instructor assignment peer review

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Peer Review Assignment Best Practices for Instructors

Canvas has a built-in Peer Review tool that allows instructors to assign student submissions to each other for feedback. This feature can be enabled for groups and can be set up to be anonymous. 

If the built-in tool in Canvas doesn’t meet your needs, there may be other options . 

Before You Start

We strongly recommend working with your LSP if you want to create a peer review assignment in Canvas to create the best experience for you and your students.

• Consider providing clear instructions or a rubric in your assignment for students on what a peer review is in Canvas , how they will grade, and how they can view their feedback .
• We recommend reiterating to students that it is important that they submit on time so they don’t hold the assignment up for others in the course.
• Students who haven’t submitted an assignment can no longer be invited to review others’ work. If students don’t submit, they can’t participate. 

How to Create a Peer Review Assignment in Canvas

• If this will be a group assignment, you will see an additional option to “Allow intra-group peer reviews”. Select this if you would like Canvas to select a member of the same group for that student to review.

Note – Canvas assigns peer reviews to individuals, EVEN if it’s a Group Project assignment. The only project member who will see feedback is the one the peer reviewer was assigned to. It will not be visible to other project members.

• If you select assign reviews manually , instructors will need to go in and pair up the students after students have finished submitting their assignments.
• Instructors should provide a buffer for students to allow for late submissions and not use the same time as the due date of the assignment.
• Once all additional settings have been configured, save and publish the assignment.
• Students will receive an email and a to do list item once they have been assigned a peer to review. Students will not receive a peer to review until they submit the assignment.

Keep in Mind

• We recommend using the Manually Assign Peer Reviews option (see screenshot below) to assign peer reviews later if they need to be done at a specific time. 

• “ If a student has not submitted the assignment or submits the assignment after the due date, the student will not automatically be assigned a peer review and you must manually assign one. ”
• For assignments with Turnitin enabled, only the original student can see the originality score, not the assigned reviewer. Reviewers won’t be able to assess this information, since it isn’t visible to them.

Known Issues 

The manual drag and drop option to assign peer reviews has not been reliable . For the best experience, we recommend using the “assign peer reviews now” option for this need instead.

• Automatic (randomly assigned) peer reviews may take up to an hour to be assigned to students. We recommend letting your students know that there may be a delay before submissions are available to them to review.
• Clear your cache on a PC  
• Clear your cache on a Mac  

Please try the instructions linked above for your preferred browser and then open a new window and try logging in again. 

Clearing the browser cache can also sometimes solve issues students are having with peer reviews, and the above instructions may be helpful to share with them as well.

Other Peer Review Options

• Wharton instructors – contact the Wharton Courseware team ( [email protected] ) for a full list of your options for peer review assignments. 
• If you’re already using Perusall in your course, consider using Perusall’s peer review functions . 
• For group assignments: consider creating a Canvas discussion board or using Ed Discussion to allow students to share feedback with the entire group.

Please contact [email protected] or your Local Service Provider for assistance. 

Last Updated: 31 Oct 2023

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Implementing Peer Review in Your Course

During her graduate studies at The Ohio State University, Nicole Pizarro worked as both an English instructor and a consultant at the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing’s Writing Center .   

“In my teaching, I didn’t have time to help each student craft and edit their papers. But as a peer consultant, I could focus on a client’s writing and walk them through the revision process while providing comprehensive feedback. This work highlighted for me the benefits of peer-to-peer feedback in everyday writing instruction.”

It wasn’t long before Pizarro’s Writing Center experience influenced her teaching. In a second-year writing course, she used a CarmenCanvas discussion board to encourage students to actively reflect on each other’s writing styles and the bottlenecks they encountered when composing.  

“We talked about what we valued in peer-to-peer feedback. For each assignment, students would use Carmen’s peer review tool and a set of guiding questions to provide feedback to each other. Weaving those interactions throughout the course fostered a classroom community where students could identify areas of improvement in their peers’ work as well as actively reflect on their own writing.” 

Why peer review? 

Feedback is essential to any writing task, especially in the workplace. Whether your students move on to academic careers or other professions, they must be comfortable with the practice of seeking feedback from colleagues. For example, active feedback is integral to the production of scholarly and business communications such as grant proposals, presentations, memos, technical guides, and reports. What’s more, many of the bottlenecks college students face with writing tasks can be addressed through peer review, which helps them further develop the writing skills they need to enter the workforce.  

Unfortunately, peer review activities are not always successful, and many instructors avoid them altogether. Some common reasons for this: 

• Instructors may believe it is unproductive to have students who encounter the same bottlenecks in their writing provide feedback to one another. 
• Instructors may be hesitant or unable to commit the time and energy needed for effective peer review activities, which necessitate advance planning and active participation from students throughout the length of a writing assignment or even a whole course. 
• Students may have difficulty differentiating between feedback and criticism, leading peer review activities to feel intimidating or unpleasant. Furthermore, students who are not confident in their own composition skills may be hesitant to “judge” their peers’ writing. 
• Students may not see the point of peer review because they have been conditioned to value feedback only from their instructors.  

Do any of these concerns hit home for you or your students? The good news is that while designing peer review activities may seem daunting, research suggests that effective peer review can enhance students’ writing education. 

What the research says 

Encouraging students to actively reflect on their own and their peers’ writing can have lasting effects on their development as writers. In Peer Review: Successful from the Start , Shelley Reid notes that peer review “broadens the audience to whom student writers are responsible,” reinforces “the idea that writing is the result of the writer’s choices—which can be controlled and modified,” and increases students’ “awareness of writing as a negotiation between the intent of the writer and the needs of the audience” (2008, para. 5-6). Similarly, WAC Clearinghouse contends that “peer review enhances students’ critical thinking skills as readers and writers... [and] fosters the collaborative awareness of peer readers and their needs” (n.d.).  

Because of the varied ways peer review is implemented in higher ed, the research suggests that its effectiveness varies. Lundstrom and Baker (2009) identified three key benefits of peer review: students receive extra feedback, they have more language interactions, and they improve their own writing by providing feedback to others. However, they also found that the training students got on giving and receiving feedback influenced whether their writing improved overall or globally. “Students who revised student papers improved in specific areas of writing more so than those who only learned to use student feedback” (Lundstrom & Baker, 2009, p. 38). Other researchers have echoed the importance of providing “explicit training in both giving and receiving formative feedback” (Dressler, Chu, Crossman, & Hillman, 2019).  

Ultimately, for a peer review activity to be successful, students must receive training or clear instructions regarding the expectations for the activity . Providing a rubric, working with students to establish criteria, and having open conversations about how to structure helpful feedback can all enhance the peer review process. Asao Inoue (2005) suggests that instructors implement community-based assessment pedagogies in which “students take control of the writing and assessment practices of the class” by contributing to the development of assignments and rubrics. Such methods support students to “evolve as writers, assessors, and theorizers of language” while structured opportunities to evaluate their own writing processes can turn them into “reflective, more self-conscious writers” (p. 210). 

Research also demonstrates that students for whom English is a second language, sometimes called L2 students, can benefit from peer review activities. “Especially popular in L2 instruction, peer response has been shown to help students understand their own process of writing development by analyzing the writing of peers at similar stages in the process” (Anson & Anson, 2017, p. 14 ). Lundstrom and Baker (2009) found that peer review activities help English language learners improve their own writing by “transferring abilities they learn when reviewing peer texts” (p. 38 ). In other words, peer review activities allow English language learners to critically evaluate their own writing through evaluating their peers’ work. 

Supporting International Students

Are you considering how best to support the success of international students on writing assignments, peer reviews, and other learning activities? Find guidance in the Center for the Study and Teaching of Writing’s Supporting International Student Learning in the Classroom . 

Ultimately, peer review can help students improve their writing. But to maximize its benefits, students must be trained on how to provide effective feedback and what to do with the feedback they receive. Even if a final product doesn’t show significant improvement, peer review can influence students’ overall development as writers, spurring them to be more self-aware, reflective, and thoughtful about their writing choices and processes.

In Practice

The following approaches can help you plan productive peer review activities for your course.  

