The Topic of the Ideal Dairy Farm Can Inspire How to Assess Knowledge about Dairy Production Processes: A Case Study with Students and Their Contributions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The objective of the study was to depict what entails an ideal dairy farm based on the opinion of undergraduate students after attending an agriculture course that covered dairy production. A few areas were highlighted by the students as important aspects of a dairy farm and special attention was given to animal welfare.

An interesting methodology was used in this study despite the limitation of having only 6 students. My main concern is the time when the student answers were collected. As presented in the material and methods section, it would be safe to assume that the course presented material that would tell the students what aspects describe an ideal farm. Asking the students to answer the three questions as a homework towards the end of such a course significantly bias the responses received.
In addition, you have used a non-parametric statistical test (Kruskal-Wallis test), which I believe is appropriate for your data. However, you report the mean, SE, and SD in all of your figures. Reporting medians and other percentiles would be better in your case.

Now, some more specific comments:
Abstract
I suggested revising your abstract and focusing more on your “results” and “conclusions” rather than “introduction” and “material and methods”

Introduction:
I could not find a hypothesis in your introduction. I suggest including it along with the objectives.
L60 to L62: I suggest presenting the objective as the last paragraph before the M&M section
L62 to L66: I believe this will be better in the M&M section

Material and Methods:
L211: “Keywords generated on the basis of studies prepared by students were used for the quantitative comparison”. It is not clear how these keywords were generated here.

Results:
L262: You mentioned table 4 here, but it is only shown towards the end of the Results section. You should present a table as soon as you reference it in the text. I suggest you turn your table 4 into table 2 and present it before figure 1 (and also move the paragraph on Lines 420 - 424 close to the table in its new location).
L276 to L 289; L380 to L405; and L460 to L477: I believe this would be more appropriate in the Discussion section since you are “discussing” some aspects of your results here.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for the prepared review and all detailed comments about our article.

Before starting the livestock production course module, I advised my students that there would be homework on the ideal dairy farm. In this way, I wanted to draw students' attention to information that may be useful in developing the topic of the ideal dairy farm. Students had 4 weeks from the time of homework assignment to the date of its submission. Taking into account my previous teaching experience, I came to the conclusion that four weeks for homework is a long enough time. All students sent me their individual homework on time.

Thank you for your suggestions on the charts and the information they provide. Instead of the mean, SE and SD, I determined the median and percentiles, which I included in the new versions of Figures 1-3.

Abstract:

I partially changed the content of the Abstract, putting more emphasis on presenting the research results and summarizing them instead of the research methodology.

Introduction:

In the paragraph covering the purpose of the work, I also included the research hypothesis. I have placed the paragraph with the purpose and hypothesis at the end of the Introduction.

Material and methods:

Keywords for the analysis of students' homework were generated on the basis of a literature review presenting issues of farm assessment, including ideal dairy farms, including keywords. In articles available in world literature, keywords were used to research the opinions of various social and professional groups. In our research, they were students. Based on a specific set of keywords used to research the opinions of different groups, it was easier for us to compare our own research results with the research of other authors.

Results:

I changed the position of Table 4 and put it right after the paragraph where it was first mentioned. Now Table 4 is Table 2 and it is placed before Figure 1. I have added the appropriate explanatory text in the paragraph before the current Table 2. As suggested, I moved the comments (under the appropriate Tables) regarding students' answers to individual questions to the "Discussion" chapter.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript by Gaworski et al., present potentially interesting work. However, the study has a huge limitation when selecting the sample. The study has only 6 participants, and therefore the representativeness of responses and the whole discussion is irrelevant for an international reader. If the study has been performed with a larger set of students, with diverse backgrounds (although discriminated with major cut-off selective parameters). Authors identify opinons express by various social groups are important. But, representation of this social group is the major weakness of this article. Further, 5 students are from France, 1 is from Taiwan, making it again more under representative of one context. Perceptions about animal welfare, farm context and ideal dairy farm are hugely varied per individual culture. E.g. in some counties, an ideal dairy farm could be a small-scale family-run business, whereas, in other countries, it can be a herd of over 1000 milking cows with intensive management practices. This is just an example of what idealism means in this context. This inhomogeneity of participants might lead to biases in the results obtained. Therefore, I strongly suggest authors identify those constraints in the study and reevaluate results (although some concerns raised in conclusions, it's not sufficient to indicate, authors should address those in their study design). Please kindly perform this with a uniform and larger set of students and thereby authors will be able to present results more contextually, e.g. among French/Taiwanese/Polish students etc…

In the paper, especially under materials and methods, there is a lot of text, which is not significantly improving the content of the article. e.g. sections 2.2 and 2.3 can be reduced.

Authors may use the word cloud to show interesting results., e.g. table 6 can be replaced (just a suggestion).

The discussion section is extremely long and needs to condense by choosing appropriate and interesting results and discuss those in-depth. Not all results, in detail and length.

Again, in the conclusion, it's hard to generalize and conclude as students, as the sample is not representative. If that would have been specifici population/sample, then you could have expressed it as XX students pointed…etc.

