Instructor Guide Peer Review in Canvas

Peer review is a great tool for engaging students in meaningful reflection on assignments, and providing students with additional feedback on their work. Peer review is also a valuable exercise for reviewers, giving them the opportunity to see the assignment through a different lens. The result is deeper understanding of the assignment and its requirements, and meaningful peer feedback.

Peer Review Guides

Peer reviews are designed to help students learn from each other. The tool is designed primarily to give students an opportunity to share their work, but it is also designed to provide instructors with students' opinions of their peers work. A peer review tool is available as part of Assignments and Discussions.

How to Set Up Peer Review 

Apart from the location of the tool in discussions vs. assignments, the tool works the same way. It allows instructors to automatically or manually assign peer review, effective once students submit their work. The default start date of peer review if instructors don't set a start date is one day after the assignment is due. You cannot set a due date for peer review in Canvas. Instructors can assign any number of reviews to each student, so students can get feedback from one or several of their classmates.

Access the peer review tool from an assignment

 

Access the peer review tool from a discussion

Once assigned, students are notified that they have to complete a review in their To-Do Lists on their Dashboard and their course homepage and in the assignment. Students follow the link to the student work that they must review. To complete the review, students submit a comment. If they choose the feedback link in the review window, they can also provide in-line comments. Instructors can add a rubric to the peer review, and if they do that, then students must fill out the rubric before the review is complete.

To manage all of the peer review assignments, go to the assignment or the discussion, and select Peer Reviews (see images above). In the management panel instructors can assign and delete reviews and remind students to complete reviews. Instructors can also see all of the reviews from this panel. When grading in SpeedGrader, instructors will see both the student and the reviewer comments.

Additional Peer Review Tips

The Peer Review tool has some known limitations:

  1. Instructors cannot set a due date for a review. The only date that can be set in the tool is the date when the review can begin.
  2. The tool does not provide a clear way to give students credit for completing a review. To give reviewers credit, instructors must create a "No Submission" assignment and grade the reviews manually. The Peer Review management tool is helpful for keeping track of all of the reviews and reviewers.
  3. Unlike assignment peer reviews, discussion reviews cannot be anonymous.
  4. If a student who was assigned a peer review leaves the class, you will have to reassign any associated reviews manually, even if you had Canvas assign the reviews automatically.