Provide students opportunities to reflect on their writing process. Encouraging students to reflect on their own writing processes helps you understand specific areas to address in their writing skills development so you can tailor your instruction. It also helps students set individual goals that their peers can use to provide meaningful, targeted feedback. When students consciously consider their strengths and areas for improvement, they are set up to be accountable in how they respond to the feedback they receive in those areas.

Ask students to write a paragraph explaining what their writing process looks like for a traditional paper. Ask guiding questions, such as:  

• Do you enjoy writing? Why or why not? 
• How do you brainstorm ideas?  
• How do you organize your ideas before writing?  
• What is a piece of writing you are most proud of? Why? 
• What do you struggle with when working on a writing assignment? 

Develop a questionnaire asking students to reflect on or rate their writing skills. Using the anonymous submission option when  building your survey in Carmen can help students feel comfortable being honest about the bottlenecks they experience when writing.  

Spend class time explaining the benefits of peer review and addressing students’ questions and concerns. We mentioned earlier some negative connotations that are often associated with peer review activities. Because many students share similar concerns, it is helpful to dedicate class time to openly discussing their prior experiences with peer review. Ask them to share what they find most valuable about peer feedback and what they want to gain from peer review activities. This is a good opportunity to explain the difference between feedback and criticism, as well as the benefits that understanding and practicing peer review can have on students’ writing.  

Create a contract as a class to lay out key guidelines for peer review . Once you’ve discussed students’ experiences and concerns, you can dive into specific expectations and parameters for peer review. Together with students, create a peer review contract wherein key areas for development and feedback are highlighted. This contract can serve as a reminder of the difference between criticism and feedback, and how to provide useful feedback. Developing a community contract allows students to have control in the peer review process and tailor activities to their shared needs. Along these lines, you can also work with students to establish the specific criteria for the individual peer review activities you assign throughout the term. 

Scaffold major assignments and implement feedback loops throughout their duration.   In a First Year Writing course in Ohio State’s English department, students are expected to develop an academic paper analyzing a popular media text. This research paper is broken down into smaller writing tasks focused on specific skills: primary source analysis, annotated bibliography, secondary source integration, and analytical research. For each of those individual tasks, students perform peer reviews and follow up on feedback to make improvements to their drafts. The frequent feedback loops throughout the course help students actively reflect upon and develop their writing skills and become more comfortable providing and responding to feedback in the process.  

Provide a detailed worksheet, checklist, or rubric for each peer review assignment. Students are often unsure how to evaluate peers’ writing and compose their review, so explicit guidance for them to reference during the process is crucial. Delineate clear areas for feedback or provide guiding questions, such as: 

• In a few sentences, summarize your peer’s paper. 
• What is the paper’s main argument? Is the argument clear and specific? 
• Does the introduction establish the argument and provide an overview of the paper’s topic? 
• Are the main points well organized? Are there any paragraphs that could be expanded, clarified, or re-ordered? 
• Does the conclusion wrap up the paper by synthesizing ideas or suggesting new directions of thought? 
• What were the writer’s most interesting or illuminating points? 
• What questions do you still have after reading the paper? Did you find anything confusing?  
• Does the author cite reliable sources? Do the sources support the paper’s argument?  

It is also helpful to encourage students to pose specific questions about their papers that they would like their peer reviewers to consider. 

For additional ideas for structuring peer review assignments, see the University of Alaska, Fairbanks’ extensive list of Peer Review Activities .

Teaching Online

Peer review has value no matter your mode of instruction. If you’re wondering how to best adapt peer review activities for the online classroom, explore the Purdue Online Writing Lab’s Remote Peer Review Strategies . Find more support for promoting peer connections at a distance in Student Interaction Online  and Creating and Adapting Assessments for Online Courses .

Guide students to reflect on each peer review activity and the feedback they received . After a peer review activity concludes, have students reflect on their peers’ feedback, revisit their work, and identify the revisions they plan to apply. This can be as simple as asking them to compose a paragraph or bulleted list outlining the changes that they want to make to their drafts. Prompting students to reflect on peer feedback throughout the duration of a project motivates them to see the revision process as ongoing.  

Leverage university-supported technology to support your peer review activities.  Carmen has a built-in peer review tool that can streamline the peer review process for you and your students. It facilitates students’ reviews and enables you to grade them, all in a centralized location. Learn more about using the Carmen peer review tool . 

Integrating peer review activities in your course can support your students’ holistic development as writers. For peer review to be effective, you must train your students in how to provide feedback as well as how to respond to the feedback they receive. Setting up clear expectations and resources will go a long way toward making peer review a productive endeavor for all involved. 

When designing peer review activities for your course: 

Encourage students to actively reflect on their writing processes. This helps students better establish the kind of feedback they want from peers and consider how they will incorporate it into their revisions.  

Provide opportunities for students to share their concerns and questions about peer review before conducting any activities. 

Give students agency in peer review activities by creating a community-generated peer review contract and working together to establish criteria for peer review assignments.  

Scaffold all major assignments and build multiple opportunities for peer feedback into the writing process. 

Provide students with a detailed worksheet, checklist, or rubric to guide their evaluation of their peers’ writing.  

Allow students to reflect on the feedback they received after a peer review and consider how they will incorporate it into their revisions. 

Take advantage of university-supported tools like Carmen to streamline peer review activities. 

• Peer Review in CarmenCanvas Can Aid in Students’ Learning Process (ODEE/CSTW ar…
• Shelley's (Quick) Guides for Writing Teachers: Full-Circle Peer Review (web res…
• Teaching Students to Evaluate Each Other (web resources)

Anson, I.F., & Anson, C.M. (2017). Assessing peer and instructor response to writing: A corpus analysis from an expert survey. Assessing Writing , 33 , 12-24.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2017.03.001

Cho, K., Schunn, C.D., & Charney, D. (2006). Commenting on Writing: Typology and perceived helpfulness of comments from novice peer reviewers and subject matter experts. Written Communications , 23 (3), 260-294.  https://doi.org/10.1177/0741088306289261

Inoue, A.B. (2005). Community-based assessment pedagogy. Assessing Writing , 9 , 208-238.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.asw.2004.12.001 

Lundstrom, K. & Baker, W. (2009). To give is better than to receive: The benefits of peer review to the reviewer’s own writing. Journal of Second Language Writing , 18 , 30-43.  https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002

Reid, E. S. (2006). Peer Review: Successful from the Start. The Teaching Professo r, 20 (8), 3.

WAC Clearinghouse. (n.d.). How can I get the most out of peer review? . https://wac.colostate.edu/resources/wac/intro/peer/    

Related Teaching Topics

Designing assessments of student learning, helping students write across the disciplines, supporting student learning and metacognition, related toolsets, carmencanvas, search for resources.

Peer Review

• About Peer Review

Best Practices for Instructors

Student readings to encourage best practices.

• Scholarly Peer Review
• Open Peer Review
• Peer Reviewer Recognition/Credit

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As with any other assignment or activity, a peer review exercise should be constructed with learning outcomes in mind.  Do you want students to gain skill in editing?  Do you primarily want them to improve as writers?  Are you using this interactive work to build connection and community within the cohort?  All of the above?  How much time do you have to devote to it?  Would it be more effective to move an in-class session to asynchronous homework?  Is the writing assignment iterative?  Is there a way to make the peer review iterative as well?

First, some best practices on including peer review in your course assignments from several organizations on teaching and learning:

• Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review - Washington U in St Louis Center for Teaching and Learning Incorporating peer review into your course can help your students become better writers, readers, and collaborators. However, peer review must be planned and guided carefully.
• Peer Assessment - McGill Teaching and Learning Services These resources from McGill University's Teaching and Learning Services include a detailed planning and implementation document for instructors, as well as several examples of instructor-created assessment worksheets and instructions to students.
• Teaching Students to Evaluate Each Other - Cornell Center for Teaching Innovation One-page description of best practices in designing the assignment and supporting students throughout.
• Designing Effective Peer and Self Assessment - UFlorida Center for Instructional Technology and Training Best practices, with emphasis on designing a rubric for students to refer to. Resources for creating effective rubrics.
• Instructor Resource Hub - Eli Review Eli Review is a for-profit teaching and learning suite of tools. Eli was invented by Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Mike McLeod, all faculty in the Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures department at Michigan State University and researchers in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center. These Instructor Resources include a free four-part series on peer learning pedagogy and collection of teaching materials from classrooms using Eli.

