Abstract:

In the last years, we have assisted to major changes in the technological field that has had, as consequence, a great impact on how teachers plan their teaching activities. There is a lot of literature that reports practices and case studies in several contexts, such as School and University, related to the use of specific technologies in teaching (Clark-Wilson et al., 2014). In this context, the teacher should be able to become researchers in educational design, instead of being only recipient of the research results (Laurillard, 2012). So, we designed an educational course that involved 160 mathematics teachers from all Italian educational levels (33 hours in total, from January to May). The course was focused on the argumentative competence and the specific learning activities were based on peer review methodology. We started to ask the teachers to design, individually, a learning activity that they usually propose in their classes and to upload it by means the Task’s Moodle module in pdf/word format. After that, the teachers participated to various lectures, conducted by experts in mathematics education, and to online activities, managed through the Moodle e-learning platform. Subsequently, the peer review process was implemented using the Workshop Moodle’s module (Albano et al., 2017), that allows to upload a required task, the automatic redistribution of the tasks among the platform participants and the review of a task assigned to a participant by the platform. In order to optimize the review process, by using the functionalities of Moodle, we split the teachers into three groups respect to their own educational levels, for allowing each of them to review the work of a colleague of the same scholastic grade. After, the teachers had to redesign the same learning activity, focusing it on argumentative competence, taking into account the suggestions received during the course. Then, they uploaded it on the Workshop module. Once everyone have accomplished this task, the platform distributed, automatically and in an anonymous way, the redesigned learning activity among the teachers. So, each teacher had to review, in a fixed time, one activity produced by a colleague. This review process took into account appropriate review criteria provided both by the trainers than by the experts of the course. Note that the use of the e-learning platform gives teachers the possibility to work wherever and whenever they want. We are collecting data from the experimentation that will be analyzed from a quantitative and qualitative point of view. We will quantify the involvement of the participants and we will compare the teachers’ products before and after the peer review process. Comparing their first delivery (using Task’s Moodle) and their last one (using the Workshop Moodle’s module), we are going to observe if the peer review methodology, implemented with the Moodle platform, is effective to improve the teachers design capability.

References:
[1] Albano G., Capuano N., Pierri, A. (2017) Adaptive Peer Grading and Formative Assessment Journal of e-Learning and Knowledge Society, vol.13, n.1, pp. 147-161, 2017, ISSN: 1826-6223, e-ISSN:1971-8829
[2] Clark-Wilson, A., Robutti, O., & Sinclair, N. (2014). The Mathematics Teacher in the Digital Era. Springer, Dordrecht.
[3] Laurillard, D. (2012). Teaching as a Design Science: Building Pedagogical Patterns for Learning and Technology. New York: Routledge.

Keywords:

e-learning, peer review, teacher education, Workshop Moodle’s module.