Skip to main content

Writing Strong Criteria for Peer Review

A great peer review assignment is open-ended.

A closed-ended question is a closed door. Open-ended assignments are an invitation to think critically and creatively about a topic. There is a time and place in instruction and assessment for closed-ended questions – we need to know what our students can recall and understand before we know they’re ready to move on to higher-order tasks. But the great assignments, the one’s we share with our colleagues and the ones that grow our students confidence, are open-ended.
Vice Provost – Carlton University

A great criteria is singular, challenging, and a bit subjective.

As teachers, we are subject area experts. One of our tasks is to help our students become experts themselves. This means that we must clearly define for them what excellent work looks like. We do this with our assignment criteria. By distilling our assignments down to smaller, bite-sized tasks, we can bring the focus in on one, single criteria. Our instruction and feedback, then, can elevate student work and allow for students to channel their effort into mastering one skill at a time. It’s the classic argument of depth over breadth.

When we add a step of formative feedback into the work process, we allow ourselves the opportunity to increase the challenge level of the criteria. We can also make the criteria more subjective, which moves students farther down the path towards being subject-area experts.

Examples

This work has minimal grammatical errors.
This example is too rigid and low-level to be of worth using for peer review. Students who can spot grammatical errors easily will get minor practice and students who struggle with grammar will flail. There’s no opportunity for evaluation with this criteria, just opportunity for spotting and counting.
This work establishes and maintains a formal style.
This criteria (CCSS.ELA-LITERACY.W.8.1.D, to be precise) is a strong example of a criteria worthy of peer review. Students will have to analyze the writing sample and make an informed judgement. This practice of giving feedback to their peer will help them to develop a better understanding of the assessment criteria and to apply that understanding to their own work. Because this criteria is singular in focus, appropriately challenging. and just a bit subjective, it makes a very strong criteria for peer review.

Partnering an open-ended assignment, a strong criteria, and a rapid peer review tool like Floop’s Flash Feedback is a great way to help students develop feedback literacy. Give it a try and let us know how it goes!

Labels:

Comments

  1. JacksonJuly 13, 2019 at 7:16 AM

    Learning to proofread your work yourself is a must-have skill. But, it always helps to have a second pair of eyes review your work to make sure you haven't missed embarassing typos, or grammatical and syntactical errors. I'd suggest WordsRU.com for this. It also saves you a lot of time to have your work formatted according to the right style. Saves you a lot of time and allows you to focus on your work.
    Academic Editing and Proofreading Services
    Academic Editing Services
    Academic Proofreading Services
    Article Editing Services
    Article Writing Services
    Journal Article Editing Services
    Book Editing Services
    Book writing Services

    ReplyDelete

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Back-to-School: Consider Your Feedback System, Not Grading System

One question I ask other teachers is “How important is feedback in learning?” Every teacher I talk to agrees that feedback is crucial. It’s how both teacher and student gets better. Research backs the importance of feedback; building off of John Hattie’s work comparing factors on learning, Evidence for Learning’s toolkit ranks feedback as having the highest impact out of their 34 approaches (along with meta-cognition) with a +8 months’ impact on students’ learning progress. I follow the feedback question with “How important are grades in learning?” It might seem like a loaded question. You can imagine how teachers respond: “They’re not.” Why give grades, then? We’ll save that topic for another occasion. For now, I just want to point out that we are frequently asked to consider and describe our grading system by students, parents, colleagues, and administrators. We’re rarely asked about the much bigger and more important component of our work: feedback. With back-to-school qu
4 comments
Read more

A Culture of Iteration: Policies and Practices for a Revision-FocusedClassroom

Success in the real world depends on a person's ability to iterate. to understand the definition of success on a task to seek feedback early and often to use that feedback to revise and refine until successful As teachers, its our job to scaffold this process, with developmentally-appropriate differentiation, until our students can fly solo. As I sit here writing this, my  SO  Dan is at his desk  red-lining  a building diagram for a warehouse in Canada. When he's done, the diagram will go back to his team of engineers where they will respond to Dan's feedback with a better design. They'll repeat this process until both building code and client requirements have been met. To do this work, which requires an iteration cycle that can last over a year or more, Dan has to understand building code and client needs, seek feedback from other engineers and the client, and use that feedback to revise and refine until the design is ready for implementation. ​Dan wasn'
4 comments
Read more

Part 2 - Tools for an Equitable Feedback System: Engaging with Criteria

This series of posts will cover a variety of bite-sized strategies that can be incorporated into a more holistic feedback system. To learn more about the research behind these approaches, we recommend you first read our white paper . Part 1 - Feedback is Emotional For feedback information to be useful, it must communicate:  Where am I going? (What are the goals?) How am I going? (What progress is being made toward the goal?) Where to next? (What activities need to be undertaken to make better progress?) (Hattie & Timperley, 2007).  Supporting students in engaging with the grading criteria helps give context to the feedback to come. In other words, it does the groundwork of helping them determine for themselves, "Where am I going?"
Post a Comment
Read more