Next, a couple of first-hand accounts of professors changing up how they incorporate the peer review activities and assignments to overcome student disengagement and dissatisfaction with the way it's usually done:

• Peer Review Reviewed by Rachel Wagner In this Inside Higher Ed article, one instructor describes her goal of trying to get her students to care about writing, by getting them to care about editing. After a failure to engage students in a one-shot, in-class peer review activity, she reimagined it as an integrated part of writing, with the opportunity to work with a different partner on each assignment.
• A Better Way to Do Peer Review of Writing in Large Classes by Lauren McCarthy A UMass professor describes making peer review work for a 100+ student lecture by moving it to the online LMS and reaching out to non-participants.

Students may be engaging in a peer review activity for the first time in your classroom.  As the instructor, try to share one or more example of what is expected, what constitutes good, passable, and poor peer review, and possibly even provide a rubric or worksheet as part of the assignment.  The resources below are written for students performing peer review in the classroom, and go into more detail on these best practices and expectations:

Read the entire work before starting your peer review.

Make notes to yourself as you go, but reading the entire work might clarify things that confused you to start - it might be a stylistic choice.  Respect stylistic choices, because their paper is not and should not be just like your paper.

Be explicit about the parts you liked or thought worked well, not just things to fix.

Not only does this make the feedback feel less negative, it can help guide changes to problem areas.

When you suggest changes, be specific.

"This is unclear" is not helpful.  "The purpose of this sentence/the information it's trying to convey is not clear.  Do you mean XYZ or ABC?"

Describe, Evaluate, Suggest

Take a moment to write out your thinking, how the part you're commenting on caught your attention, before making a suggestion.  The Eli Review resource below has a good video describing the technique.

Be constructive and professional in your review!

Drafts are going to have mistakes - that's why they're not finished yet.  The point of peer review is to improve the work.  That only works if your feedback is understandable, helpful, kindly given.

• Giving Feedback for Peer Review The Purdue Online Writing Lab (OWL) offers advice on all areas and stages of writing. This page comes from their "Writing with Feedback" section.
• Student Guidelines for Peer Review - Pedagogy in Action This page includes a number of tips and suggestions to provide to students before completing their first peer review assignment. A number of these guidelines have been compiled from the University of Richmond's Writing Center and University of Hawaii at Manoa's Writing Program. Instructors may want to discuss these guidelines with students during a peer review practice session.
• Describe-Evaluate-Suggest: A Helpful Feedback Pattern - Eli Review Learning to give helpful feedback takes practice. An easy way to start is to follow the describe-evaluate-suggest pattern. Describe-evaluate-suggest doesn’t necessarily describe everything that goes into giving good feedback, but it’s one way for newer reviewers to get started. It also helps to make the feedback writers receive more useful for planning revision. In this video, one of Eli’s co-inventors Bill Hart-Davidson explains how the pattern works.

• Student Resource Hub - Eli Review Eli Review is a for-profit teaching and learning suite of tools. Eli was invented by Jeff Grabill, Bill Hart-Davidson, and Mike McLeod, all faculty in the Writing, Rhetoric, & American Cultures department at Michigan State University and researchers in the Writing in Digital Environments Research Center. These Student Resources include free tutorials and advice on both giving feedback and incorporating feedback into your writing from classrooms using Eli.

And one specific example of an assignment from a classroom here on campus:

• Peer Review Worksheet used in Prof. McCarthy's classes Described in her article above, "A Better Way to Do Peer Review of Writing in Large Classes," Prof. McCarthy provides this worksheet to students in her classes performing peer review.
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• Last Updated: Feb 9, 2024 1:33 PM
• URL: https://guides.library.umass.edu/PeerReview

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Help Articles

Submit peer reviewed assignments, learner help center nov 29, 2023 • knowledge, article details.

When you submit a peer-reviewed assignment, other learners in the course will review your work and submit feedback . 

You'll also need to give feedback to other learners. Your grade might be affected if you don't give feedback.

If you're having trouble with a peer reviewed assignment, check our troubleshooting page .

Steps to submit

To submit a peer reviewed assignment:

• Open the course you want to submit an assignment for.
• Click the Grades tab.
• Choose the assignment you want to submit work for.
• Read the instructions, then click My submission to submit your assignment.
• To save a draft of your assignment, click Save draft .
• To see what your saved assignment will look like when you submit it, click Preview .
• Before you submit, ensure the assignment is above the minimum word count. The default minimum is five words, but a course may have a unique minimum set.
• To make changes to your saved assignment, click Edit .
• To submit your assignment for peer review, click Submit for review .

By submitting a peer reviewed assignment, you confirm that you understand and will follow our privacy policies about peer reviewed work.

When will I receive feedback from my peers?

You'll receive a grade on your assignment within 7-10 days, as long as you've received at least one peer review.

When you get feedback, you may see the name of the learner who gave it. If your instructor has anonymous feedback turned on, you’ll see a notice at the top of the feedback for the assignment.

I can’t submit my assignment

If you can’t submit your assignment, make sure that your answers are all over the minimum word limit.

You may not be able to submit your assignment if your answers are too similar to another learner’s submission. Please keep in mind that plagiarism is against the Coursera Honor Code. 

If you see a notification letting you know that your assignment answers are similar to another learner’s submission, you’ll need to update your response before submitting. 

Once you’ve updated your answers with original work, the Submit for review button will appear.

If you need more time to work on your assignment, you can click Save draft and come back to it later.

If you think you shouldn’t be seeing this error, you can click the link below the notification to let us know. You’ll be able to submit your assignment after you edit your answers.

If you aren’t seeing any error messages, but are still not able to submit your assignment, try these troubleshooting steps.

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Attempt limits

Some private courses (such as courses in a Degree or MasterTrack program) may have a limit on how many times you can submit a peer-reviewed assignment.

If there's an attempt limit for your assignment, you'll see an 'Attempts' section listed near the top of the page when you open the assignment.

If you meet the attempt limit and need help with your grade, you can reach out to your program support team. You can find your dedicated support email address in the onboarding course for your program.

Save your work as a draft

If you want to start working on an assignment but you don't want to submit it yet, you can save it as a draft. When you save an assignment as a draft:

• You can work on your saved draft from any computer or device if you log in with your Coursera account.
• No one will be able to see or review your work until you submit it.
• You can save a draft as many times as you want before submitting it.

To save an assignment as a draft, click  Save draft when you're working on it.

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About PeerMark™ assignments

PeerMark is a peer review assignment tool. Instructors can create and manage PeerMark assignments that allow students to read, review, and evaluate one or many papers submitted by their classmates. With the advanced options in PeerMark instructors can choose whether the reviews are anonymous or attributed.

The basic stages of the peer review process:

• Instructor creates a Turnitin paper assignment.
• Instructor creates a PeerMark assignment and sets the number of papers students will be required to review, and creates free response and scale questions for students to respond to while reviewing papers.
• Student papers are submitted to the Turnitin assignment.
• On the PeerMark assignment start date, students begin writing peer reviews.

For each assigned paper, students write reviews by responding to the free response and scale questions.

• Students receive reviews when other students complete them.
• Once the PeerMark assignment due date passes, no more reviews can be written, completed, or edited by the writer

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Center for Teaching and Learning

Engaging students with peer review.

In this module, you will learn how to use two peer review tools, Canvas Peer Review (the peer review feature of Canvas Assignments), as well as a 3rd-party tool, Turnitin PeerMark,  to enable students to learn from each other by reviewing their peer's work and providing feedback. 

Why Peer Review?

Peer review provides students an opportunity to learn from each other by reviewing their peer's work and giving each other feedback.  The challenge is: 

How can we enable students to respond thoughtfully and constructively in their review?

Peer review, when implemented well, is beneficial not only for the person being assessed but also for the peer assessors. It helps develop students' ability and skills of discerning strengths and weaknesses, offering strategies and solutions for improvement. Many students appreciate the opportunity to learn from their peer's work, share their thoughts about a peer's performance, and get constructive feedback from their peers. 

