Why educators are choosing Kritik over Circuit
Accountability through Feedback-on-Feedback
Research has shown that professors spend approximately 18 hours a week grading papers, assignments and discussion threads. This accounts for 45.67% of the total time professors allocate to various instructional activities for online teaching. Students want personalized feedback to improve their skills, but many students report not receiving timely feedback to build upon before the end of their term. This is where peer assessment comes in!
Establishing structured accountability in the peer evaluation process is critical to the success of peer-to-peer learning activities. With only an optional self-reflection stage after the peer evaluation stage, Circuit lacks the accountability and student engagement that is present with a Feedback-on-Feedback model.
Kritik can do it better
Kritik follows a Feedback-on-Feedback model to provide students with structure and guidance on how to receive and provide peer evaluations. Students provide feedback on the peer evaluations they received based on two criteria: how critical and motivational the evaluations are while validating the correctness of their peers’ comments. Along with a score, proving a written comment is mandatory in the evaluation and feedback stage, allowing students to articulate why they provided their numerical score.
Through Kritik’s peer grading process, students are empowered to constantly develop their ability to receive and provide feedback. Our most recent student survey validated the effectiveness of the Feedback-on-Feedback model with approximately 78% of students saying that they learned by reading the evaluations of their peers. Unlike open-ended peer evaluation activities, adding this mandatory feedback step creates a closed loop of accountability and encourages students to provide critical feedback in accordance with the activity rubric and course content.
Research-backed peer-to-peer pedagogy practices
With the variety of educational tools available, educators have countless options to choose from. Education technology should complement the teaching practices of the instructor and help them develop key skills students will need post-graduation, with pedagogy built into the platform. Circuit focuses solely on an open-loop peer evaluation, rather than creating features based on proven practices and pedagogies for increasing student engagement and material comprehension.
Kritik does it better
Kritik was founded to address the biggest problem facing students in higher education today: the lack of development of critical thinking skills. Kritik’s Learning by Teaching approach was conceived through years of hands-on work in the world of academia. Our many features, including the Feedback-on-Feedback model, are designed to develop higher-order thinking skills in students based on Bloom’s Taxonomy.
Additional features on Kritik include peer evaluations for group assignments (between-group and within-group) Live Presentations to engage students with real-time peer feedback; streamlined instructional design for instructors with the ability for instructors to generate customizable assignments with AI; an AI-generated plagiarism detection tool and; the ability for instructors to spotlight exemplary student submissions for the class to learn from.
Our co-founders bring deep knowledge of higher education and technology with them: Mohsen is the co-founder of Top Hat while Carine is an accomplished academic with 4 degrees. We are agile, and constantly innovating and implementing new peer-to-peer pedagogy features and ideas based on suggestions and feedback from the instructors who use our platform.
Accurate student grading through calibration
A common concern when assigning students marks given by their peers is how to quickly verify whether these grades were assessed critically and in good faith. Instructors should be able to identify those with strong evaluative skills and be sure that the grades assigned are fair. Although Circuit has an optional calibration feature that determines the weight of students' grading at the start of the term, it lacks the ability to account for fluctuations in student grading throughout the term, potentially creating inequitable and inaccurate peer grade results.
Kritik can do it better
Kritik not only calibrates the weighting of student grades based on a preliminary calibration activity, but our algorithm also utilizes calibration after every assignment to ensure that students' grades are weighted correctly throughout the term. This incentivizes students to learn from previous evaluations and continue to provide critical, accurate and authentic feedback for each subsequent assessment.
While our studies have shown that about 94% of student evaluations are on par with how the instructor would have graded the activity, Kritik’s AI algorithm adjusts the weighting of grades to ensure equity and accountability in the peer evaluation process.
In-platform grading dispute process
No matter the assessment type, grade disputes are a common occurrence in the classroom. A common misconception about peer evaluation activities is that it creates an increase in grade disputes. However, a methodized approach to grade disputes is necessary for a successful peer-to-peer pedagogy scheme. Without a formal dispute process on Circuit, students may feel dissatisfied with the lack of accountability while instructors are left with a more complex process of addressing grade challenges.
Kritik can do it better
Kritik’s grading scheme significantly reduces grade disputes. Kritik’s analysis of approximately 140,000 peer-evaluated student assignments shows that only 1-4% of students dispute their grades. Should a grade dispute arise, Kritik has a formalized process in the interface for addressing peer evaluation disputes. All evaluations are anonymous, to eliminate any biases. Students are able to dispute a score and flag evaluations that may be inaccurate or inappropriate. The instructor will be notified to assess this dispute from the student. While Kritik equips its platform with these dispute functions, the large majority of the students are very satisfied with the grades that they receive from their peers. Students are learning at a deeper level from having an increased opportunity to apply multiple perspectives for dynamic problem-solving.
Gamification to incentivize meaningful student participation
Kritik leverages introspective gamification techniques to further incentivize active participation in the peer evaluation process. Students have the opportunity to track their improvements as the term progresses through our evaluation scoring system. Students are given profile emblems to show their evaluative skill level. Gamification encourages students to strive for strong participation in evaluative activities and feeds into Kritik’s calibration feature, showing the increase in students’ grading power as they become stronger evaluators. Circuit has limited gamification strategies in its interface.
User-driven feature improvements
Have great ideas? We know you do. Individuals working hands-on with a product have valid and beneficial perspectives on potential improvements.
Kritik can do it better
Our clients drive innovation and improvements to our product. Kritik is a company based on feedback and powered by innovation. Many features that exist today are because educators using Kritik requested them - and we delivered! Creating a reciprocal relationship with our clients is what we do best at Kritik. Educators can access the Feature Requests Tab in their Kritik accounts to express their ideas for new features and functionality to enhance their experience at any time. Educators can also see what other requests have been made by others in the Kritik Community and upvote those requests for faster implementation. Our Kritik team works hard to make sure highly requested features are implemented fast and efficiently. In fact, our team has recently developed a live presentation feature that started as a feature request by our clients.
24/7 customer support
Instructors want to know that they can rely on their technology provider after implementation for ongoing support. Circuit support is only available by consultation. This can be challenging for students or instructors who are having difficulty with the platform in the evening or on the weekend before a deadline.
Kritik can do it better
Kritik has a 24/7 Live Chat that is available to both students and instructors. We will respond to your inquiry within 2 minutes to ensure that your query is resolved as efficiently as possible. Our team recognizes that clients located in various time zones have assignment deadlines at all hours of the day or may be working with Kritik at any time, and need support available at all odd hours.
