4. Was the peer-assessment a helpful process to learn more about designed experiments? Did you learn anything else from this approach? ------------------ I did not learn much from it. It was not a bad idea. I like it. I did learn a few things. No. I really didn't find it useful. It was very time consuming. I found it surprisingly very useful. Doing the evaluations gave me a sense of how thorough people should be in their reports. It also made me think of the mistakes I might have done in my report. I look forward to seeing the feedback. At the end, a report should be thorough, concise and analytical. If all of these elements were fulfilled, I was sure to give the students a good grade. Of course, grammar is important as well. Yeah I did learn new concepts from peer evaluating the designed experiments. They were tedious to do but they helped me understand the concepts better. I learned how to make my project better in the future. Learnt about mistakes that people usually make I didn't learn much from the peer assessment, it was interesting reading other student's work but we've been exposed to that to an extent in our group work setting, where we frequently read over each others work to ensure we submit the best work we can. I didn't find peer grading very helpful to learn more about the designed experiments, maybe 10 min in class presentations would be more effective and powerful. The peer-assessment was helpful in a way, but at times made me more confused than before. The peer assessment was helpful as it allowed me to compare my thought process during the project to others. I did the project by myself so reading other reports critically in a way was like collaborating with my peers, which was very beneficial in learning the designed experiment process. I didn't really learn anything from the peer evals. I just saw what other groups did as projects and the results they obtained. I found it quite helpful to learn about designed experiments. I certainly did make quite a few mistakes in my project, and learning from them in others projects made me understand the concepts a lot better. - For me the self-evaluation was the most effective part of the process. To think about each question before submitting the report, gave me a good idea of my areas that I could improve. And the feedback was great as well, even from those who could not understand something from your report, because I think that our main goal should always be try to write in a way that everyone can understand. It just felt tedious to me. Marking one would have sufficed. I didn't find the peer assessment helpful to learn more about the design process. I learned much more from planning and working in my own experiment Yes, it gave great insight into the work that TA's and instructors put into marking our work (hint: it's a lot of work ;) ). I also felt that I learned more about what makes a good DOE approach. "The peer-assesment was valuble. I learned about how valuble my co-ops were in terms of technical writing compared with a few of the reports that were evaluated. I also learned about some on-going research from some of the grad-students I presume. " The peer-assetssment was a helpful process to learn more about the experiments of others. It was also great to see the ideas others came up with and see how they designed their experiments. From the assessment, I also learned about the difficulty in marking open ended projects. I assume the work place will involve projects which also do not have a set solution. This assessment has helped me understand what to expect when assessing potential projects in the future. "I think it was a different experience. I learned that marlin is tedious. You sit and stare at a project sometimes trying to make sense of things because you have no idea what the individuals who did he project were thinking when they did the projects. It's difficult to judge someone else's work. " I didn't feel I gained a great deal from the peer evaluation. I think the main thing I learned was that marking is hard work! YES. It forced me to review concepts that I felt needed criticism in my peer's reports. It was helpful; however, doing two would be enough as well. "The designed experiments are a good way to learn and fully understand the content. However, some of the report was kind of poorly done and I did not get a lot of values nor enjoying reading them. I think reading 3 reports are a good standard for peer-assessment so that we will have a better idea of the content and see how others design their experiment. If grading more, I feel mostly the structure of the experiment design are somewhat similar. I learn a difference between 400 level vs. 600 levels experiments, their reports are more technical and experiment is more practical, maybe they have a better resource than 400 levels, since they can work in the lab when they can, plus mostly are the experiment that they are researching, but 400 levels students report are more creative in away because we do not have access to lab for technical experiments." Yes, I thought it was useful. Also, seeing other experiments gave insight into types of factors and other ideas that others may not have thought of. In addition, it was interesting to see the level of work done by other students in the class. I learned about how experiments should be planned meticulously -- some people had really well put-together reports. I also liked learning about some genuinely interesting topics -- peer-assessment was a good idea. I enjoyed this approach. I found the peer-assessment to be a slightly difficult process. Some of the projects were difficult to understand or they included the correct information but maybe not in the section that was stated in the peer eval form. I'm assuming this is because it was too late to completely restructure the report once people had reviewed the peer evaluation. Also I checked that the models were correctly done, but for the collapsing of fractional factorials / removing of factors it was difficult to understand If it was done correctly due to lots of aliasing present in certain scenarios. "Yes, it was nice to compare my comments to what other people had commented and the similarities (confirming my understanding) and also see some things I might have missed. Getting lots of feedback on my own report was also very helpful, there were many suggestions and good points that I could use in the future for improvement. Also, while peer evaluating other group's reports, it made me think about ways I could've