Using Calibrated Peer Review to Facilitate Writing Assignments in Large Political Science Classes

Abstract

As class sizes grow, faculty must often sacrifice writing assignments in order to keep up with grading demands. Writing assignments, however, help students develop important communication skills and encourage higher order learning. Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) is a software system developed through a grant from the National Science Foundation to address these challenges. By teaching students to be competent reviewers, the program allows a system of peer- and self-assessment which simultaneously takes the grading burden away from faculty while still giving students the opportunity to develop complex arguments and the critical thinking skills to assess such arguments. In this paper, we will present our experiences with using Calibrated Peer Review in three large sections of introductory political science (with a total of over 650 students). Our ongoing project proposes to focus on whether the CPR writing process facilitated student learning of the substantive content of the essays and whether the CPR process actually helped students develop their writing skills. Although the limited empirical literature suggests that CPR has positive benefits on student performance (see Russell 2005), what component part of CPR is most responsible for student learning of specific content? In this paper we outline some of the basic features of the CPR program and present some preliminary empirical results regarding the impact of the use of the CPR program in two introductory US government classes at the University of North Texas. We address two questions 1) did the CPR process increase students’ learning of substantive content of essay topic? In particular, we examine the effects of the component parts of the CPR exercise—doing the essay, doing the calibration exercises, and completing the self reviews; and. 2) did completing CPR process for Essay 1 improve quality of Essay 2?