Knowledge Use in Education for Environmental Citizenship—Results of Four Case Studies in Europe (France, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey)

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Let me keep my review rather short, as I don’t judge this submission as a scientific research paper. It must be an internal descriptive report not eligible for a research outlet.

First, the paper ignores the literature standards of citizenships, knowledge construction as well as statistical empirical standards.

Second, the author/s) declare the study as “qualitative” study as they collect some feed backs from small samples without taking care to established analyses’ methods. Nevertheless, the paper does not even try to apply a categorisation process.

Third, a comparative study as announced within the title requires representative samples (which are not at all given).

In consequence, I don’t see a scientific value of adding substantial knowledge to an existing body of science.

Author Response

Dear Editors,

Thank you for your mail and suggestions to improve our article Knowledge use in environmental citizenship – a European comparative study (France, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey). The article has been corrected according to reviewers suggestions. Hopefully, we answered on all requests and comments.

Detailed corrections are listed below point by point:

Let me keep my review rather short, as I don’t judge this submission as a scientific research paper. It must be an internal descriptive report not eligible for a research outlet.

First, the paper ignores the literature standards of citizenships, knowledge construction as well as statistical empirical standards.

We amended the literature review concentrating on environmental citizenship (Dobson, Kymlicka, Etzioni, Johnson, L. and Morris).

Second, the author/s) declare the study as “qualitative” study as they collect some feed backs from small samples without taking care to established analyses’ methods. Nevertheless, the paper does not even try to apply a categorisation process.

We added a more detailed methodological part, and presented the method of analysis; finally in the discussion we present a categorization.

Third, a comparative study as announced within the title requires representative samples (which are not at all given).

As a qualitative study we cannot aim to be statistically representative; even thematic representativeness could be difficult to achieve, given the multitude of educational forms across Europe, but by choosing these examples we analysed the knowledge forms used in environmental education to show the differences of four countries.

We added a comparative table also in the discussion part.

In consequence, I don’t see a scientific value of adding substantial knowledge to an existing body of science.

We are genuinely grateful for patience and suggestions that have helped us even more improve the manuscript. The manuscript has been resubmitted to your journal. We are looking forward to your response.

Sincerely yours,

the authors

Reviewer 2 Report

The article provides an interesting look at the practice of environmental education in four European countries. The theory is well written, but quite brief. It would be appropriate to supplement it with a deeper look at the topic of environmental citizenship. The case studies are fine, although they may be too different for the necessary comparisons.

The paper has two fundamental problems that must be resolved before it can be recommended for publication:

1,The methodology does not sufficiently describe how the case studies are compared. Has their content been encoded? How did the authors obtain comparable data?

2, Discussion is not a discussion, but only a summary of case studies. Since the comparison of case studies is not in the Results section, I would expect that a detailed comparison will be in the discussion. Furthermore, there should be a placement of the findings made by the authors in the context of the whole field. This cannot be done without quoting of relevant research and a deeper connection with the theory of environmental education, or with a comparison with other states.

The use of citations does not respect the standards of the journal.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you for your mail and suggestions to improve our article Knowledge use in environmental citizenship – a European comparative study (France, Hungary, Serbia, Turkey). The article has been corrected according to reviewers suggestions. Hopefully, we answered on all requests and comments.

Detailed corrections are listed below point by point:

The article provides an interesting look at the practice of environmental education in four European countries. The theory is well written, but quite brief. It would be appropriate to supplement it with a deeper look at the topic of environmental citizenship. The case studies are fine, although they may be too different for the necessary comparisons.

The paper has two fundamental problems that must be resolved before it can be recommended for publication:

1,The methodology does not sufficiently describe how the case studies are compared. Has their content been encoded? How did the authors obtain comparable data?

We added a more detailed methodological part, describing the methods used by each country team, and also presented the method of analysis; we hope that with the amendment we could show that our cases are comparable.

2, Discussion is not a discussion, but only a summary of case studies. Since the comparison of case studies is not in the Results section, I would expect that a detailed comparison will be in the discussion. Furthermore, there should be a placement of the findings made by the authors in the context of the whole field. This cannot be done without quoting of relevant research and a deeper connection with the theory of environmental education, or with a comparison with other states.

We amended the literature review concentrating on environmental citizenship (Dobson, Kymlicka, Etzioni, Johnson, L. and Morris) and developed the discussions. We added a table to present the comparable results of our study.

The use of citations does not respect the standards of the journal.

We modified the citations according to the standards of the journal.

We are genuinely grateful for patience and suggestions that have helped us even more improve the manuscript. The manuscript has been resubmitted to your journal. We are looking forward to your response.

Sincerely yours,

the authors

Reviewer 3 Report

1. Sources of French study? How? Sample?
2. Hungarian: What documents? What data? Who/what are the 6 sample? How selected? How transcribed? How analyzed? What methodology and paradigm?
3. Turkish case study: Did you pilot the questionnaire? Validate it? Examine reliability? How long? How constructed? Please describe the sample. How were and why were they selected?
4. Explain semi open coding. What qualitative technique? Why? How?

You must have limited transferability and generalizability. Was there triangulation?

Without the aforementioned information, one cannot evaluate your claims.

Separate the discussion from the conclusion.

Limitations should be a formal section.

Author Response

We improved the description of the methodology: gave the sources of French study, the sample. We also amended the presentation of the methodology used in the Hungarian case-tudy, with documents, data, method of selection, og analysis. We gave a detailed explanation to the methodology of the Turkish case study, finally we explained shortly semi open coding.

We hope that now the text is sufficiently informative on methodology.

We amended the manuscript to answer your questions and comments on limited transferability and generalizability. We used different techniques for triangulation, and now we amended the manuscript accordingly.

We separated the discussion and the conclusions, and modified them accordingly.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

The study is still presented as a comparison study even in the title. This is by several NOT the case as already outlined in my previous review where I also expressed my severe doubts that this paper can be upgraded enough to reach a publication standard.

Author Response

We reformulated the title, amended and modified the analysis, and presented the limitations of our study. We sincerely hope that you will find the modifications satisfactory.

Reviewer 2 Report

the article has been edited according to all my comments

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. We decided to present most striking case studies and examples and given the insufficiently uniform education systems it was difficult to find examples that  can be easily compared. Also, we have corrected the subheadings in the manuscript and whole discussion and conclusion part is improved so we hope that you will find them more suitable now. 

Reviewer 3 Report

The paper is much improved.

What is transect walking as a triangulation method? I have never heard of transect walking as a way to improve qualitative research.

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

I dont see any real improvement as the theoretical and literature foundation of the paper is totally missing (just cosmetic modifications do not cure the paper's vision). It is rather a final (descriptive) report of some European project rather than a scientific paper. It is not suitable for SUSTAINABILITY at all: The only possible recommendation is REJECT.