made report better (before seeing my own peer evaluations from people). " To be honest, the peer evaluation process taught me more about what not to do when designing experiments. It was a good learning experience to examine reports that sometimes had major flaws and think about how I would have done it differently. I learned about different ways to do experiments! I am not sure if the peer grading confused me more or helped me understand the DOE process, but I did find it helpful and useful. I didn't find the peer-assessment too helpful actually. It was cool reading each report and seeing what different students did but it was also time consuming. Didn't really feel that I learned a lot more on designed experiments from the peer-assessment. It was a good learning process. I understood the mistakes that I made. I have a comment on the length of the report though. Being a 600 level student a little more is expected out of me, but to bring that out I need extra resources and extra pages in turn. In order to explain my work better and to sideline the mistakes that I made, I needed to be unconstrained with the number of pages. It was a little difficult, putting more info in the same no. of pages as the undergrads. It was really good. Not only did it teach me a lot about that material, but it gave me a new appreciation for how difficult and time consuming grading can be. Yes. It also helped me study for the final exam; if I did not understand why or how a group did their experimental analysis, I would review the topic to make sure I understood the topic and could mark the report fairly. Yes, I learned from the peer evaluation, however I would prefer if the peer grading percentage had a lower weight of the total grade. "While the peer assessment of several of the well-constructed reports was very useful (to see the implementation and logic behind a well-designed experiment and data analysis in a thorough, worked out manner), it also highlighted some pretty serious shortcomings in quite a number of reports. While it would involve more logistics for the instructor, perhaps an ""optional"" sign up in which a preliminary report could be submitted and shared with another group and peer-marked with the same rubric would allow for more consistently well-developed final report submissions? " Yes it was a very unique method and enable us to see all the different approaches our classmates had on relevant topics. "-i got to see how everyone perceived the material differently -it also gave me a chance to see if I really understood the material as well." Peer assessment was really nice as I got to see how other people wrote reports and did experiments. I think there should be an opportunity to re-submit the final report after going through the peer evaluation, as I can learn from other people and improve my own report (this grade can be an-addition to the previous submission, somewhat like how the test are marked) Yes, peer evaluation helped me to observe different aspects to designing experiments. I didn't find the peer-assessment to be too helpful to be honest since it was kind of difficult to read comments in the way we got the feedback. I think that if there was a format that everybody followed with the commentary it might help remedy that problem, but currently its hard to tell when a comment from another person begins. The peer evaluations helped get a feel for grading, and just identifying what good reports look like compared to average or poor ones. I didn't learn anything new content wise, but some of the analysis for the projects was great in analyzing the experimental results. It didn't feel like it was too helpful. It felt more like I was checking boxes and explaining why rather than learning from other people's reports. However, it was very easy to tell which was a bad report and which was a good report. I didn't really learn much from the peer evaluations (besides what could have been done better), but perhaps doing the peer evaluations before submitting the final report would be helpful. I did, however, learn how hard it can be marking something that you are unsure if it is right or wrong (eg. the report doesn't state something but you know it was done). I was not helpful for me because I left the assessments til the last minute and therefore did not get as much out of it as I could have if I would have spent more time. While marking I did learn the importance of clear, concise writing because reading unorganized reports is not easy! The peer assessment was helpful since I got to see how my peers interpreted the data. It was a nice comparison since it was a good check to see if I was doing the right stuff when faced with similar problems. Yes, I learnt some small things that help me understand DOEs better. It was somewhat useful from the perspective that it allowed you to see lots of different types of experiments and how the process could be applied in lots of different ways. I learned more about designed experiments through the course videos than I did about the peer-assessment. "One of the most useful tools in my undergrad. They say the best way to learn is to teach, I now feel the same way goes for marking. I spent quite a bit of time going over everyone's reports, making sure I understood their project and results before grading their written portion. It was a great way to really understand the concepts behind D.O.E. Reading the other peoples reports really allowed me to judge how my work stands up against others. I was a bit surprised at the variation in marks given for the analysis section. Some reports were clearly wrong, and quite a few people gave quite high marks. I question if people actually understand what they are interpreting or are just ""looking to see if they followed the rubric"". " Of course. It helped us to know about a perfect and complete report. I did not find very many of the peer-assessments very helpful. However, I will give them a better read through once exams are over. For myself I did not have the opportunity to review my notes as well as I would have liked. For this reason I feel like my reviews of my peers could have been better. Some peers give me great feedback, but some peers did not grade our report with a good attitude. It helped me in terms of finding out some of the things I should have done in the report that I didn't do. I feel like I already knew what needed to be done, however it was not thought of while designing the experiment and some of the aspects that should have been there were missed.