Allowing students to interact during assignment peer reviews

[fabian_fagerhol]

When students provide peer review comments on other students' assignments, they can only see their own comments but not anything that other peer reviewers, teachers, or the submitting student writes.

The student who submitted the assignment can see all comments, but it seems they have no way of replying to a peer review comment because the student who wrote the comment will not be able to see the reply. So students cannot discuss an assignment as part of an assignment peer review.

Is this correct? At least I haven't found a way to let students interact within the assignment peer review. In regular classroom sessions, I have found small-group peer review discussions around a student submission to be very beneficial, and I would like to do something similar in Canvas.

Has anyone had similar thoughts and how have you solved this?

[kona]

 @fabian_fagerhol , for something like this have you Thomas guy about putting the students into small groups, say 3-4 students maybe and then using a group discussion to have them review and provide feedback to each other? It wouldn’t allow for a grade, but it would allow people to see each other’s feedback and respond to it. I’ve done something similar in one of my courses and it seemed to work pretty well with the students. 

Hope this helps!

[fabian_fagerhol]

 @kona , thanks for the tip! I could always add a separate dummy assignment without any submission to hold the grades. Or they first discuss in small groups using a group discussion and then submit a (possibly revised) version for grading using an assignment.

The only drawbacks I see is that students can't comment directly on the submission using annotations and the peer review will be between those in the same group rather than between random pairs of students in the whole course. But I could probably sacrifice these for the increased interaction...

Thank you! :smileygrin:

[kona]

If you don't mind the student using Word and downloading the document and editing it there you could still have them add annotated feedback. OR, you could have them use Google Doc's and do the same, but have it done all online.