After completing the first draft of the lab report analysis and technical description assignments, I took part in an in-class peer review. These are reflections of my experience of the peer reviews.
Reflection 1: Lab Report Analysis
The peer review helped in multiple ways. Firstly, my draft was reviewed by two other people. This was helpful because getting because they can spot something in my analysis that I missed. For instance, Yaslin commented on my analysis was that I forgot to add page numbers. This was a required part of the assignment, but I forgot about it and didn’t even think about the page numbers when I was proofreading my work. So, this comment helped me correct my mistake. Also, the peer review helped me understand that my essay did not have any major problems because neither Mohamed nor Yaslin reported any. Overall, having a fresh set of eyes on my work was very helpful for me.
Additionally, the second part of peer reviewing which is, to read other people’s work, also helped me. This is because I was able to compare our work and see what I could be missing. And I can help the other person by telling them what they are missing. One comment I left on Yaslin’s paper was about how the materials section also includes methods because the essay I was reading kept repeating that there were no physical materials mentioned. Also, I noticed that there was no cover page in the essay I was reading, so I reminded Yaslin about it. After reviewing the other two articles, I reread my own and found that I repeated myself a few times and could cut down some paragraphs to enhance the essay. Overall, having my paper read by my peers and reading my peers’ papers helped me fix many parts of my analysis.
Reflection 2: Technical Description
The technical description peer review was very insightful for me because I noticed many things in my own paper and my peers’ papers which helped me. First, I noticed many similarities between the papers. All of my peers included images throughout their technical descriptions. This was helpful for me because I was unsure of how I should format or place the pictures. So when I saw that they did it in a similar way, I was reassured. Similarly, I was also unsure about the formatting of the paper in general because this is the first time I did a technical description. However, the fact that my peers more or less had similar organization as me reassured me again. On the other hand, I also noticed some differences between our papers. For instance, I noticed that Sebastian did not include captions or figure numbers. I was able to tell him to add that to his paper. Furthermore, I noticed that all three of my peers had titles in their paper. I did not have a title so that stood out to me and I have decided to add a title. Finally, I noticed that Karina included sub sections to her sections which was unlike my own paper. However, I realized that while the sub sections worked for her paper, they would not really fit in mine. This is because her paper was about the reciprocating engine which has something called a four stroke cycle. So, she was able to put each of those strokes in a separate section under the main section. My paper, on the other hand, is about the Apple Pencil. I wrote about the body, motherboard, battery, antenna, and tip. While I included details about each of their sub parts, I don’t think it would be wise to split each of the sub parts into a separate section because there is not as much detail of each sub part as there is for each stroke of the cycle in Karina’s paper. So, I will see if there is an opportunity to implement sub sections in a future paper of mine. Overall, the peer review was helpful for two main reasons. First, I was reassured that most of my paper was done in the proper format because I saw many similarities between my paper and my peers’ papers. Second, I was able to make necessary changes to improve my paper and I was able to make suggestions to my peers to improve their papers. So, I would say the peer review was a success.
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