Samples of Peer Review Writing Assignments

Examples of Google Forms and Spreadsheets for Student Writing Assignments and general use.

Assignment Rubric

1. Anonymous feedback, collecting responses from small groups, and quizes.

• Tell Me - a general way of collecting information about anything from students.
• Anonymous Preference Voting - simple polling of student prefs.
• New Small Group Discussion Report - Ethics -- getting text from small groups
• Short Critical Response - collecting responses on a question.

• Many of these short assignments can be evaluated by completion. The point is sometimes to generate and share student writing with the class. If you want to introduce some informal evaluation, you can ask students to pick a few favorites in a followup exercise, for example.
• Google forms quiz mode will track multiple quizes with different numbers of questions.

2. Simple "collect and post" exercises. With and without peer review.

• 1. Non-evaluative informal student writing.

• Example: Everyday Ethics Discussion and Short Writing Prompt #1

• Describe a situation in which you decided to trust someone and you were right (or wrong) to do so. What made you decide to trust the person? Try to identify specific behaviors. Alternately, describe things you would do if you were trying to get someone to trust you. What are the characteristic behaviors and statements of trust worthy people?
• Follow this link when you are ready to write. Due midnight tonight!

• 2. Evaluative student writing. Collect student writing in one form, peer feedback in a second, back-evaluation in a third, and share all writing to class. (with or without scoring)

• Example: Flow and Content Rubric Items in Short writing

• Short Writing Assignment #1: Evolution and Social Behavior (600 words)

• Stage 1: Please write an 600 word maximum answer to the following question by September 22, 2020 11:59pm.
• Topic: In "The Evolution of Social Behavior," Robert Sapolsky reviews the resources in evolutionary theory for explaining social behaviors like cooperation and group behavior. In a 600 word essay, answer this question: "Drawing on resources from this chapter, how does an evolutionist explain how cooperation and other moral behaviors start and are sustained in a human community?" Give examples of processes which promote or impede moral behaviors. Be sure to consider how humans both fit and do not fit evolutionary patterns which apply to other animals. How does Sapolsky explain this?

• Advice about collaboration: I encourage you to collaborate with other students, but only up to the point of sharing ideas, references to class notes, and your own notes. Collaboration is part of the academic process and the intellectual world that college courses are based on, so it is important to me that you have the possibility to collaborate. It's a great way to make sure that a high average level of learning and development occurs. The best way to avoid plagiarism is to NOT share text of draft answers or outlines of your answer. Keep it verbal. Generate your own examples.

• Prepare your answer and submit it in the following way:

• Here I would suggest you use a google form to collect their answers. I might do that or have them upload files. Also an option for you.

• Stage 2: Please evaluate four student answers and provide brief comments and a score. Review the Assignment Rubric for this exercise. We will be using the Flow and Content areas of the rubric for this assignment. Complete your evaluations and scoring by Tuesday, September 29, 11:59pm.

• Use this Google Form to evaluate four peer papers.

• To determine the papers you need to peer review, I will send you a key with saint names in alphabetically order, along with animal names. You will find your saint name and review the next four (4) animals' work.

• Some papers may arrive late. If you are in line to review a missing paper, allow a day or two for it to show up. If it does not show up, go ahead and review enough papers to get to four reviews. This assures that you will get enough "back evaluations" of your work to get a good average for your peer review credit. (You will also have an opportunity to challenge a back evaluation score of your reviewing that is out of line with the others.)

• Stage 3: I will grade and briefly comment on your writing using the peer scores as an initial ranking. Assuming the process works normally, I will give you the higher of the two grades. Up to 14 points.

• Stage 4: Back-evaluation: After you receive your peer comments and my evaluation, take a few minutes to fill out this quick "back evaluation" rating form: [1]. Fill out the form for each reviewer, but not Alfino. Up to 10 points, in Points.

• Back evaluations are due Thursday, October 8, 11:59pm.

3. "Advanced" Techniques for Scoring

• If you collect numeric scoring from peer reviewers, you will want to learn how to sum up and average those scores. With spreadsheets, you do this with a "pivot table". It's a daunting thing, but once you do it a few times it's magic.

• One reason to add scoring is to use peer reviews to "pre-sort" answers. You can then refine the sort with your own scoring, using the pre-sort as a baseline. The fewer scores you need to adjust, the more you might assume that the rubric was applied effective by the peers.