Instructional Technology General Education proposal to CPC

Abstract

CPR (Calibrated Peer Review) is a web-based tool designed by chemists at UCLA, with funding from the NSF and HHMI. It's grounded in good educational and writing theory. It allows students to review their peers' writing, assisted by guiding questions and "calibrated" by samples provided by the instructor.

CPR is a part of the regular summer workshop series offered by the NSF through the Chautauqua program which Janet Russell has attended. At Earlham, Janet has used it successfully in Chemistry in Societal Context, and Jennifer is preparing to use it in Elementary Statistics with Janet's assisstance.

We envision a week-long workshop, spent partly learning how to use CPR and partly devising and discussing our own CPR assignments. We propose that CPC fund each faculty attendee and instructor with the stipend allocated from the recently announced General Education fund.

Proposers

Janet Russell, Jennifer Ziebarth and Mark Pearson.

Janet has used the Calibrated Peer Review tool (CPR) in her Chemistry in Societal Context course (chem 106) which is currently in progress (Spring 2003). Janet and Mark have presented a poster entitled "Four Instructional Technology Jewelsin a Non-Majors Chemistry Course" at a recent MITC conference. Jennifer is currently creating CPR assignment for a Statistics class.

Janet and Mark will act as instructors for the workshop to gently guide faculty through the process of understanding how CPR works, gaining familiarity with the CPR interface, presenting example strategy for developing assignments, and accomplishing the goal of producing a working CPR unit.

Introduction

The problem with much of the activity that teachers undertake with computers is the perceived lack of pedagogical value. While it's important that students have a mastery over the tools of the Information Age it's difficult to articulate any higher order thinking skills involved in such activities as "surfing the web". Moroever, instructors at Earlham are particularly focussed on empowering students to hone their writing skills (witness the recent visit of Lad Tobin to discuss writing) which some suspect can be deterimentally affected by the medium of information technology (as evidence just observe the English used by students employing "chat" to converse with friends; this readily spills over into their essay writing). However, the process of overseeing the cycle of writing and review by the instructor is particularly time intensive and in the domain of Natural Sciences is often neglected entirely in favour of coverage of subject matter.

The CPR tool addresses these issues. Superficially it is similar to Jerry Woolpy's Delphi tool in that students write a short essay on a particular topic and then grade anonymously each other's work. However, CPR differs in the important respect that each student calibrates his/her grading technique against a standard set by the instructor. In this way, not only does the student engage in reviewing his/her peer's work, he/she has to reflect upon his/her own work prior to the peer grading process. Thus the student is required to self assess before assessing his/her peers which can be an enlightening experience. Finally, the beauty of the CPR process is that once it gets underway it is self propelling and involves little or no overhead on the instructor's behalf. So what's the catch? The catch is that the creation of a CPR "unit" does involve considerable preparation.

To create a CPR unit de novo - and there are many pre-packaged topics available - the instructor has to do the following:

• understand how Calibrated Peer Review works
• decide upon a topic upon which to base the writing unit
• assemble reference material (books, articles, web references)
• create guiding questions and writing prompts
• create calibration questions
• create three "calibration" essays of high, medium and low quality
• create calibration answer key

Thus there is a great deal of thought behind each CPR unit and the process of creating such a unit may also help the instructor tighten up other areas in the course.

Objective

Rough Schedule

We can effectively work with a maximum of 10 faculty.

Mark Pearson & Janet Russell & Jennifer Ziebarth
Wednesday 12^th March 2003