This module introduces you to two tools for peer review:

• Canvas Peer Reviews : When you create a Canvas assignment and configure the assignment settings, you have the option of requiring students to review the submissions of this assignment by other students and provide feedback. 
• Turnitin PeerMark:  PeerMark is an application of a 3rd-party software package, Turnitin. Turnitin is licensed at Georgia Tech and integrated with Canvas. When you create an assignment, you can choose to allow students to submit it through Turnitin and enable PeerMark for peer review. 

Let's take a look at how you can use these two tools to enable students to learn from each other through peer reviews. 

Technology for Peer Review: Turnitin PeerMark

How does it work for instructors?

Turnitin is a 3rd-party tool integrated with Canvas. While it is well-known as a tool for analyzing the originality of assignment submissions and detecting plagiarism, its PeerMark feature allows peer reviews on the submissions. Setting up the peer reviews involves the following steps: 

1. Create a Turnitin assignment with PeerMark Enabled

The process of creating a Turnitin assignment is similar to the process of creating any new assignments that use external tools - You choose  External Tools  as the submission type, and select  Turnitin External Tool  from the list of available external tools. Once you save the assignment as a draft, you will the Assignment Inbox page where you can customize the assignment settings. To enable PeerMark, you just simply check the box next to  (see screenshot below). 

This video tutorial  demonstrates how to create and set up a Turnitin assignment step by step. Please note that it does not enable PeerMark though. We will explain how to set up PeerMark in the next step. 

2. Set up PeerMark

Once PeerMark is enabled, you will see a PeerMark tab show on the top of the page. It has a drop-down list that gives you two options:  PeerMark Setup  and  PeerMark Reviews  (see the screenshots below). You may choose  PeerMark Setup  to customize how and when students should do the peer reviews. Peer reviews can be automatically assigned, you may allow students to choose which submission they would like to review. You can also decide whether the peer reviews are anonymous or attributed. 

Please refer to  the detailed instructions on how to set it up . 

3. Create PeerMark Questions

When you create the assignment, you can choose to use a rubric for the peer review. The rubric can be used for scoring the assignment submissions by using the criteria and scales defined in the rubric. If you want your students to provide additional feedback, you may add specific questions to solicit responses. You may choose questions available in the library or create your own questions, which could be saved to the library for use in the future. Two question types are available: Free Response and Scale. 

To learn more, please refer to  this documentation on how to add PeerMark questions .

4. Review assignment instructions before publishing it

After you finish PeerMark setup, you can publish the assignment. However, we recommend that you review the instructions of the assignment to see if they provide students with clear information on what they are expected to do and how to do it for the peer reviews. Here is a checklist for you to consider regarding what to be included in the assignment instructions: 

• When is the assignment due? 
• When are students assigned to do the peer reviews?
• When are the peer reviews due? 
• Are peer reviews assigned to students or do you allow them to select the peer reviews?
• How many assignment submissions will each student review? 
• How are students expected to do the peer reviews? For example, are they supposed to respond to any questions? Should they provide inline comments?
• Are the peer reviews anonymous?
• Does students' evaluation of the assignment submission count for its grade?
• Do students get credit for completing the peer reviews? 
• Are there any instructions you can provide to your students regarding how to do the peer reviews? - The section below, How does it work for students? provides resources that you can provide to your students.

5. Provide instructor feedback

Besides having students review and provide feedback on the assignment submissions, you may provide your feedback as the instructor.

This video tutorial  demonstrates how to use QuickMarks and other commenting tools to provide feedback. 

6. Verify and review students' peer reviews

You can verify if students have completed the peer reviews assigned to them and review the feedback they provided. Please watch  this video tutorial  for more details.

Instructor Guides

The  instructor guides  on the Turnitin website provides help documentation on creating and managing Turinit assignments, using and interpreting similarity report, as well as setting up and managing PeerMark. 

How does it work for students?

The PeerMark assignments allow students to read, review, and evaluate assignments submitted by their peers. The basic stages of the PeerMark peer review process are: 

Submit a Turnitin assignment in Canvas  - We recommend that you have the assignment submission checked for its originality, grammar, spelling, etc. Students could use the reports generated from Turnitin to improve their assignments before submitting the final version. That means you need to allow multiple submissions before the assignment is due. Here is a  video tutorial  on how students submit a Turnitin assignment and view the originality and e-rator reports.

Conduct Peer Reviews  -  This tutorial  demonstrates how students can use QuickMarks and other commenting tools to conduct peer reviews and provide feedback in a PeerMark assignment. 

View and rate peer feedback  - After the peer reviews are released, students can view the feedback they received from their peers. They can also rate the helpfulness of the review by selecting a number on a scale from 0 to 10. Here are  instructions on how students view and rate peer feedback

Student Guides

The  student guides  on the Turnitin website provide help documentation for students on how to submit a Turnitin assignment, interpret the similarity report and the e-rator feedback, and how to conduct peer review and provide feedback in a PeerMark assignment. 

Technology for Peer Review: Canvas Peer Reviews

Introduction.

The Assignments tool in Canvas gives you an option of requiring peer reviews. Setting up the peer reviews takes a few steps: 

• Enable peer reviews when creating a new assignment. 
• Manually or automatically assign peer reviews. 
• Decide whether the peer reviews will be anonymous or not.
• Save the assignment draft. 
• Add a rubric for peer reviews. 
• Review the instructions of the assignment before publishing it.
• Verify and view students' peer reviews.

Enable peer reviews when creating a new assignment

When creating an assignment, you can require students to review submissions of this assignment by other students and provide feedback What you need to do is check the box next to  Require Peer Reviews  in the assignment settings. 

Manually or automatically assign peer reviews

You have two options when assigning peer reviews: 

• Manually assign peer reviews : Choose this option if you want to assign a particular student to review another.  Here are instructions on how to do it . 
• Automatically assign peer reviews : If you choose this option, Canvas will randomly assign peer reviews for you. You need to decide how many reviews each student needs to complete, and enter the date when the peer reviews will be assigned. The Assign Reviews date must come on or after the assignment due date. If left blank, Canvas will use the assignment due date.   Here are instructions on how to do it . 

Note : When automatically assigning peer reviews, students will not be assigned peer reviews or see their assigned peer reviews until they have submitted their own assignment. When manually assigning peer reviews, students can complete their assigned peer reviews without having to submit their own assignment first.

Decide whether the peer reviews will be anonymous or not

If you want to make peer reviews anonymous, check the box next to  Peer Reviews appear Anonymously . Anonymous peer review is a double-blind process. The reviewer cannot see the name of the assessee, and the assessee cannot identify the reviewer. 

Save the assignment draft

Once you finish configuring the assignment settings, you may save a draft of the assignment by clicking the  Save  button. We do not publish the assignment at this time because there is one more thing to do, adding a rubric for the peer reviews. This step cannot be done until we save the draft. 

Add a rubric for peer reviews

After you save the assignment draft, you can see that you have the option of adding a rubric that students can use for evaluating their peers' work. Using a rubric can help guide students' peer reviews by providing them with criteria that are clearly defined for the evaluation. Here are  instructions on how to create and add a rubric for assignments . 

Review the instructions of the assignment before publishing it

After you add the rubric for the peer reviews, you can publish the assignment. However, we recommend that you review the instructions of the assignment to see if they provide students with clear information on what they are expected to do and how to do it for the peer reviews. Here is a checklist for you to consider regarding what to be included in the assignment instructions: 

• When are the peer reviews due? - Note that you can only set the due date for the assignment submission in the settings. You have to provide the due date of the peer reviews in the instructions.
• How many reviews will be assigned to each student?
• How are students expected to do the peer reviews? For example, is there a rubric for them to use? If yes, are they supposed to write comments in addition to evaluating the assignment with the rubric? 
• Do students get credit for their peer reviews? - The peer reviews assignment won't allow you to assign a grade for students who completed the peer review. However, you may create a no-submission assignment and assign students a grade for completing the task.
• Are there any instructions you can provide to your students regarding how to do peer reviews in Canvas? - The section below,  How does it work for students?  provides resources that you can provide to your students.

Verify and view students' peer reviews

You can verify if students have completed an assigned peer review in the peer review page. You can also use SpeedGrader to view how each student evaluated the assignment submission by using the rubric, and what comments they provided. Here are  instructions on how to verify and view students' peer reviews .

