Episode 44 – Dr. Ginger Carney discusses CPR, Calibrated Peer Review, and her W course
July 2008
Episode 44 – Dr. Ginger Carney discusses Calibrated Peer Review in her W course
Howdy, I’m Gabriel and welcome to Write Away, the faculty podcast of the Texas A&M University Writing Center, bringing you news, tips, and ideas for making your students better, more innovative writers.
Today we’re talking to Dr. Ginger Carney, Assistant Professor of Biology here at Texas A&M. Dr. Carney received her bachelor’s and Ph.D. degrees in genetics from the University of Georgia and did her postdoctoral work at Oregon State University. She’s been at Texas A&M since 2004 where she runs a research lab and teaches a W course, Biology 401, Critical Writing in Biology.
Dr. Carney — I came here about four years ago so that I could start my own lab and run my own research program. My interest is in flies, in fruit flies–Drosophila melanogaster, and in learning about how genes regulate behaviors and that’s a big topic actually in my W course. This is a science class. There is a misconception that it’s supposed to be a writing class. I know a lot of my students seem to come in and think that I’m going to teach them composition and grammar. One thing that I think is really important in teaching our undergraduates before they leave is how to read a research paper. I find that many of the students that come to my course, have read review articles, they’ve read text books, but in many cases they haven’t actually read and thought about a peer-reviewed research publication. And that is really one of the most important things that scientists do, is read those papers and produce those papers based upon their own work. The reality is if any of these students stay in science or even if they go on to other types of careers, they’re going to face peer review either formally or informally. And so for instance in my own career, every time I write a research proposal or I write a research article there is a peer review process through which the article or proposal is vetted and people who are experts in my field are going to look at my work and read my work and evaluate it. And so they’re actually getting a real world taste of what a scientist actually goes through during their career as well.
Gabe — Dr. Carney explains how reading, writing and peer review are related in her class.
Dr. Carney – And so what I do in my course is I guide the students through how it is you read a research paper and think about the work in that paper and then we write critical synopses of the various papers that we read in class. And I think that aspect of the course is particularly important because actually writing about something that you’ve read about helps crystallize the ideas. Right before I came over here actually I was talking to one of my students who had turned in an early version of a paper that she is going to turn in for grade. We had given her some peer feedback and some instructor feedback on this writing. What she said to me was that as she was writing her paper it really helped her understand the concepts that are in the research article. And that’s a big thing that we’re trying to do in my class.
Gabe — Dr. Carney explains why she’s a big fan of Calibrated Peer Review or CPR.
Dr. Carney — I have somewhere on average of 70 to 80 students each semester that I teach and so it’s very difficult to provide a lot of feedback to those students. It’s difficult to give them all the exposure they need to reading and writing. And Calibrated Peer Review is a mechanism that allows us to do that. You’re writing something, you’re having your peers look at it and review it and you’re learning by reading their writing as well as by the sample writing. You have all of these opportunities to read multiple essays. And so the first thing they do is they read this research article that I have assigned and we talk about it extensively in class because the material is difficult. Most of my students are seniors and so I am sort of trying to top it off for them, bring some of the genetic and molecular biology concepts back together. And so what they do is they read this paper and then they write their own essay and we give them some feedback on that and then they submit it through Calibrated Peer Review. They then see some essays that I have written about the same paper. One of the essays is what I would consider an excellent example of scientific writing about the paper. It’s brief, it’s concise, it highlights the main points. But then they have two other essays. There is usually an essay I provide that is pretty good, but maybe it doesn’t have the right tone. Maybe it has a conversational tone instead of a scientific tone. Or maybe it garbles up some of the facts or maybe there are lots of grammatical or organizational errors. And so I try to bring a lot of different kinds of problems to that essay. And then they’re also given an essay that is flat out terrible. One that would get an F if somebody turned it in. And part of the utility and value of is that they then each have to read these three essays and they have to figure out, well which one of these examples is the good example and which one is the poor example? There are always a lot of students who really fall in love with that poor essay and I think part of it is because they haven’t read enough scientific papers. They haven’t really been exposed to how a real scientist writes stuff down. And so they fall in love with this essay. It sounds really smart, it’s got all of these big science words in it. But it really doesn’t say anything. And so it’s very instructive I think for them to see that and to see that sometimes saying things in a really flowery fancy sounding way isn’t the best way to convey information. They have to figure out which is the good essay, which is the mediocre essay, which is the crummy essay basically. And then it gives a point value to how good of a job they did. It calibrates how good of a reviewer they are. And then when they go through and they review the papers of their peers the grade derived at the end from several people reviewing a particular paper takes into account how good of a reviewer each of the reviewers is. So if there’s one reviewer who’s way off target on everything that they’ve done and they give an essay that everyone else thought was excellent a poor score, then that review isn’t weighted as highly as the other two reviews. And so that’s where the calibration aspect comes in. And they don’t know who these peers are. They are anonymously reviewing three other essays.
Gabe — And so what is the end result of all this?
Dr. Carney — Altogether I think this is helping them to begin to evaluate what is good writing, what is poor writing. How might I organize my own ideas the next time because now I’ve seen these other ways that people have done it. And so in each case when we’re giving them the three essays I’ve written or the three peer essays, I also provide them a list of questions that they use to evaluate those essays and make their determinations based upon. And then at the end what they do is they go back and look at their own essay, hopefully with fresh eyes. They take that same list of questions and then they evaluate their own essay. And the beauty of Calibrated Peer Review is that they are getting all these multiple exposures to different writing and different writing styles and they begin to learn what I see is an appropriate essay and what I see as not. They don’t lose points if their essay was terrible and they recognize it. That actually helps them in the peer review process. Because they get points for recognizing what everybody recognized about their essay. And so if it turns out that their essay is a mediocre essay and they recognize that, then they get points, but if they still think that their essay is a stellar essay and no one else did, then they actually lose points for that because they haven’t gone through the appropriate learning process to recognize that.
Gabe — Dr. Carney wraps it up with an important message she tells her students.
Dr. Carney — How you present yourself through your writing and through your verbal communication skills really reflects on you. And so it’s not just about writing about science. It’s about being a good communicator. And writing and reading and doing those things alternately helps them become good communicators.
Gabe — Thank you for joining us. Write Away is a production of the Writing Center at Texas A&M University. This podcast promotes the mission of the Writing Center by highlighting effective writing instruction. For resources to improve communication and writing ability, please visit our website at writingcenter.tamu.edu.
We’d like to thank Dr. Carney for her time today, and for her dedication to writing instruction at Texas A&M. I’m your host Gabriel, please join us next time. Have a great day, write away.
