Active Citizens: Evaluation of a Community-Based Education Program

Round  1

Reviewer 1 Report

This paper presents an evaluation of the Active Citizens program potentialities and limitations. The study, implemented with 13,8 years old Czech students, centres on the impact of this program on students’ self-efficacy and perceived school democratic culture. Some data is collected about students’ and teachers’ perceptions regarding the program’s potentialities and limitations.

The focus of the article is pertinent and relevant for Sustainability Journal readers. However, the article presents some problems that need to be addressed before its publication.

 The abstract gives a clear idea about the aims, the methodology and the main results of the study.

 The introduction section demonstrates some knowledge of the literature about the impact of students’ involvement on local community-based projects centred on environmental problems. Some of the literature mobilized in the discussion section should be included in the introduction.

The introduction fails in establishing a clear connection between the concept of Education for Environmental Citizenship (EEC) and the Active Citizens program. Is the promotion of EEC the major aim of the program? Is this concept used to analyze the results of the program?

The aims of the study are clearly defined and consistent with the rest of the manuscript.

 The research questions are clear. The methodology is appropriate to the questions and the type of research. The data collection procedures are adequate to the research. However, this section doesn’t give enough information about: a) what happened in each one of the different stages of the implemented projects (experimental group); and b) the activities implemented by the control group. This information is crucial to discuss the results obtained, namely, the positive results achieved by the control group students.

 The results are interesting and presented in a clear way.

The quality of the discussion section is affected by the lack of information already mentioned.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you for your inspiring comments and important feedback. We have tried to implement all of the suggested modifications. Specifically, we:

have discussed the link between the concept of EEC and the program; 

we have provided more comprehensive description of the program (what is going on in each of its stages);

we have specified the conditions of the control group (they had no treatment similar to AC);

we have removed one of the references from the Discussion to the Introduction.

In addition, we have have provided following changes:

We have specified the sampling procedure and provided more information about the respondents;

we have provided more information about the qualitative and quantitative analysis, including references to applied methodological literature;

we have described the steps we conducted to achieve credibility of the findings; 

we have provided more information about barriers, including additonal excerpts;

we have provided more specific information about cited respondents;

we have discussed other challenges connected with the program, specifically the age issue, and provided more perspectives by teachers;

we have extensively enlarged the references, particularly for the concept of EEC;

we have provided references to Czech and international literature on views and attitudes of elementary school students and educators towards the environment;

we have corrected the minor language mistakes in the text.

Once again, thank you for your work with our manuscript.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report

This study makes an important contribution to the field by describing results from an environmental citizenship initiative in Czech elementary schools. 

More details are needed about the research design and methods.

1) How were the participants in the focus groups recruited and selected? Were all students who volunteered to participate selected, or was there a larger group recruited who agreed to participate? Discuss your participants more fully.

2) How were the qualitative data analyzed? Provide more detail about how the conclusions were reached. What steps did you take to ensure the validity of your results? For example, how did you triangulate findings, and what disconfirming evidence was found?

3) Early in the paper, you mention that teacher perceptions of the process, its barriers and benefits would be discussed. These results were not included in much detail. Generally I found that there were a few qualitative excerpts, but it was not clear whether they represented more than one perspective. More work is needed to provide richer descriptions of your qualitative data analyses and results. For example, what other challenges did teachers face as they implemented the program? Very few teacher perspectives are included here, yet they are a critical part of the program.

4) The discussion of the paper is very insightful, and provides important ideas, such as the question raised about whether competencies should be developed prior to or during a community project. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you for your help with our manuscript and all of your suggestions. We hope we were able to meet all of them. 

Specifically, we:

We have specified the sampling procedure and provided more information about the respondents;

we have provided more information about the qualitative and quantitative analysis, including references to applied methodological literature;

we have described the steps conducted to achieve credibility of our findings; 

we have provided more information about barriers, including additonal excerpts;

we have provided more specific information about the cited respondents;

we have discussed the other challenges of the program, specifically the age issue, and provided more data for teachers' perspective.

In addition, we have have provided following changes:

We have discussed the link between the concept of EEC and the program; 

we have provided more comprehensive description of the program;

we have specified the conditions of the control group (they had no treatment similar to AC);

we have removed one of the references from the Discussion to the Introduction.

we have extensively enlarged the references, particularly for the concept of EEC;

we have provided references to Czech and international literature on views and attitudes of elementary school students and educators towards the environment;

we have corrected the minor language mistakes in the text.

Once again, thank you very much for your feedback.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 3 Report

It is an interesting paper, I propose the publication of the paper as long as the authors consider performing the following modifications.

1. In lines 78-79, the phrase “…to prevent students’ involvement in controversial, potentially political issues” should be clarified and then it should be linked to the following sentence in a better way.

 2. The relevant literature should involve more recently published works.

 3. In section 2. Materials and Methods, the literature used to construct the questionnaire should be referred to.

 4. The pitfalls mentioned in line 269 (“…some of its pitfalls”) should be given comprehensively. 

5. The use of punctuation marks should be monitored, and the words of the title should not be repeated in the key-words. Moreover, attention should be given to the concise use of articles and adjectives throughout the paper. 

6. Finally, both Czech and international literature on views and attitudes of elementary school students and educators towards the environment should be added.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

thank you for your iimportant feedback and all of your suggestions. We hope we were able to meet all of them. Specifically, we:

have corrected the sentence in l. 78-79.

we have extensively enlarged the references, particularly for the concept of EEC;

we have provided references to Czech and international literature on views and attitudes of elementary school students and educators towards the environment;

we have corrected the minor language mistakes in the text.

In addition, we have provided following changes:

We have discussed the link between the concept of EEC and the program; 

we have provided more comprehensive description of the program;

we have specified the conditions of the control group (they had no treatment similar to AC);

we have removed one of the references from the Discussion to the Introduction.

we have specified the sampling procedure and provided more information about the respondents;

we have provided more information about the qualitative and quantitative analysis, including references to applied methodological literature;

we have described the steps conducted to achieve credibility of our findings; 

we have provided more information about barriers, including additonal excerpts;

we have provided more specific information about cited respondents;

we have discussed other challenges connected with the program, specifically the age issue, and provided more data about teachers' perspective.

Once again, thank you very much for your help with our manuscript.

Best regards,

Authors

Round  2

Reviewer 1 Report

Congratulations on your work!

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you very much for your positive feedback and for your help with our manuscript.

Best regards,

Authors

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for your thoughtful attention to the feedback I provided. You have addressed most of the comments that I submitted.

However, in your response, you mention that: we have provided more information about the qualitative and quantitative analysis, including references to applied methodological literature; and we have described the steps conducted to achieve credibility of our findings.

I did not see much additional information about the qualitative analyses, and was not sure what you meant by this statement: After receiving the participants’ feedback, the analysis was further improved.

Which participants provided feedback, and at what phase of analyses? How were the analyses improved after that? Please provide an example of what you mean.

Please be more clear about who coded the data, and how the results were drawn from the data.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

thank you very much for your positive feedback. We apologize for not being specific enough with providing information about qualitative analysis in the previous version of the manuscript. I hope we were able to fix it now. Specifically, we have provided more information about the analytic procedure (open coding, creating broader categories), specified who conducted the analysis, and how we asked the participants for their feedback.

Once again, thank you very much for your help with our manuscript.

Best regards,

Authors