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.