Peer Review

Overview

Peer review is a technique that has always been great conceptually but hard to execute. Canvas streamlines and automates peer review for instructors making it easy to use and gaining the benefits with a minimum of hassle. Peer reviews are an effective tool for any writing assignment and create benefits for both students and instructors.

Benefits for Instructors

• No more first draft submissions
• A chance to de-bug assignments for students before instructor submission which means fewer questions/problems
• Better submissions = faster grading
• Enhance student understanding of the assessment process

Benefits of Students

• Gain added perspectives on different ways to approach assignments
• Check perceived quality against their own work
• Reduce stress by checking in with peers efforts
• Peer proofing enhances proofing skills in general
• Formalize understanding of the revision process
• Helps facilitate the learning community

Mechanics of Using Peer Review

The problem with peer reviews is that often peers are not very skilled or invested in proofing other student's work. Moreover, that students who get a glowing peer review and poor grade later can get upset. The key is to train students and provide a detailed evaluation procedure for them to follow. Fortunately, these can both be accomplished easily using Canvas.

Training

Training students for conducting peer reviews and proofing their own work can be rolled into one online workshop. This type of workshop can then be exported to other courses with writing components. Usually a brief, low point value task is sufficient to encourage students to take it. For example, a brief quiz (the benefit is that is is fully automated) or submitting a plan outlining the approach they use/plan to use to edit/proof their own and peers papers. The latter can be easily graded pass/fail in speedgrader. Of course, a more rigorous training regime would get better results, but this example is a baseline for achieving benefits from the process.

Evaluation

There is balance between enough and too much work for students conducting peer reviews. You can have students download, edit, and then upload reviewed papers. However, usually the main benefit of the peer review is catch technical errors, rule following/requirements, and missing components. Toward this end and to ease the process, I suggest a detailed rubric. The rubric below allows students to add in written feedback as well as assign a numeric value of 1-10 connected to a chart*. (not connected to the students earned points**).

*Scale

** When editing your rubric, you have the option at the bottom to use or not use the points for grading. 

Peer Review Tutorials for Faculty

What is a peer review Assignment?

Instructors can create peer review assignments for their students to complete. Peer reviews are not anonymous.

How do I create a peer review assignment?

A peer review assignment enables students to comment and provide feedback to other students in the course.

How do I automatically assign peer reviews?

Automatically assigning peer reviews will assign students with submissions peer reviews. The best way to do this is through creating or editing an assignment.

How do I manually assign peer reviews?

Manually assigning peer reviews allows you to choose which students review a certain assignment.

Note: You cannot assign peer reviews to a student until the student has submitted the assignment.

Peer Review Links for Students

Students find using the peer review function easy and providing them instructions is as easy as linking to Canvas resources such as video and tutorials.

Here is complete rundown on how to submit, conduct, and see a peer review in Canvas:

Important notes for students for peer review.

Only one document per peer review - it will display the last document uploaded only.

Students need to leave a comment in the comment box at the bottom of the page for the review to be marked as complete, even if the rubric is filled out.

Students can download the paper to be reviewed and would upload the reviewed paper as an attached file using the comments feature.

What is a peer review Assignment?

How do I know if I have a peer review to complete?

Where can I find my peers' feedback for peer reviewed assignments? 

How do I submit a peer review to an Assignment?

If you wish, you can take these links and video and simply copy and paste them into your own assignments page. Just highlight and paste in.