Mass Extinction Calibrated Peer Review Assignment Elizabeth A. Heise University of Texas at Brownsville Overview Calibrated Peer Review (CPR™) was developed by chemists at UCLA to help students with science content, critical thinking and written communication skills. During a CPR assignment the student touches the content at least seven times (1 time writing the essay, 3 more times reviewing three essays written by the faculty member, and 3 more times reviewing three of their peers’ essays.) This helps reinforce important concepts. Students also use critical thinking to review all of the essays and to write feedback to their peers. Students tell me that they work harder writing essays that are going to be reviewed by their peers than they do for essays that I am going to review. They try to impress their peers while they don’t seem to feel this desire to impress the faculty member. The CPR software is free and online. It is easy to use and students have little or no problems working with it. Phase 1: Essay Submission Students submit an essay on the Calibrated Peer Review website http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu using source material provided and following the writing prompt. Source Material: Below are links to web pages with information about the different mass extinctions in the geologic record. Use your textbook and class notes as sources for additional information. Source Material Resources: Mass Extinctions Web Page - assignment resource URL: http://hannover.park.org/Canada/Museum/extinction/extincm enu.html Phase 2: Calibration Essays Students calibrate their reviewing skills by reviewing three essays that were written by the instructor. These essays have common errors and represent a range of writing skills. The students use the same rubric for reviewing these essays as they will for reviewing their peers’ essays. If they miss too many of the “correct” answers on the calibration essays, the students must repeat the calibration exercise again. Phase 3: Peer Review Students review three essays submitted by their peers. They use the rubric and provide feedback to their peers during the review. They also justify their reviews with their feedback. Phase 4: Self Assessement The final exercise is to use the same rubric to evaluate the essay the student submitted. Ideally they will find the errors that they made and understand what they could have done to improve their own essay. Phase 5: Evaluation and Feedback Students are evaluated on the quality of their submitted essay, the calibration exercise, the correlation of their peer reviews with the other student reviews and the correlation of the self-review with the peers’ reviews. The faculty member selects the percentage value for each of these parts. The students get the scores from their peers and the written feedback from their peers.