Assessing Student Peer Review
Through peer review, your students will have the chance to evaluate each other's work and to improve their own presentations. You may be wondering how to assess the peer review process itself. It will probably be too cumbersome for you to keep track of all of the comments that students provide to each other, so how can you be sure that the students undertake peer review responsibly?

We suggest that you follow a stepwise progression in peer review, building gradually to the level of responsibility needed for anonymous peer review such as our online system. As one part of this progression, you may wish to assign students to answer questions such as the following:

1. What is peer review? Describe at least 2 ways in which it can be used in student research.
2. How do professional scientists use peer review? Describe 2 or more ways in which it is useful in science.
3. You are anonymously reviewing another students' description of a research project they spent several weeks completing. They obviously worked very hard and collected a lot of data, but you believe that their conclusions are not supported by their data. What kinds of things would be good to say in your review?

An assignment such as this will allow you to gauge your students' understanding of peer review, and it will emphasize the importance of the responsibility they will be undertaking.

For assessment purposes, it may be too cumbersome for you to evaluate all the peer review comments that students provide. Instead, we suggest that you concentrate on how each student responds to the feedback he or she receives. For example, in their final research reports, each student could address questions such as these:

1. What peer review comments did you receive?
2. Did you agree with these comments?
3. How did you use the comments in preparing your final report?

Peer Review Guidelines for Teachers

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