Dr. Tai integrated the Washington State University critical thinking rubric into a Calibrated Peer Review (CPR) writing assignment in her Miami Plan Foundation course CHM 111, Chemistry in Modern Society.  She feels that  CPR is a useful tool for designing writing assignments for a large class (CHM 111 enrollment has been about 150 students/semester).  In CPR, students are provided with resources for a topic, and then asked to write an essay according to guided prompt.  After writing the essay and submitting it on-line, students learned to evaluate the essays by grading several instructor-provided sample essays of varying quality (calibration stage).  The evaluation is performed by answering questions about specific components that were provided in the writing prompt.  After “mastering” the calibration stage, students are given three peer essays to evaluate.  The topic of this assignment was food irradiation.  Due to the restrictions of the CPR, decisions on whether students had met a particular criterion was restricted to a 2-level yes/no evaluation.  Dr. Tai found that students’ ability to pick out the critical thinking traits in the work of other students was limited and devised several ways to address this in the future.

Assignment

Tai Assignment

Rubric

Tai Rubric