Peer review

After pitch submission students are assigned to write peer reviews. By default Pitch2Peer assigns each pitch author a number of pitches to peer review. Peer reviews can also be disabled if you do not want your students to write reviews.

Practical considerations:

• Automatic or manual. By default each reviewer is assigned a number of pitches to review automatically and randomly. If you want more control on who will review what pitch, you can set this to manual. This is only practical in smaller groups, however.
• Reviewers. By default only pitch authors will be assigned to review pitches. You can set this to ‘all students’. Then all students in the module will be required to write peer reviews, regardless of whether they submitted a pitch or not. Note that in case of team pitches, each team member will be assigned the set number of reviews, as peer reviewing is conducted individually. Also note that with this setting, also students who may have quit the course would be assigned to write peer reviews, possibly resulting in empty reviews. You may want to first remove those students before starting the review period (e.g., in the ‘wait for review’ period). Finally, you can set this option to ‘only students who did not submit a pitch’, which allows you to split the group in half, and let students who did not submit do the reviewing. In the next week (multiple assignments in a course) you can switch this around. Of course, when you set peer review to manual mode, no reviews are generated at all, as you do this by hand.
• Number of peer reviews. The number of peer reviews should be seen in relation to the number students and pitches. Ideally you want each student to learn from reviewing a number of pitches, and you want each pitch to receive a number of reviews with feedback. Reviewing pitches does cost time and needs to fit in your overall course schedule. The following table may be helpful as rule of thumb:

  Number of students	Number of reviews
  10	3
  20	3
  30	3
  50	4
  80	4-5

  Of course, when using team pitches , you may want to use fewer peer reviews. Each team member will be assigned to review the number of pitches as set in the assignment. A typical set up might be (teams of 4 students):

  Number of students	Number of pitches	Number of reviews
  40	10	2
  80	20	2
  120	30	3

  Of course, when you set peer review to manual mode, no reviews are generated at all, as you do this by hand.
• Overall score. By default each review also contains an overall 1-5 star rating score, requiring the reviewer to specify an overall score for the pitch under review. The average of the overall scores of all reviews of a particular pitch is shown with that pitch in the gallery, resulting in a sense of playful competition (you can set this score to be visible or hidden during peer review). These overall scores are often very motivating in assignments that challenge your students to be creative and impress each other. Having created a top-ranking pitch can be highly motivating. Of course, this also means that some students will end up in the lower rankings. Alternatively, you may choose to disable this overall score altogether, which is often more appropriate with more ‘serious’ assignments that do not challenge student creativity, such as practicing conversational skills. A third possible setting is the ‘medal setting’ which requires students to assign 1 gold medal, 1 silver medal and 1 bronze medal to the pitches they have to review, essentially making an explicit ranking. This is very suitable for even more competitive settings (e.g., honours students).
• Instruction. You can set a specific instruction (1 line of text) that is shown when students write their peer review. Here you can motivate your students to take peer reviewing seriously and to make things as explicit as possible to ensure they understand what is expected.Default instruction: Write a review of at least 90 words focusing on the criteria set for this assignment.