Instructor Guide

• How do I use peer review assignments in a course? 
• How do I create a peer review assignment? 
• How do I manually assign peer reviews for an assignment? 
• How do I automatically assign peer reviews for an assignment?
• How do I view student peer review comments as an instructor?

A peer review assignment does not look any different to students than other Canvas assignment that does not require peer reviews. Therefore, students will submit the assignment the way they usually do for any assignments. The peer reviews are not assigned to the students until after the assignment is due. 

The video tutorial below demonstrates how students conduct peer reviews in Canvas: 

In summary, here are three essential things that student need to know about peer reviews: 

How do students know when a peer review is assigned to them?

Once a peer review is assigned to students, they will be notified about the task via email. Please note that how they receive the email notification depends on how they set up their notification preferences. 

Students can also view a notification in three areas within the Canvas course site: 

How do I know if I have a peer review assignment to complete?

You can provide the link below to students for related instructions:  

How do students submit a peer review to an assignment?

The process of peer reviews is similar to what instructors would do when they grade assignments.  If the assignment submission is  a file supported by Canvas DocViewer , it can be rendered in  SpeedGrader , which is a tool for grading assignments and quizzes and providing feedback within the submissions. Students can use the markup tools of the SpeedGrader to provide annotated comments on the assignment submissions. 

If a rubric is provided for the peer reviews, students could score the assignment by using the criteria defined in the rubric. Please note that the score does not get entered into the gradebook. Only the instructor can actually grade the assignment. 

Adding comments on each score on the rubric is optional, but could be encouraged because it is an opportunity for the reviewers to explain why they gave a certain score for each criterion. Please note that the annotated comment would not be anonymous so it should not be used for anonymous peer reviews. 

In addition, overall comments can be added by typing in a comment box or attaching a separate document. Video or audio comments can be recorded and attached. 

You can provide the link below to students for related instructions:   

How do I submit a peer review to an assignment?

How do students view feedback from peer reviewers?

Students can find peer feedback on their assignment submissions in several places. First, there is a notification under  Recent Feedback  on the right sidebar in Canvas. They can go to  Assignments  and open that particular assignment to view the feedback. 

Where can I find my peers' feedback for peer reviewed assignments?  

Canvas Peer Reviews vs. Turnitin PeerMark

You just learned how to use Canvas Peer Reviews and Turnitin PeerMark for peer review assignments. They have some features in common, but each seems to have something unique. You might be thinking: which tool should I use? To help you make decisions, we do a side-by-side comparison of these two tools in what they enable you to do in terms of these four aspects: 

• Schedule peer reviews
• Assign peer reviews
• Conduct peer reviews
• Assess peer reviews

You can download the 2-page feature comparison below to learn more details. 

Strategies for Using Peer Review Effectively

Make it transparent

Purpose, task, and criteria are three components of the  Transparency Framework  for creating assignments. This framework can be applied to peer review. You should communicate with students about the key benefits, the purposes, the process, and the criteria of peer review, which will help students take this task seriously and put efforts into it. 

Consider students' workload

You need to consider students' appropriate workload when you decide how many reviews should be assigned to each student and when the peer review will be completed. Having to review too many submissions within a short time could affect the quality of the feedback provided. 

Use rubrics or provide question prompts

Develop a rubric to guide students' review:  what to be reviewed and what criteria are to be used for the review. Go over the rubric with students and address questions they may have on applying the rubric criteria to their review. If you do not use a rubric, you may consider asking a few free-response and/ or scale questions to guide students' peer reviews. 

Offer guidance on providing good feedback

Provide students with guidelines on how to provide good feedback.  Model the respectful, informative, and constructive commentary that you expect of your students. You may use the RISE model as a guide for providing quality peer feedback:

Reflect (Recall, Ponder, and Communicate) :

• I relate/concur/disagree with X because…
• I like what you did with X because…

Inquire (seek information and/or provide ideas through questioning) :

• Have you considered looking at X from Y perspective?
• When you said X, am I understanding that you meant XY?

Suggest (introduce ideas for improvement of current iteration) :

• You might want to consider tweaking X for Y effect…
• You might want to include supporting information for X resource …

Elevate (raise a higher degree or purpose in future iterations) :

• Perhaps you can expand on this in X fashion to further address Y…
• Perhaps you can re-purpose X as Y for Z…

Provide help guides on using the peer review tool

Assume your students do not know how and provide help guides on how to use the peer review tools. You may use the student guides included in the previous sessions. 

Allow revision and resubmission

Provide students an opportunity to revise their work based on the feedback they received and resubmit their improved product. 

Recommended Resources

• Using Peer Review to Improve Student Writing : This is a comprehensive guide on using peer review from the University of Michigan. Although it is focused on using peer review to improve student writing, the strategies and techniques could be applied in other disciplines.
• Using Student Peer Review in Any Class : This resource compiled by the Center for Teaching Excellence at the University of Waterloo summarizes the Why and How of using peer review in any class. It also provides a list of other resources and further readings.

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Peer Feedback Tools

Get started, peer review, group member evaluation.

• Additional resources from Feedback Fruits (vendor)

Resources for peer review practices

Uw policy on using peer feedback tools.

Peer feedback tools — Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation — are now available as integrations in Canvas. These tools are provided by Feedback Fruits .

Add a peer feedback tool in Canvas

Allows students to review one or more artifacts submitted by classmates. Artifacts can include a wide range of file types, including documents, websites, audio and video.

• Setting up Peer Review – Create a Peer Review assignment
• Setting up Feedback Criteria – Add/create rubrics, rating scales, and comment criteria
• Using Peer Review – Monitor students’ progress, view and download submitted work, and view feedback students gave one another

Let your students know that they can get online help using Peer Review

Allows students to evaluate the contributions and behaviors of fellow group members. Can also be used to have students evaluate live performances (e.g., presentations, role plays, ensemble performances) of individuals or groups.

• Setting up Group Member Evaluation – Create a Group Member Evaluation assignment
• Using Group Member Evaluation – Monitor students’ progress and view the feedback they gave one another
• Setting up Group Contribution Grading – Add Group Contribution Grading (extra functionality) to an assignment
• Checking for Outliers – Identify out-of-the-ordinary situations in teamwork (e.g., overconfident students, group conflicts)

Let your students know that they can get an overview of Group Member Evaluation

Additional resources from Feedback Fruits

• Creating rubrics to support learning objectives
• Facilitating effective peer feedback

These resources support peer review practices (not specific to Peer Review or Group Member Evaluation tools)

Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review – This resource from Washington University in St. Louis offers excellent guidance on what to do before, during, and after your peer review activities to help students reap the greatest benefits. Although it focuses on reviewing papers in class, the advice can easily apply to any mode of work (video, audio, etc.) and to peer review assignments in Feedback Fruits.

UW’s Program on Writing and Rhetoric provides helpful information about preferred teaching practices to their instructors, including information on Peer Review . This page on revision from the Writing Program includes sample handouts and lesson plans , including a lesson plan for designing an assignment rubric as a class.

This Peer Review Guide was created by the School of Social Work to help students review one another’s work.

The Office of the University Registrar includes guidelines about peer evaluation and grading under its UW Syllabus Guidelines and Resources . The guidelines state: Peer evaluation must be used judiciously and in moderation. Peer evaluation may not replace grading by the instructor; while peer evaluation may be included in a grading rubric, students are not to assign grades to other students. 

This policy is in keeping with using Peer Review for formative assessment — on drafts of work, for example, that students have the opportunity to improve before submitting to the instructor for a final grade. If you have any questions, please contact the Registrar’s office. (The Center for Teaching and Learning does not advise on policy.)

If you have questions about the tools or need help with set-up or use, you can send an email to [email protected] , or reach out to the support chat by clicking the blue chat icon within the tools (chat is available 24/5; you’ll usually get a response within a few minutes).

You can also review frequently asked questions on the Feedback Fruits’ site, especially helpful for those getting started with the tools.

In addition, we strongly encourage you to join the UW Feedback Fruits Community of Practice in Teams. Here you can get advice from experienced users in the UW community, sign up for scheduled educational sessions on the tools, and peruse available templates for Peer Review and Group Member Evaluation activities, modifiable for your course.

