CRITICAL PEER EVALUATION
Philip Doty and R. E. Wyllys

Assignment Title: Critical Peer Evaluation of Web-based Presentations

Participation: Individual.

Format: Formal two-page critical review in APA final manuscript format.

Submission Method: Email to the course emailbox with the review attached as a Microsoft Word document and post to the discussion board under the topic of the team reviewed.

Maximum points: 10.

Introduction: This assignment is intended to provide you with experience in critical evaluation by evaluating the work of your peers in preparation for their monograph reviews. Since all students will have the experience of developing a PowerPoint presentation, it will be easier for you to critique the work of others from both a positive and negative viewpoint.

Goals: The goals of this assignment are threefold:

• To provide you with experience preparing critical reviews answering such questions as:
  
  
  • How clearly and completely does the presentation describe the topic? Why or why not?
    
    
  • Can an educated layperson or a new information professional follow the argument while receiving a useful introduction to the topic? Why or why not?
    
    
  • Does the presentation reflect good pedagogy? Why or why not?
    
    
  • Are the slides effectively designed and presented in a way calculated to help support the comprehension of the audience? How?
    
    
  • Do the sources appear useful and clearly explained? Why or why not?
    
    
  • What elements of the topic are not included that you believe should be? Why?
    
    
  • In what specific ways might the group improve the presentation, whether with regard to clarity, breadth, depth, citations, or other elements of the presentation?
    
    
• To enable you to receive feedback on your own work by mentally comparing it with the work of others as the evaluation is completed.
  
  
• To help you understand and accept critical feedback as constructive, critiquing the work rather rather than the author.
  

Your critique will be judged on how well it presents a critical evaluation of the quality of the presentations. (It is NOT a goal of this assignment to help the professor judge the critiqued presentations. The professor will evaluate the presentations independently of the peer critiques; i.e., the content of these critiques will NOT be used in the professor's evaluations of the critiqued presentations.)

Tasks:

1. Choose one of the Web presentations developed by a group other than your own, and write a critical review of it addressing the above questions in approximately two pages. Your review should be specific, have examples, and cite any standards you used.
   
   
2. E-mail your essay to the course emailbox as a Microsoft Word attachment.
   
   
3. Post the paper to the class discussion board under the Peer Project Evaluation topic, using the subtopic for the Web presentation you are critiquing. In copying from your essay, please change the format to single-spaced lines, and then use the method of copying to and pasting from the clipboard into the discussion board (that is to say, do not post your paper as an attachment to the board).