The Effects of Gamified Flipped Learning Method on Student’s Innovation Skills, Self-Efficacy towards Virtual Physics Lab Course and Perceptions
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The paper is quite well written and interesting. In my opinion however it could focus more also on using the approach to other type of classes, not only physics. In my opinion other experimental-based classes share the same type or problems and potentially the same type of solutions could be implemented.
Furthermore the work lacks comparison with traditional, stationary teaching approach. This is unfortunately common for this type of papers - the work compares GFL and CFL approaches. But are any of those really valid? How the GFL compares with traditional, stationary laboratory-based teaching? Exploring this area could greatly improve the general results of the paper. Or this area could be explored in the following works.
Please look and correct punctuation mistakes - you have missing spaces (like in "the class -an added task"), inconsistency in punctuation marks placement (like in "points, gifts [15, 16.]These" vs. "their goals [12-14]. Several") etc.
Please check you spelling and language in generall, e.g. the questions in lines 83 and 84 are missing a verb? Lines 163 and onward are spelled wrongly and thus not understandable. There is also questionable word usage, like in "Also, details on the process were made available online for the consumption of the participants."
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We are very grateful for your comments on the manuscript. We revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments and suggestions. We hope that you find my responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Best Regards.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Line 64, spell out the meaning of EFL then state in brackets, just like it was done in line 72. In line 64 the term is introduced for the first time in the text and all readers may not know what the abbreviation means. Abbreviations should be used after the term is fully introduced.
For the discussion, any potential reasons as to why no significant improvement was introduced by GFL on student's self efficacy? A bit more explanation about why it was in line with the two other studies mentioned will strengthen this work. The explanation does not have to be long, but it should give more insights to the self-efficacy results presented. This addition would help to balance the discussion, which more fully discusses the results of research questions one and three.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We are very grateful for your comments on the manuscript. We revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments and suggestions. We hope that you find my responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Best Regards.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The article presents a timely research. As a researcher who plays video games, the reviewer found this article interesting, informative, and fun to read. The reviewer really liked the idea of experience points.
However, sadly, I must say there are some critical issues with the data analysis. If the authors could improve the following, a smaller "article restructuring" may be needed as well because the results may change. The reviewer suggest to carefully investigate the data.
Starting from the beginning, the reviewer's remarks are the following:
Line 73: There is a "[22" in this line.
Lines 83-84: These two questions do not make sense. Start them with "Can flipped learning be gamified to..." instead.
Line 184: "Questionary"? Perhaps the authors mean "Questionnaire". These words have two different meanings.
Regarding Tables 1 and 2 and the methodology (please include the answers in the respective parts in the study):
- What did the questionnaires look like? Were they a 5-point Likert scale? <- The reviewer wrote this remark before reading subsection 3.3, however the reviewer believes a small restructuring is necessary to make the article more logical. Subsection 3.3 should be before the pre-test evaluation. Or the pre-test evaluation should be after subsection 3.3
- Did the authors check the distribution of data before using t-tests? The authors should be careful, because if it is not normal, then non-parametric tests should be used (the t-test is parametric).
- If the data is normal, the F-test could be also used for variance analysis (t-test checks the mean). Maybe there is a significant difference among variances.
- Regarding significance, (at the moment) the last row of Table 1 is barely significant. In the text below the Table 1 the authors wrote that there is no significant difference. As can be seen, there is one.
- Also regarding significance, there are two significant differences in Table 2, which are also not mentioned in the text below.
Something is not right with Tables 4 and 5. The t and p values are almost the same as in Tables 1 and 2, respectively.
Also, to see whether there are significant differences between pre-test and post-test, the authors need to compare the results of both groups on the pre-test to the results of both groups to the results on the post-test with a paired t-test (if all data distributions are normally distributed). Therefore, what is written in lines 361 - 362 are not confirmed by anything.
What could confirm it, should be in Table 6. However, p = 0.00 in it. It should not be that value.
Lines 364 - 366: "Contrary to the observations in Table 3 for innovation skill, Table 5 shows the results of the physics self-efficacy questionnaire, indicating that gamification process did not improve the physics self-efficacy of the students." Well, judging by the means, their results became worse, actually. Is it significant, though?
Table 6 and Figures 6 - 7 are not mentioned in the text before them.
Author Response
Dear Reviewer,
We are very grateful for your comments on the manuscript. We revised the manuscript in accordance with your comments and suggestions. We hope that you find my responses satisfactory and that the manuscript is now acceptable for publication.
Best Regards.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 3 Report
The article improved considerably.
