Effective Peer Review

I'll be the first to admit that I did not do a good job last year of teaching my students to peer review each other's work.

I thought it would be enough to teach my students about how their papers and presentations would be scored, hand them a copy of the rubric and let them start scoring.  Suffice it to say, the results were not good.   Students got contradictory advice - "This paper was great!  Good job!" would be scribbled next to "This paper was very weak."  I think most of my students would have agreed that the Peer Review didn't help them at all.

Which was sad, because peer review is a powerful tool when students apply it well.  Not only does it allow them to help one another - it also improves their own understanding of the subject matter.

Rather than scrap the idea of peer review,  I completely changed my approach.

1.  TRAIN STUDENTS TO PEER REVIEW

I realized that one of the the main problem was that the students didn't have a firm understanding of the how their papers were scored, so I started by breaking down the College Board rubrics into simpler to understand language.  I also focused on one Row of the rubric at a time.

The students read three sample IRRs.  Every day for about two weeks, we spent about fifteen minutes of class talking about how to score each paper in a single Row.  We practiced until the students were almost as well trained in grading as I was.

2.  LESS IS MORE

Once my students were trained,  I divided them into groups.  Each group consisted of 4 students who were considered the "experts" in a single Row.  When we had a set of draft IRRs, we divided them so that each group of students had a small number of drafts to read through and score in just their Row. By the end of class, the IRRs have circulated through each group and each one had an accurate score for each Row. In addition, the students left great feedback for one another on their papers.  Instead of comments like "This paper was weak,"  students got comments like, "you need to add another perspective to your argument" and "dont' forget to add attributive phrases to indicate the credibility of the author you're quoting."