About Peerceptiv
RTL is currently piloting Peerceptiv, a tool integrated into bCourses that offers robust, research-validated peer review functionality, through Spring 2025. You can use the tool to set up peer assessments on assignment submissions, team member evaluations for group projects, live presentation assessments, and more.
Peerceptiv provides peer review functionality for multiple different assignment types, including peer assessments on assignment submissions, team member evaluations for group projects, live presentation assessments, and more. Students can be graded on their submission, accuracy of their ratings when compared to peer and instructor ratings, helpfulness of comments, and task completion.
Key Features
- Anonymous peer review for a wide range of writing, presentation, graphic, video submission, and other assignments
- Flexible grading settings (including customizable weights for submission, peer review, overall tasks, and team member evaluation) and automated grading
- Custom rubrics
- Flexible deadlines
- Automated allocation of peer reviews (including by group)
- Ability for students to provide feedback on peer reviews
- Reflection stage option where students can receive credit for reviewing and interacting with peer reviews
- Students can anonymously view all feedback for a submission they also reviewed
- Students can submit self-assessments
If you’re already using the Peer Review tool in bCourses, take a look at the Peerceptiv and bCourses (Canvas) peer review functionality comparison chart to decide which tool is best for you.
Opt In to Use The Tool
This tool is currently in a pilot phase and available to instructors on an opt-in basis. Follow these steps to enable Peercpetiv today in your bCourses settings. Adding Peerceptiv as a course navigation link allows all Peerceptiv assignments to be accessed from the same link.
Support Resources and Feedback
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Consultations: The UC Berkeley Learning Environments and Tools (LET) team offers consultations to instructors for supported academic technologies. Schedule a personalized 1:1 consultation here.
- Slides: Review these slides for an overview of Peerceptiv, a little history of the tool, and helpful tips for getting started.
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Technical Support: If you encounter technical issues with the tool, please contact peer-review@berkeley.edu.
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Feedback: We will connect with participating instructors toward the end of the term to seek your feedback on Peerceptiv. Your feedback will be used to guide the adoption of the tool on the UC Berkeley campus.
FAQs
Do I have to recreate everything that I’ve already created in bCourses if I want to use Peerceptiv?
No! A Peerceptiv course only contains Peerceptiv assignments and is where you’ll create and monitor the progress of those assignments. Peerceptiv only replaces the peer review functionality in bCourses.
How does peer review of group projects work?
Group peer assessment allows students in groups to submit one project per group and then each student in the group will be required to review other group projects.
Can you manually distribute peer reviews?
Yes! You can randomly distribute, manually distribute, or create “review circles” where the same students review one another as part of a reviewing group.
Do reviewers have to be anonymous?
At this time reviewers are anonymous, but a feature to de-anonymize reviewers is in the development process.
Can you set different due dates for different groups of students?
No, the assignment has set due dates that will apply to all students required to complete that assignment.
Does Perceptive allow an instructor to remove reviews/scores given by a student?
Yes, an instructor can remove both student reviews and submissions.
Can students review an assignment without submitting one themselves?
By default students must submit before they can start reviewing others, but there is a setting instructors can enable that allows students who haven't submitted to peer review.
Can students annotate the work they review?
Students can pin comments to specific areas, but they cannot highlight or do in-line editing. Research has shown that the quality of comments goes down if students get bogged down in copyediting.
Can I assign a Peerceptiv assignment to only a subset of students?
Peerceptiv doesn’t sync sections from bCourses, but you can turn off Peerceptiv email notifications so all students aren’t automatically notified about the deadlines and restrict the assignment to only certain sections in bCourses.
Can I use Turnitin with a Peerceptiv assignment?
In order to use Turnitin you need to create a separate bCourses assignment with Turnitin enabled and have students submit in Peercpetiv as well as in bCourses.
What is the “submission grade”?
The submission grade is based on the quality of the student’s submission as judged by the peer and/or instructor ratings. The ratings of the submission are first adjusted for accuracy and then used to calculate the submission grade. Please note, accuracy can only be determined if each student submission is reviewed by multiple people.
What is the “review grade”? How is it calculated?
The review grade looks at how accurate and helpful were the reviews that the student gave. Higher accuracy = a better review grade. Accuracy is determined by the ranking of a student’s ratings in relation to the mean rank, the distance from the mean for each rating prompt, and how the ratings compare to the instructor scores (which are considered 100% accurate). Helpfulness is determined by the feedback ratings that they receive from their peers whose work they reviewed.
What is the “task grade”?
Task grade assesses student completion of review, feedback, and reflection tasks, if they’re enabled. If students complete all required tasks, they get full credit for the task grade.