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Engaging Your Students Through the Use of Peer Review

Are you looking for ways to help students grow their skills when it comes to critiquing the work of others?  Would you like to assist them in their development of lifelong skills (e.g., preparing and receiving feedback, communicating with others effectively, collaboration) which translate to life outside of the classroom?  Consider incorporating peer review and using the Peer Review and rubric tools in Canvas LMS to facilitate the process. 

Peer review assignments assist students in the development of soft, transferable skills including communication, critical thinking, collaboration/teamwork, and awareness (Wu, Chanda, and Willison, 2014; Suñol et al., 2016).  Peer review is a one approach to keep students learning and involved, which leads them to engage in self-regulation (Zimmerman, 1990) and active learning (Bonwell & Eison, 1991) and to take more responsibility for managing their own learning (e.g., Logan, 2009; Volante, Beckett, Reid & Drake, 2010).

In becoming a part of the peer review process, students engage in metacognitive reflection.  They learn what is appreciated in an answer and can successfully locate common errors and deficiencies (Mirmotahari & Berg, 2008) and by understanding the criteria outlined by the instructor, students can more easily commit to and articulate a judgment (Tai et al., 2017).  This opens the door for collaborative exchange of ideas and feedback among students by creating a space for dialogue where students better understand standards and produce better work in the future (Yucel et al., 2014).  Students’ participation in peer review is likely to create a more cohesive classroom community.

Planning and Getting Started with Peer Review

Planning for peer review can be a substantial time investment.  It is more than simply identifying the assignment and the evaluative criteria. From the 30,000 ft. view, you can look at the entire whole of a semester class and figure out how to build in peer review components across the term in ways that make the most sense.  Depending on your class content, it may be that you want to incorporate peer review into the rhythm of a recurrent project cycle.  If you aren’t ready to dive in headfirst with peer review, you can certainly look at discrete elements in your course–perhaps a midterm and a final essay or project submission–where peer review might be the most useful and utilize it there.

Whatever the case may be, you’ll want to clearly identify what you hope to achieve and what you want your students to accomplish through the peer review process.  It is also highly recommended that you plan out and model a peer review workflow by conducting an in-class ‘mock’ review. This type of exercise helps ensure that your students are on the same page with your expectations.

When all of this work is done, identify an assignment (or more) and develop evaluation criteria–generally, this works really well in the form of a rubric which can also be built directly on Canvas and associated with your assignment.   You should also take care in planning how you will evaluate students for their peer review performance to make sure that students aren’t just providing perfunctory selections in a rubric or making comments which have no chance at making a substantial impact on their peer’s next iteration of the assignment.

Use Cases/Example

Peer Review assessments can be used as a formative (i.e., check learning in progress) or a summative (i.e., end of learning activity) to gauge student progress.   

Use Case #1: Papers and Projects (Summative)

For written assignments, particularly those which are guided by a formalized writing process (e.g., in the humanities, research, etc.), peer review can be especially helpful to students as they work their way from an initial draft to final draft.  For example, students are provided an assignment with the rubric criteria, along with a deadline for the 1st draft.  Students submit the first draft and are automatically assigned a peer review partner in Canvas (this can also be done manually).  A defined window of time should be provided for peer review feedback; again this is where modeling feedback and responding to feedback can be helpful skillbuilding for your students.  The students make modifications based on feedback provided by their peers and submit a final draft to the instructor for grading.  One benefit of this, from an instructor’s perspective, is that — with adequate scaffolding and preparation, students should be able to engage in this process in a way which increases the quality of the final draft products received.

Peer review is also useful for projects which contain several stages or multiple components which will be submitted over the course of a given semester.  Much like papers, a multi-stage or multi-component project can be evaluated in sequence.  One example I have from teaching is where students use the entire semester to create a project portfolio.  Each project in that portfolio goes through a peer review cycle where students draft, peer review, and submit a final draft for instructor assessment.

Use Case #2: Discussions

Online discussion forums or threads can be tricky to implement as part of your class participation or assessment strategy.  Students often go through the motions and do not always make meaningful connections or contributions in these forums, typically doing enough to earn points, but not always in an authentically engaging way.  Adding peer review to a graded discussion in Canvas is another application of peer review as a strategy to promote authentic engagement and involvement in class conversations.

Canvas Confessions:  Peer Review

As an instructor myself, I find peer review to be extremely useful in engaging students in project work.  Students in my class work all semester long to construct a portfolio of multimedia artifacts that they will be using as professional representation when they enter the job market post-graduation.  I am a proponent of using rubrics for peer review and for providing students with the same criteria which I would use to grade.  I would flag that the expectation for them is to provide peer feedback–they are not being asked to ‘play teacher’ and assess the work in the same way.  It’s important that they know their peer feedback is critical and will ideally advance their peer’s learning in a given domain as well as their own.  I underscore that the role of peer reviewer is not one of being an editor–simply to get them to go beneath the surface of the work they review.

Though our students often come to us as novices when it comes to formal assessment and evaluation, modeling, scaffolding, and guidelines seem to work together to improve final project submissions (which are the ones I assess for a grade).  The key in all of this is your commitment and clear communication.

While I’ve used peer review strategies with both undergraduate and graduate students, I would suggest that undergraduate students may benefit from additional scaffolding, modeling,  or opportunities to practice.  For instance, you might have them only focus on a subset of the criteria in your rubric during a particular stage of the work giving them a narrower focus and providing feedback on the most critical criteria at that stage. Including peer review will go miles to enhance skill development and towards class community building.

Crystal DeJaegher Teaching and Learning Technologies Consultant, University of Notre Dame

Canvas Peer Review Resources

• Create a Peer Review Assignment
• Peer Review Assignments Instructor View (video)
• How to set up Peer Reviews (video)
• Peer Reviews in Canvas (video)
• How to as a student (video)
• Canvas Peer Review with a rubric (video)

Additional Resources for Peer Review

• Planning and Guiding In-Class Peer Review
• Remote Peer Review Strategies
• Implementing Peer Review Assessments

Bonwell, C. C., & Eison, J. A. (1991). Active Learning: Creating Excitement in the Classroom. 1991 ASHE-ERIC Higher Education Reports. ERIC Clearinghouse on Higher Education, The George Washington University, One Dupont Circle, Suite 630, Washington, DC 20036-1183.

Logan, E. (2009). Self and peer assessment in action. Practitioner Research in Higher Education, 3(1), 29-35.

Mirmotahari, O., & Berg, Y. (2018, April). Structured peer review using a custom assessment program for electrical engineering students. In 2018 IEEE Global Engineering Education Conference (EDUCON) (pp. 999-1006). IEEE.

Ndoye, A. (2017). Peer/Self Assessment and Student Learning. International Journal of Teaching and Learning in Higher Education, 29(2), 255-269.

Reinholz, D. (2016). The assessment cycle: a model for learning through peer assessment. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(2), 301-315.

Suñol, J. J., Arbat, G., Pujol, J., Feliu, L., Fraguell, R. M., & Planas-Lladó, A. (2016). Peer and self-assessment applied to oral presentations from a multidisciplinary perspective. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 41(4), 622-637.

Tai, J. H. M., Canny, B. J., Haines, T. P., & Molloy, E. K. (2017). Implementing peer learning in clinical education: a framework to address challenges in the “real world”. Teaching and learning in medicine, 29(2), 162-172.

Volante, L., Beckett, D., Reid, J., & Drake, S. (2010). Teachers’ Views on Conducting Formative Assessment within Contemporary Classrooms. Online Submission.

Wu, C., Chanda, E., & Willison, J. (2014). Implementation and outcomes of online self and peer assessment on group based honours research projects. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(1), 21-37.

Yucel, R., Bird, F. L., Young, J., & Blanksby, T. (2014). The road to self-assessment: exemplar marking before peer review develops first-year students’ capacity to judge the quality of a scientific report. Assessment & Evaluation in Higher Education, 39(8), 971-986.

Zimmerman, B. J. (1990). Self-regulated learning and academic achievement: An overview. Educational psychologist, 25(1), 3-17.

