Welcome to Turnitin.com’s Peer Review! This tour will take you through the basics of Turnitin.com’s Peer Review. The goal of this tour is to give you a basic understanding of how Peer Review works, and how to best utilize it as an effective learning tool in the classroom. Peer Review allows you to create completely customizable peer review assignments, composed of topic and rubric questions of your choosing, that you can distribute to your students for random peer evaluation. When completing a peer review assignment, students will use the criteria specified by you as a framework to read, consider critically, and give and receive feedback on work they and their peers complete in class.

What’s a Peer Review? To the left is an example of the end product of the peer review process: a finished peer review. Your students will receive one or more reviews like this for every peer review assignment your class completes. The top section consists of a series of questions rated on a scale of 0 to 5, called rubric questions. The second section consists of topic questions, which must be answered in essay form. These questions typically ask your students to evaluate a paper (or papers) written by their classmates based on questions chosen by you. The number, length, and difficulty of these questions is completely customizable and determined by you based on the level of your class.

Peer Review Form This is an example of the form used to post a peer review. For this particular review, the instructor has chosen one topic and one rubric question. Section “B” allows students to enter short, descriptive phrases about the paper being reviewed, which helps us create quick reference points about a given review when many reviews are displayed next to each other in list form.

Assignments Page Before you can create a peer review assignment, you must have already created a “paper assignment” to which students have made submissions. When you create a peer review, papers submitted for a previous paper assignment are distributed to your students anonymously so that they can review them based on your specified criteria. All peer review assignments can be paired with one paper assignment only, but there is no limit to the amount of times you can use a given paper assignment for peer review assignments.

Peer Review Assignment Creation This is the first page of the peer review assignment creation process. You will be asked to supply a title for the peer review, and, if you like, provide additional information about the assignment that students can access from their class calendar and assignments pages.

Step 2 The next step of the peer review assignment creation process determines the general criteria for your peer review. First, you will have to select the paper assignment you want to pair with the review. Next, you will set the dates for the review. The start date is the date that the peer review becomes available to students. The due date is the deadline for students to complete their peer reviews. Finally, the post date is the date when completed Peer Reviews can be viewed by your class. Note: when creating a peer review assignment, keep in mind that the due and post dates must occur at least one day past the start date. Additionally, the post date may occur on or later than the due date, but never before it.

Creating a Peer Review Assignment -- Step 2 (continued) Next, you will need to specify how papers will be distributed to your students. You can elect to have a given number of papers randomly distributed, you can have students pick a given number of papers to review, or any combination of the two. For details on how this works, please refer to the on-screen instructions by clicking on the button “what’s this?”. You will need to choose whether you want to create a customized peer review assignment, or choose an assignment from our library of created assignments. If you select “custom”, you will be able to write you own topic and rubric questions. If you select “library”, you can select from pre- written assignments developed by a panel of educators designed to help evaluate writing skills at both the high school and college level.

Creating a Peer Review Assignment -- Step 3 Step 3 of creating a peer review assignment will ask that you select the topic questions students will use to write short essays about their classmates’ papers. There are two options for selecting topic questions: you can write your own, you can select from our library of questions created by a panel of educators for Peer Review, or any combination of the two. Every time you select a question it will be added to a list of previously selected questions as shown on the screen to the left. When you have all the topic questions you want for a given assignment, you can click on the “next” button to take you to step 4 of the assignment creation process.

Creating a Peer Review Assignment -- Step 4 Step 4 will ask that you select the rubric questions for this assignment. Rubric questions are based on the format “Rate…”, followed by a criterion of your choosing. Students will respond to rubrics on a scale of 0 to 5, with 0 being the worst and 5 the best. These rubrics will then be combined to form an overall average for any given paper. Rubrics are chosen in the same manner as topic questions. You can write them yourself or choose from our library, and rubrics you choose will be added to previously selected rubrics as shown to the left. When you have all the rubrics you want, you can click on the “next” button to go to the final step of the creation process.

Peer Review Assignment Creation Process -- Step 5 The final step of the process presents a summary of the review assignment. From this page you will be able to view the review as a whole and decide if you would like to add or update any of the sections. If you are satisfied with your assignment, clicking on the “submit” button will finalize the assignment and send it to your students. Note: You may update a peer review assignment at any time until a student submits a review. Once a review has been submitted, the assignment can no longer be updated.

Assignments Page When you are done creating your peer review assignment, your assignments page will change to reflect the addition of the new peer review assignment. If you had set the start date for the same day, (as in most cases) the assignment will already have been distributed to your students. The slides that follow take a look at what students see when the visit Peer Review to complete a review assignment for the first time.

Student Peer Review When your students first come to their peer review homepage to review papers, this is what they will see. As an instructor, you also have access to a peer review homepage, and it is almost identical to the one shown here. By reading the text above the papers for review, students will be able to see that they must each review 2 papers. The first paper has been assigned; it is at the top and highlighted in blue. The second paper, however, can be chosen from among the remaining papers. Writing a review is as easy as clicking on the pencil icon under the “post review” column.

This example shows the same page as before, except that now a review has been posted for the paper “Independence or Interdependence”, as indicated by the “edit” icon. Students may edit any given peer review until the due date for the peer review assignment has passed. For this particular assignment, students are required to write two reviews: one that is assigned, and one they can choose. If students have written reviews for the assigned paper(s) and must still write additional reviews, they can choose those reviews from the remaining pool of papers. When a student has written the required number of reviews for a given assignment, the pencil icons will disappear.

The final stage of any peer review assignment occurs after the post date – the date when all the reviews written by your class become available to read. Clicking on the icon under “read” will take your students to another page that displays all the reviews posted for a given paper. The “reviews” column to the right indicates the total number of reviews submitted; the “avg” column tells students the average score that paper received, and the final column indicates the grade (if any) you have assigned to the paper. Note: You may elect to turn the grading option off, or not grade papers through Peer Review. If this is the case, the grade column will not appear.

The reviews page shows a detailed listing of all the reviews submitted for a given paper. Both students and instructors may access individual reviews from this page. At the top of the page is a summary of the rubric scores for this paper. In the reviews section beneath is a summary of all the reviews submitted for this paper. Clicking on the icon in the “reviews” column will display an entire review as shown earlier in the presentation.

Thanks for taking the time to learn the basics of Peer Review. The goal of this presentation was to help you get up and running quickly; there are many advanced functions not touched upon here that are explained in greater depth online and in our user manuals. user manuals If you experience any difficulties with Peer Review and can’t find the answers here or at our website, our helpdesk is available 24 hours to help you with any Again, thanks for supporting us in the ongoing fight against digital plagiarism. Good luck!