Multilevel Effects of Student and School Factors on Senior High School Students’ Ocean Literacy
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This manuscript that is focused on multilevel effect of student and school factors on senior high-school student’s ocean literacy could be of interest to ‘Sustainability’ readers. The following comments and suggestions should be addressed by the authors before considering this manuscript for publication:
The introduction is nicely presented and the focus of the study is clear. However, I could not find an explicit and clear definition for Ocean Literacy which is the key concept of your study. You must define this concept at the early beginning of the manuscript.
You use too many abbreviations. It reduces the fluency of reading. Consider use the full words of HLM, PEL or ROBM throughout the manuscript. It’s OK to use the abbreviations in the tables.
Regarding ATO – I had to guess what this abbreviation means – the full name of the concept/variable first appears on p. 5 (notes under Table 3)
I am also wondering about the full and accurate meaning of the variable ATO. According to Table 3 ATO includes three statements. The first two statements present attitudes towards ocean LEARNING (and not on towards ocean science or ocean per-se). Therefore, I think you should define this variable more accurately as attitudes towards ocean and learning about ocean.
The description of the development of the instrument and the process of validation seems complete and is well presented in the manuscript. Since you did not include the full questionnaire I have no clue about the types or characteristics of the items. I suggest to add the full questionnaire as an appendix or at least add some exemplary items in Table 2.
Ethical notes - Regarding the participants, it is important to add information about the ways you maintained anonymity and confidentiality in your study and to know whether the participants agreed to take part in the study.
In the conclusions it is important to indicate also the limitations of the study. and provide suggestions for future studies which are relevant to the current study. In addition, I suggest to expand a little bit more about your suggestions for future studies and about specific implications of your study in the field of ocean literacy.
I’m looking forward to reading the revised version of the manuscript.
Author Response
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Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The author should be commended for designing and carrying out this research and doing it as carefully as she/he does. It is a necessary and thorough addition to the literature especially in oceanography.
The first points concern presentation and content. I know that this a scientific journal and this means that the paper has this structure and headings. This particular paper is introducing a new questionnaire which comes out well in the pilot stage with good scores indicating a tool which schools and teachers will be able to use. A bit more help for readers teaching 'ocean literacy' probably for the first time could be useful. A discussion on the questions and validation with this mind also would be helpful. (Note - I haven´t quite figured out who the main readers are)
This research is timely as it coincides with the advent of the SDGs where Life underwater (nr. 14) will have several opportunities for this research and this type of research. Again it would make the paper more valuable to contextualize the research as the SGS is the most ambitious global attempt to tackle sustainability issues across a wide range of settings. Please make a reference to it.
This brings me to my last point which is the name of the journal and the concepts discussed or researched in the articles. This is the second time I have reviewed an article in which sustainability as a term is not used once and a discussion is absent. The only times I found the term sustainability was in the running headers. It is not used in the article nor is the difference between literacy and sustainability mentioned. I put the term „sustainability model“ into a search the other day and got 250 000 000 hits.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The paper should be reviewed, both the review of the scientific literature and the bibliography.
The research desing is relevant, however it is necessary tant the method is better adjusted to the reality, context and population under study.
Research results and future research lines can be further worked on.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The revisions made by the authors meet my concerns. The current version of the manuscripts seems ready for publication.
The following sentence, "Due to the limited of the space, the questionnaires used in this study can be provided to the academic community for academic research, but not for commercial use. If you need this researcher, please contact the author" (p.5, 206 and p. 6 207-208), is unnecessary. This is not something you write in an article. Once you provided your e-mail, readers who are interested in the questionnaire have the way to contact you and ask for the full instrument.
Author Response
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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
