ED11A-3393:
Implementing Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) in a Large-lecture Science Course
Abstract:
Assessing writing assignments and providing students the opportunity to meaningfully revise the assignments are challenging for instructors of large enrollment science classes. We included two individual writing assignments and peer assessments as part of course assessment for a large Introduction to Environmental Science course. In order to facilitate the assessment, Calibrated Peer Review (CPR), a web-based application developed by UCLA that enables frequent writing assignments in any discipline and with any class size, was adopted. The CPR assignment process involved four steps: submitting a writing assignment, calibrating each student’s review skills, reviewing peers’ writing, and assessing one’s own writing assignment (self-assessment). A rubric was provided to guide students through each writing assignment and the same rubric was used in calibration, review, and self-assessment scoring. Once the instructors uploaded the writing prompts, rubrics, sample writings and answer keys into the CPR system, the CPR software fully directed all student activity (writing assignment submission, calibrations, reviews, and self-assessment). Students were able to view their results within the CPR program, including their self-calibration scores, reviewing scores, peers’ ratings and feedback, total earned scores, and self-assessment scores.