Peer reviews
Canvas has a feature for peer reviewing. By using it you may easily create and administrate assignments where your students have to give each other feedback.
Activate Peer review in the assignment's settings
Usually it's only teachers that can read and comment on submitted work. If you activate the Peer review feature when creating an assignment you may enable your students to access one or several submitted assignments by fellow students. By letting the students do peer reviewing they may also get better at reviewing their own work as well as further develop their skills within the subject.
You can use peer review for both assignments and graded discussions. The settings for that is similar but below we will show how it is done for an assignment.
When editing an assignment you will find Peer review further down in the settings.
- Check the box Require peer reviews.
- If you choose to Manually assign peer reviews you will have the most control. Even when choosing manual assignment you have the option to assign submitted work automatically, but you are still in control of what student is going to read what work.
- If you want Canvas to Automatically assign peer reviews you will get two extra boxes: one where you specify how many assignments each student will have to review, and one where you state at what date the peer reviews will be distributed. The date should not be before the end date of the assignment. At the given date Canvas will automatically distribute the amount of works that you have chosen to all the students that have submitted an assignment.
Who can see the peer review feedback?
The peer review is personal. Teachers on a course can access all the feedback that has been written. The students can read the feedback that has been given to them, and the feedback they have written themselves.
TIPS! You can edit an assignment after creating it and activate Peer reviews, but we recommend that you do it at the same time that you create the assignment.
Two settings to be careful with
When it comes to Peer reviews there are two setting to be careful with since they might not work as you may intend them to.
- Anonymity sounds great and could probably be practical at times. By checking the box the student won't be able to see who gave them feedback. The problem is that this also prevents writing any comments directly in the document as Canvas DocViewer is disabled. Therefore you should ask yourself what's of most importance: should annotations and feedback directly in the document work, or should the feedback be anonymous?
- Allow intra-group peer reviews is a choice that will only appear if you choose to have Peer reviews for a group assignment. When automatically assigning peer reviews for group assignments the students within a group will not be assigned their own group's work since they have contributed to it themselves. If you wish to bypass this you should check the box.
The built in peer reviewing for group assignments works in the sense that the peer reviewing is assigned to the individual students. If you would like the feedback to be done as a group work you need to solve some other way. You could for instance tell the students to share their work with everyone in a discussion, and then each group can download the work they should peer review and work with it in their group page. Another way is to Manually assign the peer reviewing and make sure that students within the same group are being assigned the same work to review.
How to Manually assign peer reviews
Begin by opening the assignment and click on Peer reviews.
- If you want to control who is reading who's work you click on the + icon below a student's name, select a student whom they should review and click on Add.
- If you would like to assign works automatically you type in a digit for how many reviews should be assigned to each user.
- Then click on Assign peer reviews. If an assignment isn't to your liking you can remove it and assign another work to review.
TIPS! Students that haven't submitted an assignment won't be assigned a peer review if you choose to do it automatically, but you may add work for them manually.
Grading an assignment with peer reviews
When you, as a teacher, is grading an assignment that contains peer review you will see all the feedback and annotations that have been made by the fellow students.
How does it appear for the student?
When a student accesses the assignment they will see:
- What submissions they have been assigned to review. By clicking on the Assigned peer reviews they will access these submissions.
- See what feedback they have been given by fellow students.
- To see annotated comments written directly in the document the student has to click on Submission details and then View feedback.
This is what it looks like when a student is giving feedback to a fellow student:
- The student may download the submission.
- Strangely enough the student has to click on View feedback to actually write any feedback in the document.
- Their is a box for comments where the student has to write a comment in order for the peer review to be considered done by Canvas.
GOOD TO KNOW! Students will only see the feedback they themselves have written or received. They can't see the comments a fellow student may have received from another student.