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• Student Peer Assessment

Student peer assessments are structured opportunities for students to provide and receive meaningful feedback on their work from their classmates. Engaging in peer assessment (also called peer review) fosters important skills for both the student doing the review and the one receiving the review. By serving as a reviewer, students learn how to provide constructive feedback. Moreover, students receiving feedback can gain a fresh perspective on their work and make improvements prior to their final submission. By helping students learn how to give and receive constructive feedback, peer assessments provide students with valuable skills that transfer to real-world settings where collaborative work is common. This is especially the case for students in STEM disciplines, where peer review is an important component of the publication process. Partaking in a collaborative process to improve each other’s work also promotes higher engagement with the course material, better understanding evaluation criteria and increases a sense of belonging among students, all of which are known to improve student academic success (Cho and MacArthur, 2010; Gilken and Johnson, 2019).

Best Practices to Incorporate Peer Feedback in Assessments

Peer assessments can improve student work without a proportionate increase in instructor workload. Nonetheless, instructors need to prepare students for peer review with adequate instruction and examples to be effective. Expand the boxes below to learn more about best practices and resources to incorporate student peer assessments in your courses.

Before Peer Review

Instructors should identify a particular assignment or task that could benefit from peer-review in the course. This includes multi-step projects and formative assessments (e.g., low-stakes homeworks or 5-minute essays). Ideally, use peer review for formative feedback, and not as a basis for grades since students may sometimes be inconsistent in how the rubric is applied. Instead, consider those assessments on which students have ample time to improve their work in response to the feedback received before a future higher-stakes submission or summative assessment. Some examples of summative assessments which can include a component of peer review on initial drafts include: written essays, storyboards, project reports or presentations. Another way to incorporate peer review is to allow students to reflect on and evaluate the contribution of each group member to a project/presentation, what worked well and what could be done better.

Clearly explain why peer review is important and how it connects to the learning objectives of the course.

Anticipate what tools will be used for the peer-review process, and provide students with instruction and support for using these tools. For example, students can be taught to use the suggesting or track changes feature in Google Docs or MS Word to provide feedback. Certain settings in MS word allow for double-blind review of documents in which the name of the student or commenter is not known, limiting potential biases in review. You may also ask students to bring in a named copy and an unnamed copy of their work to class for engaging in double-blind peer-review. You can create a peer review assignment in Canvas that is associated with a rubric for students to use to evaluate individual or group assignments . Alternatively, you may adopt a template to use Qualtrics or google forms for peer review .

Consider in advance what process you will use to assign peer reviewers to students. Peer-review groups can be directly assigned or set up randomly in Canvas . Always leave room for flexibility in changing assigned groups depending on student needs.

Set expectations around the timeline for providing feedback and if this will be done as an in-class activity or will be completed outside of the classroom. If the assignment for review is shorter than 4 pages, does not require detailed written feedback and the class sizes are small (< 40 students), consider allocating time in class itself. If assigned outside the classroom, provide students with guidelines regarding the time they should spend to review an assignment. You may also assign points for completing the review, to ensure all students receive feedback on their assignment.

Construct a rubric that allows students to provide detailed feedback–for example, a checklist rubric (docx) or single-point rubric (docx) with space for comments. Alternatively, you may create a feedback form that contains specific questions to guide the peer review process accompanied by a detailed analytic rubric. Co-creating rubrics with students may also provide an additional avenue for students to engage with the material because it requires students to identify and consider on what criteria their work should be evaluated. 

Train students on the rubric so that they can apply it effectively and consistently. For example, you may set aside time in class for  students to practice applying the rubric to a sample of work. Then, facilitate a discussion on how students used the rubric and what are ways to provide effective feedback. Consider using at least one class session to discuss best practices in providing feedback, the distinction between reviewing and editing. Remind students that they are evaluating the work and not the person. At the same time, remind them of the vulnerability of the person in sharing their work and avoiding value judgements.

Model the type of feedback students should expect to receive or provide in assessments.This may include providing a short summary of the work, along with what aspects work well and what could be improved on. If needed, take time in class to discuss what good feedback looks like. Some sample prompts include (Bean, 2009):

• Write out at least two things that you think are particularly strong about this draft.
• Identify two or three aspects of the draft where there is room for growth or improvement.
• Make two or three directive statements recommending the most important changes that the writer should make in the next draft.

After Peer Review

The review work has been done; now what? How can you help students integrate what they have learned in the review process and improve their work?

Here are a few options for how to proceed:

• Before receiving peer feedback, students do a self-assessment using a rubric or based on embedded prompts. Then, they compare their observations to the peer feedback.
• Instead of directly sharing all feedback with individuals or groups of students, as an instructor you may summarize quantitative and qualitative feedback and address common themes during class. 
• Students discuss the peer feedback with the instructor to help develop strategies for improvement.
• In a non-blind review process, students could discuss the feedback with their peer reviewer to seek clarification and prioritize the comments to address.
• After revising their work in response to peer feedback, students can summarize the feedback they received, describe the changes they made in response to the feedback or provide a justification for not incorporating suggested changes.
• After revising their work, students can conduct a self-assessment in the form of a memo that describes the changes they made in response to peer review and their reflection on how review improved their work. 

References:

Bean, John C. (2011). Engaging ideas: The professor’s guide to integrating writing, critical thinking, and active learning in the classroom (second edition). San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

Center for Teaching Innovation. (n.d.). Peer Assessment . Cornell University

Center for Teaching Innovation. (n.d.). Teaching students to evaluate each other . Cornell University

Cho, K., & MacArthur, C. (2010). Student revision with peer and expert reviewing . Learning and Instruction, 20 (4), 328–338.

Gilken, J.M. & Johnson, H.L. (2021). Implementing a Peer Feedback Intervention within a Community of Practice Framework . Community College Journal of Research and Practice , 45:3, 155-166.

Stearns Center Writing Across the Curriculum (n.d.). How to Help Students Give Effective Peer Response . George Mason University.

Stearns Center Writing Across the Curriculum (n.d.). Tips for Commenting on Student Writing . George Mason University.

WAC Clearinghouse. (2006, April). Creating effective peer review groups to improve student writing . Colorado State University.

Further reading and resources:

Stevens, D. D., & Levi, A. J. (2013). Introduction to rubrics: An assessment tool to save grading time, convey effective feedback, and promote student learning (second edition). Sterling, VA: Stylus.

Sweetland Center for Writing.(n.d.). Using peer review to improve student writing . University of Michigan.

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Peer review for instructors (using Canvas Groups)

• Users must be part of an institutional license that includes peer review and a Canvas Learning Management System (LMS) integration
• Course copy is not supported in the PlayPosit peer review.
• Instructors must link and launch a regular Bulb in their Canvas courses before assigning a peer review Bulb, and all the students are recommended to take a regular Bulb before taking a peer review Bulb. Please see the best practices section for more information. 
• Information on PlayPosit peer review in a non-Canvas LMS can be found in this help article . 
• Information on PlayPosit peer review without an LMS can be found in this help article .
• Information on the learner experience of peer review:
• Learner experience with an LMS
• Learner experience without an LMS

In this article

Create, assign, and grade peer review assignments in PlayPosit 3.0

What is a peer review bulb?

Terminology, best practices when using playposit's peer review application, importing groups from canvas, how to update groups for peer review, creating a peer review assignment with a rubric, creating a peer review assignment without a rubric, grading peer review assignments with rubrics.

• Grading peer review assignments without rubrics

Data export for peer review

The peer review application provides instructors the opportunity to collect learner-submitted videos. These videos are then distributed among learner groups for review by peers. Based on how instructors have configured the assignment, learners in the group will provide criterion-based feedback referencing a rubric formatted by the instructor and/or open ended, time-stamped feedback through a discussion interaction. Peer review assignments may be used in a traditional classroom environment or for professional development.

This section outlines important terminology and definitions of the items that will be referenced throughout the help article. Peer review assignments are customizable and allow for several optional features.

Rubric - A customizable scoring tool that lists the criteria by which a peer review submission may be graded, primarily used to structure the way learners give each other feedback. If a peer review assignment has a rubric, then learners will fill out the required criterion to submit feedback on their peers' submissions  and  participate in a discussion forum. Instructors will also fill out rubrics to assign final grades to learner submissions.

Note : Rubrics are optional. In the case that an instructor has opted to implement a rubric, it will be automatically attached to the videos that learners upload to PlayPosit.

Note : If a peer review assignment does not have a rubric, learners will only be required to upload a submission and participate in the discussion forum. The instructor will manually assign a point value to learner submissions.

