Facilitating peer-review activities

- When it comes to assessment there are really three or even four possible sources of feedback and scoring. You the instructor are the most obvious evaluator. In some cases, an expert or professional may review student work performed in the field. The students themselves may conduct a self-assessment, often with your help or encouragement, and last but not least students may conduct a peer review of each other's work, again often with your guidance. It's this last category peer review that we'll focus on here. Usually peer review starts by providing students with the same rubric or guidelines that you'll use for grading.

Peer review works for many assignments such as written assignments, research papers, creative works of some kind, presentations, or other projects. A simple way to facilitate the process is to use a discussion forum. Along with clear instructions provide a rubric template for students to download. Students or groups submit their drafts for review as a new thread in the forum, then their peers fill out the rubric for a specific student or group and attach it as a reply. Tools like turnitin.com's peer mark combine these features by allowing students to annotate and comment on individual peer assignments as well as enter rubric scores.

You and the person who submitted the assignment will see the comments and scores along with the results of the originality scan for potential sources that haven't been cited. A calibrated peer review process involves an additional step before letting students loose to review work by their peers. First, every student rates two or more example papers you provide, preferably a paper that meets all the criteria, and a couple papers that need work in different areas. After everyone has rated the examples you discuss the results as a class, and come up with a norm for each criterion.

Some people are harsh graders while others are lenient, so a norm is a score that guides each student to be consistent with everyone else. Quick and dirty ways to facilitate norming for calibrated peer review include using clickers in the classroom, or a Google forum outside the classroom. Have your students submit their scores for each criterion and discuss as a class. Ask students who submitted extreme scores to give a reason why, and then provide guidance publicly about why the norm is the correct score to give.

The Calibrated Peer Review tool by UCLA's medical school can streamline the process for your class. Nicknamed CPR, it's used by hundreds of secondary and postsecondary schools around the country. Check to see if your institution is listed among the users, if not you can experiment for free with an older version of the software, the newest version requires purchasing a license agreement. As a side note, if you work with co-instructors, tutors, readers, graders, or teaching assistants this process helps ensure consistent grading.

While I don't use the official CPR tool, I do use a Google form for everyone to submit their scores. I don't allow anyone to see the spreadsheet of results until the mock grading deadline, so they won't be swayed prematurely. Before reviewing the next movie take a minute to answer the following questions for yourself. How will you use technology to facilitate peer-review activities, and how will you incorporate elements of the calibrated peer-review process to bring more consistency to the feedback students give to each other?