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I am teaching an academic writing course for grad students and part of the course content involves peer review activities on one another's writings. These peer reviews will receive a letter grade.

Do you know of any tools/templates/techniques to facilitate this both from the students perspective (e.g. a form or even a Perusall-like tool) and the instructor's perspective (grading peer reviews will be very time consuming unless there's some standardization).

Tips or creative ideas are welcome!

Dylan
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  • Which particular problem do you try to solve with a tool? Students need clear guidance about what they should comment on in their reviews, that is, criteria or dimensions of assessment. Once you have those criteria clear, you can build a template in which each criterion becomes a section. – lighthouse keeper Jan 05 '22 at 13:13

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For peer-review purposes, I've been content with the Workshop activity in Moodle.

You can set up peer review template forms, change the "blindness" (anonymity) of the process, modify the number of peer reviews per submission, and you have a single platform which allows the grading of both the paper submission and the peer review reports.

anpami
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We had very good experiences using Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) http://cpr.molsci.ucla.edu/Home for "writing across the curriculum" for undergraduates. I think it should fit your purposes as well.

Some discussion https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ1062843.pdf

Dimitri Vulis
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If you want the students to learn to peer review like a professional scientist, they need to understand that article peer reviewing does not come with a template. Each paper is different and each peer review should be adjusted to match. That said, here's a checklist that students could use.

Here is a similar resource for mathematics.

If you want students to learn to peer review grant applications, your funding agency probably does provide a template.

Anonymous Physicist
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    "peer reviewing does not come with a template" That it not universally correct. I've reviewed for journals that had a pretty rigid template. As a reviewer I hated it and I'm sure the authors found the review also less useful than a free-form review. Even journals without such a template often have some kind of point system that the reviewer needs to fill in. –  Jan 05 '22 at 05:46