With all the talk of MOOCs (edX / Coursera), I’ve been very interested in finding more information on peer review. So I’ve been reading the studies that espouse the benefits of peer review in general.
Duke Chronicle: Peer grading experiment a success, professor says
Mostly older articles via google
And the pitfalls:
How accurate is peer grading?
A couple years ago I was put in charge of working with UCLA’s Calibrated Peer Review for Eric Mazur. He was really excited about it — I was less so. But my problem was I was looking at the application, not the concept. Just because an application is overdeveloped drivel doesn’t mean what they were trying to do isn’t awesome. I’m of the thinking they should have simplified it. That seems to be the case with just about everything I see. Applications shouldn’t be as complicated as they’re made. The problem is there are usually too many people involved in a project’s inception and everyone needs to put a piece of themselves into it. But I digress. edX will be great.
I don’t think Mazur used the CPR for more than 2 semesters. Probably because there was too much overhead and it wasn’t intuitive enough. But a poor implementation doesn’t mean a poor idea.
Or at least that’s my theory on this. I hadn’t seen any progress with online implementations of this, people haven’t been pushing this teaching technique yet and it’s disappointing (or telling).
Coursera is making a run at it now. That is encouraging. That means edX will probably follow suit with a similar implementation. And I’m planning a mild implementation with Quizmo.