[Peer Review] Assigning Grades for Peer Reviews

Part of participating in online coursework involves working with other students to improve drafts and engage in the learning community. When students are assigned peer reviews, let's be honest, they aren't motivated to complete it unless there is a grade attached. I would love the ability to grade peer reviews.

 

This could be as simple as complete/incomplete, or more complex where the completion of peer reviews was part of a grading rubric for the assignment. But it would be nice if there was something in the grade book, some academic weight given to participating in these reviews, that doesn't involve manually looking up peer reviews outside of the grade book.

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90 Comments
ewander
Community Contributor

I agree with this. I would love to get the chance to give my students a grade when they have or have not done the peer review. I currently have a student who has not done his peer review and, like you said, has no motivation to complete it. I have told him I will not grade his entire assignment until he can done the peer review but to no avail.

Thank you for the suggestion!

Erin

jsimpson1
Community Novice

I am trying to set up an assignment where the students have to review group PowerPoint presentations and fill out a feedback form to the groups.  I would not only like to be able to assign points for them to fill out the feedback forms, but also set a due date.

james_umphres
Community Novice

I'm surprised this isn't already a feature. I know of at least one instructor who creates another "no submissions" assignment just so she can assign grades for the peer review. As you can imagine, this creates a bit of a disconnect... And it sounds pretty tedious to me.

mfreund
Community Novice

Agreed. This is closely related to a feature suggestion I recently put in, to have a deadline for completing the peer review.

!Please consider voting it up too!

mhovde
Community Novice

I agree with this suggestion, but until this feature is added to Canvas, I have devised a way for giving a grade for completing peer reviews.  Submitting is worth 10 points and reviewing is worth 10 points.  I have to view the list of completed peer reviews to grade the latter, but it's worth the few minutes it takes to do so.

10618071
Community Participant

I see this as a key feature in effective peer review.

In the spirit of "skating to where the puck is going to be", please take note that other platforms that have been doing this for years are recognizing the need for asynchronous peer review and are working in that direction.

As you build your platform please consider asynchronous work flows as well. I have written proposals that are being used by other LMSs and would love to freely share them with Canvas. In a world of Moocs, corporate training, competency based training, quest based training, choose your own adventure style training, and cafeteria style training, it is no longer reasonable to assume that students will be in the same place in the course as all other students. We must accommodate a variety of paths and speeds through content while at the same time allowing for social interaction and engagement in learning.

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

​ has been redirected to this thread.  If you voted on the previous feature but have not voted here yet, please do.

Here are the notes from the linked Idea:

 @mfreund ​

I often have students do peer reviews of one another's work, and I require both submission of their own work and a review of their classmates' within a specified period of several days.

At present it is only possible to award a grade for submitting (and being scored on) their own work. There is no way to enforce the activity of reviewing classmates' work by assigning a grade or points when they complete it.

It would be great if the peer review itself could be set up as a graded assignment with its own distinct deadline and grade point weighting. Ideally, it could be set up so that the grade for the review could either be automatic upon submission of their comments, or else graded by the instructor in case the instructor feels it is necessary to ensure a certain quality standard for the feedback they provide their peer.

mhovde

I agree with this suggestion, but until this feature is added to Canvas, I have devised a way for giving a grade for completing peer reviews.  Submitting is worth 10 points and reviewing is worth 10 points.  I have to view the list of completed peer reviews to grade the latter, but it's worth the few minutes it takes to do so.

 @blong ​

oh please oh please add this!  The lack of this ability is one of the reasons I recommend my faculty NOT use peer reviews.  The work around I've given them for grading purposes is to either 1) create an assignment item that has no submission and store the points there or 2) create it as an item in the rubric for that assignment.  They aren't happy with the work around but it's something for the time being.

 @christine_mckeo ​

Yes! We've been hearing from some of our schools that this is a much needed feature!

10618071

I see this as a key feature in effective peer review.

In the spirit of "skating to where the puck is going to be", please take note that other platforms that have been doing this for years are recognizing the need for asynchronous peer review and are working in that direction.

As you build your platform please consider asynchronous work flows as well. I have written proposals that are being used by other LMSs and would love to freely share them with Canvas. In a world of Moocs, corporate training, competency based training, quest based training, choose your own adventure style training, and cafeteria style training, it is no longer reasonable to assume that students will be in the same place in the course as all other students. We must accommodate a variety of paths and speeds through content while at the same time allowing for social interaction and engagement in learning.

 @lhughes ​

Absolutely! I've lamented the need for this since I first started using Peer Review!

10618071
Community Participant

There are a variety of strategies for how points are distributed.

One method is to give a participation grade proportional to the number of assignments completed.

Another is to compare scores of all reviewers, consider the most common score "correct" and give other reviews a score based on how similar they are

I use the first most often. The second can have odd results.

I think it might also be nice to have an average score from the reviewees factor into the reviewer's score based on the quality of the feedback.

Research has shown no correlation between the score received by the reviwee and the return evaluation score given the reviewer, showing little risk of punitive scoring.

christine_mckeo
Community Novice

I am not (honestly! Smiley Happy) trying to be pushy, but I have noticed that this idea has been in the top 2 or 3 for at least now. According to the voting documentation, "Each week, the Product team will take on the ten highest-voted ideas to which they haven't yet responded" -- is there a "release schedule" for these kinds of responses from Instructure? I know there are lots of ideas to sort through and that a response probably takes some coordination - just wondering!

Renee_Carney
Community Team
Community Team

 @christine_mckeo ​

Thank you so much for your comment/questions.

The voting documentation does state that, along with the need for an idea to hit 100 votes.  This idea has not yet hit 100 votes.  In the past we were addressing ideas that had less than 100 votes to practice our processes.  The top 10 is so that if we have 20+ ideas hit over 100 votes in one week we are not asking our awesome Product Managers to sacrifice the amazing work they do to move features forward in order to comment on the community.  I hope this explanation helps.