Sarah, I see that your method places a high value on the skill of  
GIVING meaningful feedback, assessing its quality.   I heartily agree  
that this skill is the most important one to be developed in our  
students, many of whom will be required to generate useful and  
appropriate feedback for others in their chosen careers.  The amount  
of work you spend in assessing the quality of their written comments  
is well worth the investment, in that you are giving the evaluator  
very meaningful feedback that will improve their skills.  I now count  
the quality of the evaluator's written feedback as 40% of the peer  
eval grade, but you are persuading me to increase that percentage. Paul

Paul G. Koles, MD
Associate Professor, Pathology and Surgery
Wright State University Boonshoft SOM
937-775-2625 (phone)
937-775-2633 (fax)
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On Mar 25, 2011, at 10:52 AM, Jim Sibley wrote:

> One thing I have not seen discussed in this great trail on peer  
> evaluation is undergrad vs. grad.  In my experience, the  
> overwhelming majority of those who participate in this list are  
> teaching to grad students who are in professional schools.  That's a  
> different student from teaching undergrads, particularly those in  
> first/second year required courses.  Yet, the the latter students  
> too need to learn to work in teams.  In my experience they are most  
> likely to be critical of slackers.  So what do I do for Peer  
> Evaluation?
>
> I ask my students to imagine they are their team's supervisor doing  
> an annual evaluation.  They are asked to write down high quality  
> commentary on both what each team member's positive contributions to  
> the team and to the team's work have been as well as areas needing  
> improvement.  Students are then asked to grade each team member.  I  
> evaluate the quality of their evaluations for 75% of the peer  
> evaluation grade and average the grades each student receives from  
> his/her peers for 25% of their peer evaluation grade.  Yes, it's  
> quite a bit of work and I have yet to try iPeer to help automate it  
> (though I do collect the data via an on-line survey).  However, it  
> is both more realistic (everyone has to be evaluated by our  
> superiors and we cannot pretend all evaluations will be equal) and I  
> collect great data for the inevitable requests for student  
> recommendations later on.
>
> Sarah J. Mahler
> Associate Professor
> Global & Sociocultural Studies
> Florida International University
> Miami, Florida  33199  USA