work, or a good one. What a good one looks like. I kind of I think I'm probably going to do an episode on this with Sarah and Alice about a waggle what a good one looks like. There are dangers with this, because high quality examples might unintentional and essentially reduce, you know, students capacity to to be creative for themselves. They'll copy that and so exemplars can be. We need to really think carefully and you know you don't want to be using exemplar exemplars to limit thinking, and that's why having things like handling collections to ask questions of which are related to the context or related to the artefact or the system that pupils are designing can be useful, but actually, you know, there's not been solutions. In and of themselves is really important, and again, that's something else that the literature says about high quality formative feedback.

Alison Hardy: 7:43

There are other bits emerging. Andrew Halliwell is doing some research about peer feedback and formative feedback, and if you'll come into the big D&T meet in July 2025, you'll be able to talk to Andrew about his research and what he's doing. So my reflection questions for you to think about is how might you improve the quality of feedback in your classroom and what small changes could make feedback more effective without increasing workload, particularly in the context that if you're the one doing the design crit, that's exhausting for you and who gets left out? Whereas if you think about structuring peer feedback, that can be much more effective. So the next episode will be the final one in this mini-series and exploring summative assessment of D&T capability. As ever, thanks for listening, and if you've got some practice that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you, and so do drop me a line in any of the usual ways. Thanks again for you. And and who gets left out, whereas if you think about structuring peer feedback, that can be much more effective. So the next episode will be the final one in this mini-series and exploring summative assessment of D&T capability. As as ever, thanks for listening, and if you've got some practice that you'd like to share, I'd love to hear from you, and so do drop me a line in any of the usual ways. Thanks again.

Alison Hardy: 9:04

I'm Dr Alison Hardy, and you've been listening to the Talking D&T podcast. If you enjoyed the podcast, then do subscribe on whatever platform you use, and do consider leaving a review, as it does help others find the podcast. I do the podcast because I want to support the D&T community in developing their practice, so please do share the podcast with your D&T community. If you want to respond to something I've talked about or have an idea for a future episode, then either leave me a voice memo via speakpipe or drop me an email. You can find details about me, the podcast and how to connect with me on my website, drallisonhardycom. Also, if you want to support the podcast financially, you can become a patron. Links to SpeakPipe, patreon and my website are in the show notes. Thanks for listening.