Criterion - A rubric element representing a principle or standard by which to evaluate a learner's peer review submission. Instructors will assign a point value to each criterion ranging from 1-5 points. Each criterion will include a section for learners to provide peers with additional feedback to explain why they received the point value.

Note : Only available when assigning a peer review assignment with a Rubric. 

Group - A collection or subset of learners within a class who may give each other feedback on a peer review assignment. Members of a group can see each other's submissions and are only able to receive and provide feedback to members of their own group. Click here to learn more about Canvas groups.

Note : Groups are optional. Peer review assignments that do not contain groups will require that learners view and provide feedback to all peers within the class.

Group Sets - Group sets house the different groups within a Canvas course and can be imported into PlayPosit. Click here to learn more about Canvas group sets.

This section highlights best practices and recommendations to ensure the easiest and most seamless workflow when using the PlayPosit peer review application.

• Ensures that all learners enrolled in the course are properly set up with PlayPosit accounts.
• Ensures that all learners will be available for sorting when building groups for a peer review assignment.
• Familiarizes learners with the process of taking a PlayPosit bulb. 
• Prepare groups in Canvas before creating the peer review assignment -  For a more seamless Canvas workflow,  create a group set and populate it with groups before designing a peer review assignment and rubric. See this section for more information.
• (If rubrics are enabled)  The peer review assignment has three parts. First, upload a video and submit it to your instructor. Second, watch your peer review group's videos and leave time stamped comments. Third, fill out the grading rubrics, and submit your final feedback.
• (If rubrics are disabled)  The peer review assignment has two parts. First, upload a video and submit it to your instructor. Second, watch your peer review group's videos and leave time-stamped comments.

Importing groups will enable instructors to require that learners only submit feedback for members of their own groups for their overall peer review assignments to be marked complete. Ordinarily, for a peer review assignment to be marked complete, a learner must both submit a video and submit feedback for every member of their class.

Before importing groups into PlayPosit from Canvas, please ensure that:

• You have existing group sets and groups in Canvas
• Each student in your Canvas course belongs to a group within each group set
• You have created  and  launched at least one PlayPosit assignment within your Canvas course
• Your admin has provided PlayPosit with an admin developer key .

This is the current recommendation for importing groups:

If you have not created a peer review assignment yet, click here (with rubric) or here (without rubric).

If you need to make changes to a group set or group after the initial import, then follow the instructions here .

Note:  This warning toast occurs when the Canvas session has expired. Click on Fetch Group Sets to refresh the Canvas session. The second time that you click on Fetch Group Sets, a green toast will appear that says “Fetching Imported Groups”. This will load newly created Canvas Group Sets.

Instructors may need to update their groups for a variety of reasons, either before a peer review bulb has been assigned to learners, or while they are completing it. Regardless of the type of change that needs to be made, PlayPosit's peer review application allows for group membership to be changed at any time:

Note : If a learner has changed groups they should not have to re-submit a peer review bulb attempt. However, the members in the learner's group will change accordingly. If the learner has changed groups after receiving feedback from members of their original group, they should still be able to view the feedback from the original group in addition to the new group feedback.

The instructor's experience

PlayPosit strongly encourages reviewing the terminology and reading the section on best practices when using PlayPosit’s peer review application before creating a peer review assignment with the following steps.

• Click Advanced settings and toggle  Enable peer review  on.
• Optional  Toggle Allow learners to upload video files on   to allow learners to upload their peer review submissions directly to PlayPosit. (Only possible if your institutional license includes HLS minutes )
• Optional Toggle Anonymize student rubric submissions to prevent learners from knowing the identities of their reviewers.
• Optional Toggle Allow learners to use private video hosts off to restrict learners so they can only use YouTube and Vimeo as video sources. By default, this option is enabled and learners can use the institution’s video host’s integrations if they have an account. To learn more about the different video hosts available on PlayPosit, click here .
• Toggle Enable grading rubrics on to allow learners to evaluate each other according to specific criteria that is set by the instructor in the next step. Otherwise, learners will only watch the videos of their peers and leave time-stamped comments. See the section on terminology for more information on rubrics. Otherwise, refer to this section on how to create a peer review assignment without a rubric.
• Define each rubric criterion (e.g. Clarity of concept ).
• Numeric values for each criterion can be set to be worth between 1 and 5 points.
• Reorganize the sections and criterion by dragging and dropping from the left side of each row.

• Click Save and Close  when done to save the rubric and move on to setting a bulb link.
• If a group set has already been imported for the class, select it from the drop down menu labeled " Select Group Set " and then click Link .

• Optional Toggle the  Enable complete/incomplete grading  to allow learners to receive full points as soon as they have both submitted their own video and completed giving feedback to all other learners in their group or class.
• Optional  Toggle  Allow learners to upload video files  to allow learners to upload their own video files to their peer review submissions directly to PlayPosit. (Only possible if your institutional license includes HLS minutes )
• Optional  Toggle  Anonymize student rubric submissions  to prevent learners from knowing the identities of their reviewers. 
• Optional Toggle Allow learners to use private video hosts off to restrict learners so they can only use YouTube and Vimeo as video sources. By default, this option is enabled and learners can access any video host that the institutional license includes. To learn more about the different video hosts available on PlayPosit, click here .
• Click  Next  to move on to setting the bulb link when finished configuring the peer review assignment.

Grading a peer review bulb with a rubric

Once learners have completed all of the necessary tasks associated with the peer review assignment, the instructor is able to monitor the peer review assignment to:

• View individual submissions
• Assess the feedback provided and received
• Assign final grades to each learner

See the additional steps below if grading peer review assignments that have rubrics.

• Copy  a learner's submission into the My Bulbs tab as a new bulb.
• Assign individual grades to learners and  View feedback given by a learner and feedback received by the same learner
• Enter Grade Mode to quickly assign grades to multiple learners at a time
• Sync grades to the Canvas gradebook.
• Export the learners' data for this peer review assignment.

Note : To moderate or participate in the discussion, click the R ubric   button. The Rubric button will allow you to view Peer Review bulbs and participate in discussion forums. After clicking the Rubric button click the Evaluate Submission button to view the Peer Review bulb.

Filling out rubrics as an instructor and exporting final grades

The section below outlines how instructors submit final grades for a peer review assignment with rubrics and how to export the final grades. In order for an assignment to be considered complete, instructors will need to submit final grades.

• Click the rubric icon for the learner you wish to grade. This will open a panel with three tabs, opening automatically to the Instructor Feedback tab. 
• Click the rubric icon in the sidebar to access the grading rubric for the learner's submission. The instructor can enter numeric values and leave comments or notes for each criterion. 

Example of what is synced to Canvas: If a Canvas assignment worth 50 points and the rubric is worth 16 points and the learner earns 4/16 for the rubric, it will appear as 25% in Canvas. 4 out of 16 is 25% of the possible points so Canvas translates that as 25% out of 50 which results in 12.5.

View feedback received from the learner's peers

Click on the Feedback Received  tab to view the rubrics completed by the learner's peers for the submission. These rubrics do not factor into the learner's score. The final grade is assigned by the instructor filling out the rubric associated with the learner’s submission.

Click the Discussion icon to load a view of the discussion forum for the learner's submission.

View feedback given

Select the Feedback Given  tab to view the scores given by the learner to others in the peer group. The instructor can also view group progress status.

Grading without a rubric

If rubrics were not enabled for the assignment, use the gradebook to: 

• Preview  a learner's submission
• Copy  a learner's submission into the My Bulbs tab as a new bulb.
• Enter Grade Mode  to quickly assign grades to multiple learners at a time.
• Sync Grades  to Canvas's gradebook.
• Export  the learners' data for this peer review assignment.

Assign and export final grades

To export the learners' data from the peer review assignment, please click on the data export icon on the top right of the monitor page.

On the exported CSV file, instructors can find the following information:

• Learner name
• Learner Email
• The number of interactions (learners can't add interaction to the peer review bulb, there are three built-in interactions to host discussion and grading. When learners reply to others' bulbs, the interaction they interact with will also add to this number. For example, if a learner has reviewed two other learners' bulbs, there will be 9 interactions in this field.)
• Interaction types (it will be discussion interaction and fill in the blank by default)
• Points earned 
• Points available
• LMS sync status
• Completion time

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