Tyler Cowen sends us to Jennifer Imazeki:
Economics for Teachers: Musings about Teaching Economics: Peer review with SWoRD: As I mentioned, I'm using SWoRD in my writing class for econ majors. SWoRD is a site that not only facilitates peer review, it allows for student grades to actually be determined by their classmates' reviews. For each assignment, the instructor creates both open-ended comment prompts and a numeric rubric (the SWoRD template requires a 1 to 7 scale, though you can sort of get around that by skipping some of the numbers). Students submit their papers to SWoRD and once the deadline has passed, papers are assigned to peer reviewers (minimum of three, maximum of six; the creators of SWoRD strongly recommend at least five reviews if the scores will be used for grading). Everything is anonymous.... After the reviews are completed, the authors have the opportunity to 'back evaluate' the open-ended comments, indicating how helpful the comments were, or weren't.... One of the coolest things about the SWoRD system is how it calculates grades. Students receive a grade both for reviewing and for writing. The reviewing grades are based half on 'consistency', which takes into account things like if a student just gives all high scores or all low scores, or scores that are really different from the other reviewers of the same papers, and half on the back evaluation 'helpfulness' scores. The writing grades are based on the numeric rubric scores from the reviewers but adjusted for the consistency of the reviewers.... Part of the reason I agreed to do this pilot is that I have always had students do peer review for this course anyway. So I already have many of the comment prompts and rubrics created (though they need some revising for SWoRD) and the fixed costs of getting things set up in the system seemed like they would be rather low while the benefits are potentially huge...
