This presentation is based on a new rubric developed to enhance student engagement in an R class at the University of South Florida. As more students at USF enroll in the online R course, we developed a grading scheme to allow us to facilitate and infer student engagement. The title of the course was Introduction to R, with the aim of helping students to build and evaluate their own R package. The rubric was based on the Hadley Wickham R Packages textbook. It covers ten different categories that students use to incrementally create their own R package. Under each category, we provided a criterion for the student to evaluate their peers’ work. Overall, we wanted to discover how students reacted after receiving a peer review evaluation coupled with a numeric grade. The survey conducted was primarily qualitative and highlighted that students found our rubric useful for understanding both how to develop and how to review other packages. Future work will include developing our rubric into an R package and discussing its generalizability to other R courses.
2020 Friedman, A., Beasley, Z.J. “Teaching R with Peer Review and a New Rubric.” UseR! 2020.