If you have students review and comment on each other’s work, you may want to use the Canvas peer review feature. This post briefly explains the process and includes links to resources that can help students complete their peer reviews and access their peers’ (and your) feedback.
What is Canvas peer review?
In short, adding peer reviews to a Canvas assignment means that students can be automatically or manually assigned to review one or more classmates’ papers (or videos, or whatever they’ve uploaded to Canvas), using a rubric you provide (or not), annotations (if you or they want), and comments.
Canvas guides for instructors
- How do I use peer review assignments in a course?
- How do I create a peer review assignment?
- How do I manually assign peer reviews for an assignment?
- How do I automatically assign peer reviews for an assignment?
- How do I view student peer review comments as an instructor?
Resources to share with students
KB doc with video explaining how to give and find feedback (also includes links to Canvas Student Guides)
Other instructor resources
- Resources for Faculty, Staff and TAs from the Writing Center at UW-Madison
- Handouts for your teaching – UW-Madison Writer’s Handbook
- Writing across the curriculum faculty sourcebook
- Active Teaching Lab: Canvas Peer Grading with John Zumbrunnen
- Active Teaching Lab: Canvas Peer Review with Tim Paustian
FAQs about Peer Review
- Does Canvas automatically average peer reviews or combine them into a grade?
- No, not at this time. We’re working on solutions that may improve this.
- Can peer reviews be combined with group assignments?
- Yes, they can.
- How can I make peer review more effective?
- Check out some of the instructor resources above.
- Explain the purpose to students. Link your directions to the KB doc for students (above).
- Provide prompts or rubrics to guide students’ reviews.
- For assistance in creating a peer review assignment in the College of Engineering, feel free to contact us at CEETE!