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Best practices for creating a peer-review assignment

Whether creating or editing a peer-review assignment, there are three components that you need to consider: the base assignment, the assignment's peer groups or teams, and the assignment's schedule.

The base assignment is the document that the students will review in the peer-review assignment. The base assignment is a composition assignment that you have already created. The documents that students submit for the assignment are the documents that will be reviewed in the peer-review assignment.
When you set up the peer-review assignment, you also create the peer-review groups or teams. These are the groups of students who will review each other's base assignments. A group member can begin work on the peer-review assignment only after submitting his or her own base assignment and if another group member has also submitted the base assignment. This ensures that at least two group members have documents to review before anyone in the group can start work on the assignment.
When creating a peer-review assignment, schedule the time that you will need to reassess which students are in which groups before any student starts the peer review. See Manage peer-review groups/teams for more information.
Another schedule consideration is the completion date of the base assignment. A completed assignment is one that a student has submitted to you for grading. You may want to give yourself enough time to review and grade the base-assignment submissions before any students start can work on the peer-review assignment.

Best practices

Pearson recommends the following best practices for setting up a peer-review assignment and ensuring that students can do their work on the assignment.

Step 1. Create the base (composition) assignment.

Once completed, this composition assignment will become the base assignment (the assignment that the students will review).

Make sure that the base assignment's Assignment Due Date is before the peer-review assignment's Assignment Start Date.

Step 2. Create the peer-review assignment.

Again, make sure that this assignment's Start Date is far enough after the base assignment's Due Date to give you time to:

Move students from one group to another.
For example, you might have students that are not active participants in the class and/or have not completed the base assignment. If you have a group with only one active student, that student does not have any peer documents to review, and you may want to move that student to another group. Similarly, you could set up groups of inactive students.
Or, you may have students who are always late with their submissions. Again, you may want to reassign them to their own group and move students who are always on time to another group.
Review and grade the base assignment, if applicable.

Tips

There are two other ways to block student access to a peer-review assignment (or any assignment):
- Deactivate the peer-review assignment until you are ready for students to start working on it. Students cannot see or access a deactivated assignment.
- Select a Display to Students date that is far enough in the future to prevent students from working on the peer-review assignment too soon. (This setting is on the Set titles and dates page.)
Post a note to yourself in the calendar as a reminder that you need to reassess the group memberships.