Tools for Peer Review and Peer Evaluation available in Canvas

Summary

Peer review and peer evaluation are widely recognized as valuable learning processes through which students develop lifelong skills in self-assessment and giving constructive feedback. Canvas Peer Review and Buddycheck are two tools available in Canvas to support you in setting up peer feedback to bring into your courses. This post summarises the features of these tools to help you decide which is best suited for your course activities and intended outcomes.

What are ‘Peer Review’ and ‘Peer Evaluation’?

Peer review describes the practice of having students of similar competency levels provide feedback on one another’s work. A key benefit of this process is that it can provide students with more diverse feedback and perspectives on their work than from instructors alone (Hansen and Liu, 2005). It can also increase the writing skills of the reviewers, as it encourages them to engage meaningfully with course content, think critically about academic best practice, and prompt reflexivity concerning their writing (Lundstrom and Baker, 2009). It is particularly beneficial when deployed at multiple points during the writing process i.e. at both the draft and final submission stages. This is because reviewers can ascertain whether their feedback was fair, clear, and constructive enough to be implemented by their peers, and reviewees can identify their progress between drafts and final submissions (Hansen and Liu, 2005).

Peer evaluation, alternatively, is a means of students providing feedback regarding their peers’ contribution to a piece of group work or a given task. When employed as part of group work, peer evaluation has been found to dramatically increase student participation levels, reduce ‘free-riding’ by group members, support consistent assessment of individuals based on their contributions and improve the overall quality of output (Fellenz, 2006; Tavoletti, Stephens and Dong, 2019). Peer evaluation can also improve teamwork dynamics within courses and support the development of collaboration skills in students (Jassawalla and Sashittal, 2017). The value of this process is enhanced when self-assessment is incorporated into the process, as students gain greater insights into their task performance by comparing it with their peers’ perspectives (Bryan et al., 2005).

Canvas Peer Review and Buddycheck are simple tools capable of supporting both of these processes, but there are differences as to when they should be used.

Canvas Peer Review

Canvas Peer Review is a tool that allows students to evaluate one or more assignments submitted by their peers. The submission type for the assignment would typically be a file upload of a written assignment but could also be used for video submissions or presentations.

Much like the standard instructor marking process, students provide feedback to one another in SpeedGrader through the use of comment boxes, attaching documents, scoring against rubrics, or a combination of these. Reviewers may comment on the quality of the writing, formatting, language, organization, or structure. They could also be asked to feed back on more complex elements such as the comprehension of the topic, the quality of the argument, or referencing.

Of course, Canvas Peer Review should not be viewed as a substitute for instructor feedback and grading, but as a highly useful exercise for students that can help support the grading process for instructors. Note that students will not automatically receive a grade for completing a peer review. If you want to grant points for completing peer reviews, you could create a ‘No Submission’ assignment in the Gradebook and assign e.g. 5 points manually for students who complete a review. With the ‘anonymous’ option switched on, the student who submitted the assignment is unable to view names linked with any feedback, and the reviewer is unable to see the name of the person whose work they are assessing. As a tutor, you can still turn on anonymous grading as normal. 

Buddycheck

Buddycheck is designed for self- or peer evaluation of a student’s contribution to and performance in any given group task. Students use Likert-style questions to rate their peers and the team as a whole on a scale of 1–5 concerning several inbuilt or instructor-generated criteria such as overall satisfaction, conflict, communication levels, how much of a contribution an individual made, and whether they helped keep the project on track. Self-assessment can also be switched on so that students reflect on their own performance during the task.

Instructors can request that students qualify their ratings with open questions for each metric, encouraging deeper consideration when evaluating peers. One of the most useful features of Buddycheck is that evaluations can be set up to be formative, summative, or both. This allows instructors to check in on groups during the task and intervene during conflicts or prompt individuals to complete surveys. Should they emerge, certain group dynamics (e.g. conflict) can be flagged by the system.

The output from a Buddycheck evaluation is an ‘Adjustment Factor’ – a total score for each student formed by taking the student’s individual score and dividing it by the average score for the group, including (or excluding) their self-assessment score. On completion of the task, instructors can release this score and students receive it via email or by accessing the BuddyCheck dashboard in Canvas. Note that students do not see their scores from individuals across criteria, only the averages. For obvious reasons, individual scoring and feedback can be kept entirely anonymous. Scores can be conveniently displayed in a table or chart for students to compare their self-assessment with that of their peers’ evaluation and the group average. The Adjustment Factor can be used as a standalone metric for an individual’s task performance or can be used to determine their overall score for the project.

For support on setting up peer review/evaluation using Canvas Peer Review and/or Buddycheck, please contact the TEL team at fhe-tel@ljmu.ac.uk or send John-Paul a message on Microsoft Teams. 

You may also find the following resources useful:

‘How Do I Use Peer Review Assignments in a Course?’:

https://community.canvaslms.com/t5/Instructor-Guide/How-do-I-use-peer-review-assignments-in-a-course/ta-p/697 (links to external site)

‘LJMU Staff Guide: Buddycheck’:

https://ltech.ljmu.ac.uk/?page_id=10206 (links to external site)

Book a Facilitated LJMU Buddycheck Training Session:  

https://ltech.ljmu.ac.uk/?page_id=10268 (links to an external site)

References

Bryan, R.E., Krych, A.J., Carmichael, S.W., Viggiano, T.R. and Pawlina, W. (2005). ‘Assessing Professionalism in Early Medical Education: Experience with Peer Evaluation and Self-Evaluation in the Gross Anatomy Course’, Annals-Academy of Medicine Singapore, 34(8), pp. 486–491. [Online]. Available at: https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/16205826/

Fellenz, M.R. (2006). ‘Toward Fairness in Assessing Student Groupwork: A Protocol for Peer Evaluation of Individual Contributions’, Journal of Management Education, 30(4), pp. 570–591. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1177/10525629062867  

Hansen, J.G. and Liu, J. (2005). ‘Guiding Principles for Effective Peer Response’, ELT Journal, 59(1), pp.31–38. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1093/elt/cci004

Jassawalla, A.R. and Sashittal, H.C. (2017). ‘What Students Think and Do in Classroom Teams when Peer Evaluations are Highly Consequential: A Two‐Stage Study’, Decision Sciences Journal of Innovative Education, 15(2), pp. 219–247. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1111/dsji.12127

Lundstrom, K. and 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(1), pp.30–43. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jslw.2008.06.002

Tavoletti, E., Stephens, R.D. and Dong, L. (2019). ‘The Impact of Peer Evaluation on Team Effort, Productivity, Motivation and Performance in Global Virtual Teams’, Team Performance Management: An International Journal. [Online]. Available at: https://doi.org/10.1108