Peer review with students (originally posted on Wednesday, February 26, 2014) (see opening post for Module 2)
Peer review with students is not something I have done much yet. I can understand the reasoning behind it, and I enjoyed doing it in part 2 of this course.
Reason I don’t do much peer review in my courses:
- students expectation of the teacher to give feedback
- for language errors, quite often peer marking can make it worse!
- it can take a lot of time – students need to be ‘trained’, and then the ‘reviews’ need to be checked
- there are large number of students and teachers in the course – so it is difficult to maintain parity if peer review is part of the final grade
That said I do use peer review for specific aspects that are easier to check. For example:
- Is the reference list in the correct order
- Are in-text citations correct
- Is there a main point to each paragraph
I would like peer review to be a bigger part of the courses I teach, but I’m not sure how to get around the parity issue if we make peer review an assessment.