How do I create a peer review assignment?

Peer review assignments allow students to review and discuss each others' work. A peer review assignment consists of four timed phases:

• Students submit their work.

• Students are assigned to review one or more peer submissions:

  • Scores according to instructor-defined rubric
  • Overall assessment of work
  • Rich in-text comments—just like in a regular assignment

• Instructors have the opportunity to read over the reviews submitted by students. Instructors can choose to exclude reviews and/or overall comments on a case-by-case basis.

• Students see the scores and comments entered by reviewers and can respond to and continue the conversation with their reviewers.

Assignment setup

1. Navigate to the Assignments tab of your course, select Add assignment, and then  Peer Review Assignment.
2. Name the assignment and set the deadlines for each stage in chronological order (each phase of the assignment is determined by its respective deadlines).
3. Create your Rubric by enumerating a set of criteria and possible ratings for each criterion. Each possible rating should have a description (that students will select) and the associated point value. This ensures a consistent and objective assessment by peers, and also provides clear guidelines for both the reviewer and the student being reviewed (who will be able to view the rubric in advance of submitting their work). You can also opt to have no peer scoring at all and have students provide only qualitative feedback to each other, in which case a rubric is not needed.
4. Next, specify further details, such as instructions and who will be working this assignment, and choose whether to automatically determine or manually specify which submissions students review.
5. Finally, select if you will use your course's peer review scoring settings, or customize the scoring for this specific assignment.

Scoring setup

There are five grading components that can be considered to determine scores for peer review assignment score. To set up a global scoring for all peer review assignments, navigate to Settings > Scoring> Automatic Scoring > and select the Peer review tab.  

• The Submission component gives students credit for uploading their document. 

• This Peer review component gives students credit for creating in-text comments on the document they are reviewing. By clicking the Options toggle, you can set how many comments a student must make in order to achieve full credit towards this component, and whether it is set to quality-based or Participation-based scoring. 

• The Peer scoring component gives students credit towards evaluating each of their assigned submissions according to the rubric.

• The Reviews received from peers component gives the author of the document credit by calculating the average score of the submissions earned from their peers.

  If you enable Ask students to provide qualitative feedback only (no rubric), ensure that your scoring criteria does not allocate any weight to Reviews received from peers (under Settings > Scoring > Automatic Scoring > Peer Review assignment) as students will not be scoring their peers' work.

• The Feedback on peer review gives authors credit for continuing conversations by replying in threads to comments received on their submission. By clicking the Options toggle, you can set how many comments a student must make in order to achieve full credit towards this component, and whether it is set to quality-based or participation-based scoring. 

Course grouping settings do not apply to peer review assignments. During the Student Review phase, reviewers only see their own comments when reviewing submissions. During the Author Review and Feedback phase, authors see all reviewers' comments on their submission.

The stages of peer review

Each stage of peer review is gated by the deadlines you have set. 

• In the Submission phase, students submit their work by uploading a PDF or Word document. They can re-upload documents until the submission deadline has passed. On this page, they will also see the rubric that reviewers will use to evaluate their work. 

  Instructors can upload a late submission on behalf of a student who did not submit during the submission phase by clicking +Add submission on behalf of a student after the student work submission deadline has passed. Instructors won't be able to edit an existing submission, since another student could already have reviewed it. Students will receive points for an instructor uploaded late submission.

• In the Student review stage, students review each document they have been assigned by filling out the rubric, providing overall feedback and creating in-text comments within the document. 

  During the Student Review phase, instructors can manage who reviews a particular submission by clicking Edit to the right of student names under the Peer Review assignment. Instructors won't be able to remove a student if they have already submitted their review, and they won't be able to remove a reviewer if doing so would leave the student without anything to review.

• In the Instructor review stage, instructors have the opportunity to enter the assignment and select a student from the dropdown to the see feedback they will receive. While reviewing, you can hide feedback or suppress scores if needed. You can also view all comments on the document and provide your own. Students will not be able to add more until this stage has passed its deadline.

• During the Author review and feedback stage, students see the scores and comments entered by reviewers and can respond to and continue the conversation with their reviewers.
   

Reviewing Scores

To see a score, click on the assignment and select Grade assignment, or navigate to your

Gradebook. When you click on a grade for a student, you will see the calculation for their engagement metrics, the comments they submitted on others work, and comments submitted in response to peers.