Evaluating the Effects of Non-Anonymity on Student Team-Member Evaluations

Taylor Smith has a Bachelor of Science and a Master’s degree from the civil and environmental engineering program at Brigham Young University. For his graduate studies Taylor’s classwork and technical emphasis were in geotechnical engineering; however, his Master’s Thesis was non-technical and he examined and tested ways to improve performance through the use of peer feedback. More particularly, he evaluated the effect that having students conduct team member evaluations non-anonymously had upon personal and team effectiveness. His research is an original work (initiated by himself), which was funded by the BYU college of engineering. The contents of this paper are a condensed version of his thesis. Taylor, his wife Judy, and five children recently moved to the Washington, DC area where he is currently employed with Clark Construction.