Options for Peer Assessment and Peer Review

NEW: A vision for education and skills at Newcastle University: Education for Life 2030+

You can conduct peer assessment manually (eg ask students to exchange scripts by email) but for larger groups it will be easier to use one of the tools available in Canvas. These will help you to manage the process, make sure it is fair, and have oversight of the quality of reviews that students are writing.

Set up a peer assessment in Canvas to gather peer reviews of individual pieces of work (You can do this using a Canvas assignment or by using PeerMark within Turnitin)
Use peer review discussions to enable students to give feedback on another students reply to a class discussion.
You can ask groups to submit a piece of groupwork which will then be reviewed as a group task by other groups (inter-group review)
For group work projects you can use BuddyCheck as a tool enable group members to review the contribution of peers in their group (intra-group review). You can use this to generate individual marks based on the mark you give the group for their assessed project.

On this page we’ll compare some of these options and signpost the step-by-step guides that will walk you through the processes involved.

Individual peer review: Canvas vs PeerMark

If you would like individual students to review the individual work of other students you can set this up using a Canvas peer review assignment (marking with SpeedGrader) or by using Turnitin as an external tool and setting up a Peermark assignment within this.

Both options involve the following stages

Students submit their assignment – you set an initial assignment due date
After the assignment due date work is allocated to peers – there’s a review start date.
Student reviews are released to their peers
You can view the reviews submitted by students. Canvas give you the option of adding comments, Peermark give you the option of grading reviews.
You have the option of marking the initial assignment and releasing your final marks to students.

The table below details how these two tools manage the overall process. PeerMark is a more sophisticated solution giving you more control of the overall process.

Feature	Canvas/SpeedGrader	Turnitin/PeerMark
Plagiarism review	Yes – set Turnitin as the similarity checker in assignment setup	Yes
Submission types and file sizes	Multiple files (video and audio); 250 MB file size limit	Single file submission; 100 MB file size limit
Automatically assign reviews	Yes	Yes – use automatically distribute papers for review
Manually assign reviews	Yes	Yes – using the distribution tab
Assign multiple reviews to each student	Yes – using automatic or manual approaches	Yes – set a value higher than 1 in Automatically distribute papers for review or use the distribution tab.
Anonymous peer reviews	Yes, this can be set up. Student reviewers cannot see the name of the person whose work they are reviewing.	Set students can view the names of their peers during reviewto no.
Can students who do not submit an assessment conduct reviews	Students won’t be automatically allocated peer reviews, but an instructor can manually assign reviews to a student who did not submit.	Optional setting students without a submission can review
Methods to guide student reviews	Students use the same options that are available to teachers i.e. Canvas rubrics/grading forms, bubble comments, final comments	Prompts via free response and scale questions. Student reviewers can also add bubble comments
Can reviewers assign marks	Only if you add a rubric to the assignment	Yes
How do you monitor and mark reviews	From inside SpeedGrader – you can add comments to this.	Using the PeerMark reviews tab. You have the option to grade student reviews. You can also download an Excel summary any scale response questions from the Peermark inbox.
Control when reviews are released to students	This is not possible - reviews are available to students as soon as they are created.	Yes – by setting the peer feedback available from date.
Set a deadline for the review activity	This needs to be done outside the assignment itself (i.e. by adding a calendar entry.) Students can continue to review work after this time.	Yes – by setting the review until date.
Provide a final mark to students (optional)	By marking the initial assignment in SpeedGrader	Mark using the Turnitin Assignment inbox, post grades in Turnitin, post them in Canvas Grades
How do students know if they have a peer review to complete?	Canvas generates reminders for each stage on the student to-do list and sends an email.	Turnitin generates email notifications to students. Students need to click on the assessment and open the Turnitin dashboard to complete actions.
How do students access reviews/feedback	By clicking on the assignment (or To-Do list item)	By clicking on the assignment and opening the Turnitin dashboard

Adding peer review to Canvas assignments

If you are setting up a peer review assignment for the first time see our Wayfinder individual peer review assignments in Canvas this takes you through steps involved and signposts the relevant Canvas guides.

The following Canvas guides describe key steps in the process:

Instructor guides

See also our list of avoidable issues with Canvas peer assignments.

Turnitin/Peermark Assignments

Before you can set up a Peermark assignment you need to create an assignment in Canvas that uses Turnitin as an external tool (Canvas Orientation course).

With this initial assignment set up, you can then use the Turnitin dashboard to set up and configure the settings for the Peermark assignment.

The links below are to the Turnitin website - we have linked to guides that are relevant when we are using Turnitin as an external tool in Canvas.

Instructors

Visit the Turnitin site for a full list of instructor guides for Peermark and a full list of student guides for Peermark.

Peer Review of Canvas Discussions

A peer review discussion enables students to provide feedback on another student's reply on a course discussion.

Peer reviews can only be added as part of a graded discussion and unlike peer review assignments, discussions cannot be assigned anonymously.

As an instructor: How do I use peer review discussions in a course?
As a student: How do I submit a peer review to a discussion?

Group assignments and review of other groups work (inter-group)

You may want to add group peer review to a group assignment.

For example, if you have set a task requiring groups to work together to produce a presentation, you may wish to ask each group to collaboratively review the work of one or more other groups.

There are a number of approaches that you could use to manage this, but no clear best approach.

Peer review group assignments in Canvas

We can create a group assignment in Canvas in which one member of a group submits work on behalf of their group. However, any subsequent peer reviews attached to this assignment become individual tasks (i.e. each individual member from group 1 will review a copy of another group's assignment shown against a member that group).
You may be able to work around this limitation with guidance to a group leader.

Use discussions or collaborative spaces to manage inter-group review

To organise a collaborative group response, you could follow a process like this:

Require students to post their group output on Canvas (e.g. by editing a Canvas page, or submitting them to a discussion board). If you also wished to mark the group output you could create a group assignment and require one of the group to submit their files to this area.
Make it clear which group is providing feedback for which group with some instructions on Canvas.
Ask the reviewing group to post their feedback – as a reply to the discussion board post or as a file attachment/ link on the Canvas page.
Add calendar items to make the deadlines for the review task clear.

Do get in touch with LTDS if you would like to discuss options in the context of your students and assessment needs.

Peer assessment of group work (intra-group)

Buddycheck is a Canvas integrated tool for peer evaluation of group work contribution. It can be used to enable students to evaluate their own and their peer's contribution to, and performance in, group work.  The output is an adjustment factor which can be used to update the mark awarded to each student individually.

See the BuddyCheck guides.

Get in touch

Email support

Leave feedback

Subscribe to newsletter