for learning and community building

Materials needed: a bunch of staplers, solution sets, and rubric/checklists.

Why are we grading our peers’ papers?

Any grader will tell you that they never knew the intricacies of a problem as well as when they had to grade it. I asked myself, “Why should only one person have this benefit? I believe every person in the class should have this benefit!” Also, everyone is in this class to learn, and instead of having that experience be only individual and isolated, and sometimes competitive, I want it to be more collective, more of a community effort.

What you gain from grading:

  1. You learn how other people think and solve problems. This makes you a more informed and flexible problem solver.
  2. You learn that other people make mistakes, too. This helps you understand that making mistakes is a normal thing, a part of problem solving, and a part of learning.
  3. You have to think more deeply about the problem. Often, the person will get the right answer but in a different way than you did. You’ll have to confront your own understanding of the problem when you decide if their way is valid. Was it a happy accident? Did they justify it? Also, frequently a student gets the wrong answer, but has done most everything correctly. Your job as a grader is to identify the moment they made a mistake. In both cases, you have to confront their method for solving the problem, and decide if it’s valid.
  4. You will begin to modulate the voice in your head to be more encouraging and constructive (I don’t know if your inner voice gets negative sometimes – but mine certainly does!). I will ask you to make encouraging and constructive suggestions on your classmates’ papers. You will build up the skill of being encouraging and constructive not just to other people but to yourself.
  5. You will get fast feedback on your work. With a whole class of graders, I can get the problem sets back to you the next class. Research shows that the more immediate the feedback, the more you learn from it. (After you grade each other’s papers in class, I will take all the problem sets with me and look over and adjust everything so that it’s fair and uniform.)
  6. You will recognize that everyone in our class has different strengths and talents, as well as some different and some shared struggles, and that the diversity of strategies and solutions and strengths and struggles is good and makes us a better community of problem solvers.
  7. You will recognize and come to appreciate that struggle is normal, and is part of the learning process.
  8. You will gain specific skills involving checking your own work. I will ask you to identify how the person whose work you are grading may have been able to identify that they had made a mistake (via units for example), and you will find that you get better at this in writing your own solutions.

Here’s how it works:

On the day the problem set is due, everyone brings their own solution set to class. They label it with the last four numbers of their student ID. No name. I collect them all and then redistribute them so everyone has someone else’s. I hand out a rubric sheet for you to fill out. We will go through the whole problem set checking things off together. If you have a question about something you can circle the check mark and I’ll look at it later.

Among the things on the checklist/rubric will be:
For each problem:

  • Is the main point/conclusion of the problem articulated? (Everyone will have been asked to state the main point of each problem when they write their solutions.)
  • Articulate what the student has done very well: Some examples are:
    • You have done a good job describing your work.
    • Your solution is easy to follow.
    • You are very systematic.
    • Your diagram of the problem is very helpful.
    • I learned a different way to think about the problem from reading your solution.
  • Did they get the right answer?
    • If not ->
      • Identify the place or places where the solution took a wrong turn. Describe those in words so that your colleague understands. Also
      • If possible, describe a way that they could have known that the mistake had happened. (These are often much easier to see in hindsight, but nonetheless, you will find that you can acquire the skill of finding your own mistakes.)
  • Was the logic sound and did they explain their logic? Each step should be explained so that the reader (you) can know what they were thinking.
    • If so, tell them what in particular helped you understand their logic.
    • If not, articulate what you are missing, and offer a suggestion for how to make it clearer to the reader next time.

Everything you write will be on a separate sheet of paper (the rubric sheet), not on the student’s work, so that I can alter it if necessary.

Put the last four digits of your student ID on the rubric sheet. You’ll get three points added to your problem set for doing a good job grading.

Staple your rubric sheet to the problem set and hand it back in.

The next class (!!) I turn them all back to them with grades.