Want your students to receive meaningful feedback on their writing without adding to your grading load? Want them to get practice reading, analyzing, and providing specific, actionable feedback on someone else's work? Peer Review might be exactly what you need.
Peer Review is a Writing Assignment type that has students review a classmate's Deep Dive submission by answering a short set of prompts and leaving inline comments directly on the essay.
How it fits with Deep Dives
A Peer Review assignment always follows an existing Deep Dive. You'll select that Deep Dive as the "precursor assignment" when you set up your Peer Review, and students won't be able to start their reviews until they've submitted their own Deep Dive to it. Peer Review is its own assignment, with its own dates and grades, but it always depends on an existing Deep Dive to supply the writing students will review.
How students are matched
Once a student starts a Peer Review, Packback automatically matches them to a peer's submission. You don't need to assign pairings by hand. Read more about how that works in Peer Review: How Does Packback Match Students to Peer Submissions?.
How students complete their assigned reviews
Each Peer Review assignment requires students to complete a set number of reviews, determined by you when you set up the assignment. For each review, a student reads a peer's submission, answers the assigned review tasks (short-answer prompts), and can leave inline comments directly on the essay, just as you do when evaluating a Deep Dive. Learn more about review tasks and other assignment settings in Setting Up a Peer Review Assignment.
How grading works
Peer Review grades are based on completing the required number of reviews and completing the required review tasks within each review. Each review earns completion points accordingly, and those per-review scores add together to make up the student's grade for the assignment. You can adjust an individual review's score if needed, and grades default to hidden until you're ready to post them. Full details are in Peer Review: How Grades Are Calculated and Peer Review: Reviewing Student Activity and Posting Grades.
Getting started
Ready to set up a Peer Review assignment? Head to Setting Up a Peer Review Assignment for step-by-step instructions.
Following up with a revision
Once students have received their feedback, it's a natural point for them to revise their work. Set up a Deep Dive as a follow-up assignment to a Peer Review assignment, and students can pick up where they left off and submit a revised version based on what they learned. See Creating a Follow Up Assignment in Deep Dives for more on how that works.
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