Considering the main limitations, despite the interesting concept of the study, I propose major revisions. Authors must account for those concerns raised when designing the study and evaluating results. Otherwise, far-reaching interpretations are not possible/applicable.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for the prepared review and all detailed comments about the article. I fully share your opinion that a group of 6 students is not a representative group of people to make international conclusions based on the opinion of such a small group. When deciding to conduct research with Erasmus + students, I experienced the same dilemmas and doubts regarding the scope of the research. Therefore, I was constantly thinking about what to do to show something new and creative based on research with only six people, which would contribute to science. The effect of my reflections and searches was to propose a research approach based on the students' assessment of the answers they gave to the questions asked. A key element of this approach for each of the questions was to prepare a ranking of the answers, in the order from the best to the weakest, taking into account the criterion of substantive evaluation and evaluation of the clarity of the statement. Another important idea I came up with was to draw the students randomly for the analysis stage of the research results. Therefore, the students did not know which person was the author of the given answer when they were ranking the answers. Individual students only knew the content of their answers to the questions. Until now, students do not know whose answer is behind the terms "answer 1", "answer 2", etc., because only I know the results of the students' drawing. All students' answers to three questions were quoted in the original version in the article. In the case of a larger number of students, it would probably be impossible. By presenting the original answers of all students, I wanted to show what were the differences between the answers in terms of their length, scope of argumentation and the way of developing individual issues.

In my opinion, the key value of the article is to show the method of approaching the assessment of knowledge and involvement of students forming small groups. The basis for such an assessment is the example of an ideal dairy farm in the article. The presented approach to the assessment of students and their homework may be an inspiration for other lecturers who can use the proposed method in cooperation with their own students, choosing any area of ​​considerations. And this, in my opinion, has an international dimension, which can be applied at other universities by other lecturers.

By offering students to prepare their homework - in the form of answers to three questions and a review of the state of knowledge about the ideal dairy farm - I wanted to draw attention to one more aspect in the research (article). So far, in my 35-year teaching experience, I have routinely approached the assessment of students' homework. Homework was used to check them and give the students a grade. Only research with a small group of Erasmus + students made me realize that there is something more to do with homework. My idea was for the students to rate each other by ranking the answers. Thanks to this, I achieved an important (in my opinion) goal: I aroused in students reflection on the quality of the prepared homework and their assessment. Anyway, after the survey, Erasmus + students very positively assessed the idea of ​​mutual evaluation of homework (answers to questions) within the group. I placed an additional paragraph on the approach to the preparation and use of homework in the form of research in the text of the article, at the end of the chapter "Discussion".

I admit that I wanted to implement a similar approach (with mutual assessment and ranking) to the assessment of students' homework with a group of 70 Polish students who participated in my classes (lecture) in a remote form in the last semester. Students also answered three questions (in Polish) about an ideal dairy farm. I admit that the result of this research turned out to be a total disaster. Based on 70 homework assignments, the students were unable to rank the answers. The amount of material to be assessed completely exceeded their ability to perceive and reliably prepare a ranking of answers from the best to the weakest. Students forming a group of 70 people assessed the idea of ​​developing a ranking of answers to the questions very critically / negatively.

I conducted research on the ideal dairy farm with a group of 70 students in the summer semester of the 2020/2021 academic year. Initially, I wanted to use this research for another article, but I concluded that the results of this research could be used to analyze keywords related to the ideal dairy farm.

I am aware that in the group of Erasmus + students participating in the study there were 5 people from France and one person from Taiwan. Unfortunately, I had no influence on the structure of people who chose my course in a given semester. I tried to eliminate any initial differences between the students in the field of previous dairy knowledge through the content of the presentation as part of the course and substantive discussions with students during the classes.

I am aware of the fact that the vision of an ideal dairy farm can be influenced by many factors, including those related to the regional conditions of production, knowledge and individual approach to the criteria of importance in dairy production. Even before the livestock production portion of the course began, I had advised my students that there would be homework on the ideal dairy farm. In this way, I wanted to draw students' attention to information that may be useful in developing the topic of the ideal dairy farm.

I fully agree that there may be different visions of an ideal dairy farm. In this case, there is no clear pattern of what size (with what number of animals) an ideal dairy farm should be, because it depends on the production region and many other factors. Based on my research, I expected to get to know the students' opinion on this subject. Like other teams conducting research on the ideal dairy farm, in their research, they expected to find out from selected social groups how they perceive the ideal dairy farm, taking into account the number of animals. In my lectures, I introduced Erasmus + students to the farms I visited from Latvia (with 3000 cows) and small farms from Poland, as well as many farms in the world that I visited. I presented farms with a conventional approach to dairy production and organic farms with dairy production. My intention was to present as wide a range of farms as possible, so that students could form their own opinion about the ideal dairy farm on this basis.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The reviewed manuscript has been improved and I am satisfied with the answers provided and the modifications completed by the authors in response to my comments in review 1.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thanks for explaining the limitation clearly. I think your article is suitable for publication, given its limitation of the inadequate number of the (representative) student group. Congratulations!