When you are setting up an assignment you will have various choices to make:

• How many submissions should each student review?
• Should they review their own (ie. self-assessment)?
• Who should decide which submission(s) they review: you, the system, or the student (or a mixture)?
• Should students who have not submitted an assignments be able to review others’ submissions?

Be ready with your answers when you set up the peer assessment.

Create the assignment

In your module go to the place where you want your PeerMark assignment to appear. If edit mode is off, switch it on by clicking on the Edit Mode Switch.

Click on the Create Assessment button and from the menu that pops up, click on Turnitin Assignment. This will bring up the Select Assignment Type page.

Choose PeerMark Assignment and click next step.  This will bring up the PeerMark Settings page.

Settings

From the Select an assignment drop down menu, pick the assignment that is to be peer assessed. Within this menu you will only see assignments that have already been set up within your module using the Turnitin tool.

Note Assignments that have been setup using the ordinary (Blackboard) assignment tool are cannot be peer assessed using PeerMark.

The Point value for the peer assessment is the award that the reviewer will receive for their review of their peer’s assignment. If you ask students to review submissions from more two or more peers, this will be the total award. If you tick the Award full points if review is written box then you will not be able to grade the reviews; if you leave it un-ticked you will need to give every review a mark from 0-10. If the reviewer leaves a review incomplete, they will receive no points for that review.

Example You set the Point value to 100 ask each reviewer to review four submissions from their peers, and tick the Award full points if review is written box. A reviewer only completes three reviews: and therefore will receive 75 points.

By default, reviewers will not be shown the name of the author of the assignment they are reviewing, and authors will not be shown the name of the reviewers. Also, students who have not submitted an assignment will not be able to take part in the peer assessment. You can change either of these options by clicking on the Show more options link.

The Start date is the date students can begin reviewing. The Due date is when reviewing ends, no reviews can be made after this date. The Post date is the date peer reviews become available for students to view.

By default, from the start date reviewers will only be able to see the submissions they are to write reviews for, and after the post date, they will only see the reviews for their own submitted assignment. You can change either of these options by clicking on the Show more options link.

Click on Save & Continue to proceed to determine how many papers each student will review, and how they will be distributed.

Distribution of papers

By default, PeerMark will automatically assign one submission from a peer for to each student to review, but you can change adjust this by clicking Edit.

In addition to changing the number of submissions that will be assigned to each student for review, you can allow students to select for themselves one or more submission to write a review for, and you can also ask them to review their own paper against the questions you will set for the peer review exercise (you also have the option of setting a purely self-assessment exercise by setting the first two options to 0 and ticking the Require self-review box).

You can also set up specific pairings (determining whose submission a particular individual will review) and exclude certain students (and their submissions) entirely from the peer assessment exercise, by clicking on Show more distribution options and setting up these rules. When distributing papers, PeerMark will use these rules to assign submissions to reviewers, then assign those that remain randomly.

Click on Save & Continue to proceed to defining the questions reviewers will be asked to respond to for each submission they assess.

Hover over Click here to add instructions and you will see the text turn yellow; click it and you will be able to add instructions that students will see as they are about to begin their review. Then click Add Question.

Add questions

From the drop down menu you can create a new Free Response question, which students will have to give a written response to (you can set a minimum number of words they must write)  or a Scale question (where you can set Likert scale of any length and define the labels).

Alternatively, you can use questions previously saved to a library. If you have not yet created a library of questions you will see a sample library where you may find the questions you want to use have already been created.

Click on Save & Finish. You should see the message Turnitin Assignment successfully added and when you click on OK you will see your PeerMark Assignment in the area you chose within your module. See also Turnitin’s own PeerMark guide which has links to specific features, such as the grading logic behind the tool.