Creating Peer Review Assignments

Peer-review assignments can be used in Canvas, when the tutor wants to encourage students to review and provide feedback on their peers' submissions. This enhances interactivity and promotes critical thinking and self-reflection.

Peer-review is a setting which you can turn it on while creating an assignment. This setting can be utilised only if the assignment accepts students' submissions through 'Text entry' or 'File Uploads'. 

Creating a peer-review assignment

When creating a new Assignment, select the submission type as 'Online' from the dropdown box, then click on the checkbox for 'Text entry' or 'File Upload'.

Scroll down and select 'Require peer reviews'. 

Assigning reviews: further options

Once the box is checked, you will find further options for the assignment. You can assign peer review either manually or automatically (where Canvas randomly assigns student reviewers to submissions).

You can also specify how many reviews must be assigned to each student reviewer, and make the reviews anonymous.

If you have chosen 'Manually assign peer reviews', then after you have saved the assignment, click on Peer reviews on the right side of the window and assign reviewers to submissions. 

 

You will see a list of all students in the course, who will act as reviewers. For each student, click on the blue hyperlink, which will open a drop-down list for you to select a reviewee. 

When you have selected the student reviewee, click 'Add' button. This will match the student reviewer with the number of submissions you originally specified (see above). 

Student reviewers will then receive an automated notification from Canvas prompting them to review the submission (s). They will also see a 'To-do' item on their dashboard prompting them to open the assignment for review (see 'Reviewing submissions' below). 

How to do peer review? (for students)

In the assignment, students will be able to see the submission(s) that they have been assigned to review. When clicking on each submission, they will be able to access the submission and provide feedback using Speedgrader.

Notes :

  • The student reviewer will not be able to see the comments provided by other student reviewers or the teacher. 
  • If the peer reviews are set to anonymous, the student reviewer will not be able to see the student's name on the submission. 

Reviewing feedback after submission (for students)

Once the peer reviews have been completed, students will be able to see the feedback from their peers in three different ways:

  1. It will appear on their Dashboard, where they can navigate to the assignment and view the feedback.

 

  1. If they click on the relevant assignment they will see the feedback from their peers (denoted by a little tick icon as seen in the screenshot below). 

 

  1. If the Gradebook tool has been enabled in the course, students can use it to see the feedback from their peers. 

Further documentation on peer review assignments is available on Peer review assignments Links to an external site..