Redesigning and Evaluating a Science Activity to Foster Mathematical Problem Solving

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I found the article very interesting and well written. The results, with all limitation mentioned in manuscript (selected biology task – not completely STEAM, no verification whether the revised task continues to promote model understanding) can be useful for improving the current practice in which mathematics is often underrepresented, or inadequate represented in student STEAM activities. From the available data it seems that research design is adequate and that results are valid according to the described methodology. Structure of the paper addresses all important aspects of research process trough adequate sections. The conclusion could be a bit more extensive. Supplementary material is also provided and related to the main text. The literature review is well-structured. The keywords are appropriate. I believe the manuscript can be accepted for publication after minor revision. 

Lines 79-80

… “(Mayer & Wittrock, 79 2016)”… This reference is missing in the literature and inadequately quotes.

Line 90

“The first phase is reading the task including ingestion the problem conditions”. I am not sure that INGESTION is the suitable word. In this form, I do not understand the meaning of the sentence.

Line 364

It seems that in Table 1 in sentence "If 300 ml + 100 ml + 200 ml + 300 ml are added, ml will flow out of the box." missed space in front of “ml” that student can put the predicted number.

Lines 451-452

In Figure 5 text illustration c) is not explained and presence of sentence “Description of what is contained in the second panel. Figures should be placed in the main text near to the first time they are cited.“ is unclear. Looks like a forgotten comment from an earlier review.

Line 516 

“…including aid cards and are teacher-student discussions”. It seems that ARE is redundant in this sentence.

Lines 558-560

“We have shown with both models, the descriptive phase model and the chronological sequence of the process that the problem-solving process of the redesigned it is not a linear process. A repeated variation of the previous sentence.

Author Response

March 25^th, 2024

Dear reviewer,

We are pleased to re-submit our paper titled: “Redesigning and Evaluating a Science Activity to foster Mathematical Problem Solving”. We would like to thank you for your review and your important comments on our paper. We used red font to show changes to the revised manuscript, added references are marked with comments. We responded to each of your comments, which you can find in the attached document.

Thank you again for this important review.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review the submitted study. The work as a whole has a coherent impression, but I cannot help but think that the text is insufficient for publication in an impact journal. This is a didactically focused work, the processing of which is insufficient from a scientific point of view. I am aware that this is qualitative research, but coding, working with respondents, the actual contribution to knowledge and much more are not sufficiently described. It is obvious that the literary sources were chosen more or less randomly, which is very evident from the bibliography, where the texts not only seem inconsistent, but many of them are also very outdated. For this reason, I recommend drawing more from current sources. Literary sources are not well handled in the text either. For example, the discussion chapter contains only two references to the bibliography, which is very few. Image number 4 is blurry. Figure 6 is illegible. I apologize to the authors if I am overly critical of their work. Maybe other reviewers will rate the text better.

Author Response

March 25^th, 2024

Dear reviewer,

We are pleased to re-submit our paper titled: “Redesigning and Evaluating a Science Activity to foster Mathematical Problem Solving”. We would like to thank you for your review and your important comments on our paper. We used red font to show changes to the revised manuscript, added references are marked with comments. We responded to each of your comments, which you can find in the attached document.

Thank you again for this important review.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

In this paper a science activity under the scope of biology classes is used to promote mathematics problem solving in STEM. The science activity was redesign into a mathematical problem-solving task that emphasizes structures and patterns. A qualitative content analysis was performed. Although, some limitations of the study were presented, this study case proposes a different learning sequence applied to problem solving, that appears to present promising results. Even though no impact findings were presented, the paper is interesting and can be of interest for publication.

Reasonable English writing.

Author Response

March 25^th, 2024

Dear reviewer,

We are pleased to re-submit our paper titled: “Redesigning and Evaluating a Science Activity to foster Mathematical Problem Solving”. We would like to thank you for your review of our article.

In this paper a science activity under the scope of biology classes is used to promote mathematics problem solving in STEM. The science activity was redesign into a mathematical problem-solving task that emphasizes structures and patterns. A qualitative content analysis was performed. Although, some limitations of the study were presented, this study case proposes a different learning sequence applied to problem solving, that appears to present promising results. Even though no impact findings were presented, the paper is interesting and can be of interest for publication.

Reasonable English writing - Minor editing of English language required.

We appreciate your attention to detail and your analysis of our work. It is encouraging to observe the reviewer's recognition of our study as presenting a potential alternative learning sequence for problem-solving in STEM education.

In response to your comment, we have proof-read the article in order to enhance the linguistic quality of the paper.

We used red font to show changes to the revised manuscript, added references are marked with comments.

Thank you again for this important review.