Setting Up a Peer Review Assignment

Ready to add peer feedback to one of your Writing Assignments? Setting up a Peer Review takes just a few minutes, and most of it will feel familiar if you've created a Deep Dive or Originality Review before. Here's how to get one live.

Creating a New Peer Review

1. Go to Writing Assignments from your Community home page or the left-hand navigation menu.
2. Click Manage Assignments, then + Add Assignment.

3. Under Review Assignments, select Peer Review.

   • Note: Peer Review can only be added to a Community that already has a Deep Dive assignment for students to review.

   

4. Add an Assignment Name.

5. Under Add Content to Review, Choose the Deep Dive you'd like students to review. This is your Peer Review's precursor assignment. Students must submit here before they can start reviewing.

   • Tip: You'll get the best results if your precursor Deep Dive has a due date and allows late submissions. If it doesn't, Packback will flag this for you with an option to jump straight to editing those dates.
   • Alternative path: You can also add a Peer Review directly from an existing Deep Dive. From Manage Writing Assignments, find the Deep Dive, open its Actions dropdown, and select Add Peer Review. The precursor will already be selected for you.

   

6. Add a Review Task List. This is the set of prompts your students will answer for each review they complete.

   • If you don't have one yet, click Create Review Task List. You'll start with a ready-made set of instructions and prompts you can keep, edit, or swap out in order to fit your assignment’s needs. Give it a title, and add click Save & Use. You can reorder or edit any prompt before saving.
   • If you've built a Review Task List before, click Select Saved Review Task List to reuse one.
   • Optional: turn on a character minimum to encourage more substantial responses. See Peer Review: How Grades Are Calculated for how this affects a student's score.

   

   

7. Set your Points per Review and Reviews per Student (you can require 1 to 10 reviews per student).

   

8. Decide if you want to Match students from the same section within the community, or have students review submissions from peers within the full class. To learn more, read Peer Review: How Does Packback Match Students to Peer Submissions?
9. Set your Assignment Dates: start date, due date, and whether you'll allow late submissions, just as you would for any other Writing Assignment.
   • Tip: we recommend choosing a start date and time for that occurs on or after the due date and time for the Deep Dives assignment being reviewed. This will give students the opportunity to submit work for review before they begin this Peer Review assignment.
10. Click Create Assignment.

Editing or Deleting a Peer Review

You can edit a Peer Review assignment from Manage Assignments at any time. Once a student has started a review, a few settings lock to keep the assignment consistent for everyone already participating:

• The Review Task List
• The content being reviewed (the precursor Deep Dive assignment)
• The number of required reviews
• The points awarded per review

If you need to delete a Peer Review assignment that students have already started, you'll see a confirmation prompt showing how many students have work in progress before you confirm.

What's next

Once submissions start coming in, head to Peer Review: Reviewing Student Activity and Posting Grades to learn how to monitor progress and post grades. For the reasoning behind our default review prompts, check out Packback's Task List: The Design Behind the Default Prompts.

Still Have Questions?

If you can't find the answer you are looking for, please reach out to Packback's team! Our team is eager to help, speedy to reply, and available 7-days a week. Let us know how we can support you!

Submit a request or email help@packback.co