Constructive Peer Review

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 OTHER TIPS: CONSTRUCTIVE PEER REVIEW

Constructive Peer Review

Shared by: 

Abe Rutchick, Psychology

Materials needed:

skewed rubric (see example below)
10 = awesome
9 = really really good
8 = very good (like an A-)
7 = very solid (like a B+)
6 = solid (B ish)
5 = decent
4 = a little shaky
3 = shaky (C ish)
2 = not good
1 = bad
0 = train wreck

Learning challenge addressed/predictable outcome:

Inducing students to give critical feedback to classmates

Best used for:

Any class with a paper, presentation, or other assignment of modest scale

Learning objectives/skills fostered:

Those of peer evaluation (greater insight into material and own work, etc.)

What to do/how to do it:

Ask students to evaluate each other’s work using a skewed scale (that is, one with more room for differentiation at the top). Insist that they provide at least one commendation and one recommendation (not unlike a program review). Consider a thought exercise in which students imagine that half their grade is based on the quality of their own paper/assignment and half is based on the quality of the one they review. This would lead to very detail-oriented critiques, and that is the lens they should optimally adopt.

Tips for implementing:

Give students a piece of your own work (from when you were a student, perhaps?) to critique first. Don’t tell them it’s yours until after they critique it. (First, make it worse if you need to.) This shows students that nobody fails to benefit from constructive criticism.