Student presentations are a great way to promote student engagement and to build on student strengths and interests. Requiring peer evaluations of presentations supports students in attending to and learning from their peers' presentations. Online forms and pivot tables provide a quick, easy way to collect and summarize nuanced peer ratings.

Why would I do this?

This technique allows you to collect student feedback aligned with a rubric, average the assigned ratings, and (with some effort) share those ratings back to your students. Using forms and a spreadsheet allows you to share an average score on each criterion, which is challenging and time consuming to do "by hand". With this method, your students receive more detailed feedback.

How would I use this?

Share a simple rubric or list of criteria with your students when you introduce the presentation assignments. For example:

This presentation will be peer graded. Each group will rate each other group on their command of the subject, organization, and presentation style.

Create the online form your students will use to evaluate each other. If you like, you can start from a copy of our sample evaluation form.

On the day of the presentation, give students a link to the form or embed the form in Canvas. Pause between presentations to allow each group to collaborate on submitting one evaluation of the presentation that just completed.

How do I use the results?

After all presentations have been evaluated, you can see a summary of the evaluations on the Responses tab of the form.

Pie charts showing proportion of responses of each type to question 1 and 2.

In our example, this shows you how many presentations each group evaluated and how many evaluations each group received. (It looks like The Scorpions didn't submit an evaluation of The Sharks.)

How do I turn this into grades?

To compute the average ranking for each group, click on "Open in Excel" to see a spreadsheet of responses.

In the spreadsheet, enable editing and select the columns containing the names of the groups evaluated and the submitted scores.

Spreadsheet of responses with columns F through I highlighted.

Go to the Insert tab at the top of the page and click on "Recommended PivotTables".

Recommended Pivot Tables option on the Insert ribbon of Microsoft Excel.

Choose an option. Excel will create a new table on a new sheet of the spreadsheet. Then, use the PivotTable Fields dialog box on the right to select the information you want to summarize.

In the example below, "What is the name of the group y..." and "Presenter understanding of the t..." are correctly selected. The options "Presenter organization." and "Presentation content and enjoyabil..." should also be selected, by ticking the checkbox to the left of those options.

Pivot table fields: two are selected and the rest are not.

Below the list of fields is a grid describing the rows and columns of the pivot table. In the VALUES box, use the pull down menu to select "Value Field Settings", choose Average, then click OK.

Four fields. In the VALUES field, one calculation shows an Average while two show a Sum.

Continue this process until each column described in the VALUES box is set to "Average of".

The pivot table should now have a row for each group displaying that group's average rating for each criterion. The columns of the pivot table correspond to the items in the VALUES box. Save your spreadsheet and copy the information (by hand, sorry!) into your grade book.

Four groups' average scores for three different criteria.

If you use a rubric for grading, you can use the SpeedGrader in Canvas to view the rubric and enter the average score for each criterion.