Environmental Literacy Level Comparison of Undergraduates in the Conventional and ODLs Universities in Sri Lanka

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

In this work, Kuruppuarachchi et al present a study of the environmental literacy level survey, which provides useful information for improving environmental education. I do have some comments/questions that I hope will help to improve it.

 

Materials and Methods:

I'm having trouble interpreting the structure of the questionnaire. It would be better to provide the questionnaire as supplementary information.

 

Results and Discussion:

Line 146-148. From the survey data, 94% of undergraduates interested in environmental activities is higher than 56.4% of the reference data. Please provide the reason and discuss why it is higher in the universities in Siri Lanka.

Line 152-153. “Students preferred outdoor activities … preferred social activities. Please explain the method to define higher scores in knowledge. Does the environmental questionnaire is too difficult for undergraduate students?

Line 190-192. “Only 45.6% of undergraduates … knowledge on the environment” Again, it would be better to provide the information of the question discrimination index.

Line 281: Suggest “Ca.” change to “approximately”

Author Response

See the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I carefully read the paper: it deals a local topic but it could be interesting worldwide. For this scope the authors should introduce a section regarding similar papers present in literature and the possible comparison (different papers dealing the environmental education issue in other countries). Otherwise, if no papers are present in literature, the authors should propose a model to be exported in other situations. The questionnaire should be reported, at least the questions, as supplementary materials otherwise the reader could not understand the meaning of this manuscript. Please, reduce the introduction, some points are scholar and not useful for a scientific journal. Please, insert some pie charts for describing the results, they are more clear and immediate.

Author Response

See the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The topic of the paper is not particularly novel. This would have been emerged in the presence of a comprehensive literature review, which is currently missing.

The paper is badly prepared and it was not carefully proof-read (capitalization not always consistent for statistical terms, title of sections 2.3 and 2.4 are the same, etc.).

There are no details about the Research Ethics Committee that should have approved this study and compliance with Declaration of Helsinki.

The questionnaire itself used in the study is not reported!! We have no idea about how the questions/items looked like and what were their corresponding scales. So it is impossible to assess the variables.

The statistics is not reported in a standardized way. It is not reported if assumptions for parametric statistical tests were met or violated, so we cannot trust the results of the study.

There is no Discussion section - Conclusions look merely descriptive but as I said they are not rigorously supported by empirical data. I don't see the relevance and what the contribution to knowledge of the manuscript would be..

 

Author Response

See the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

The authors improved the paper quality and not the paper could be considered for publication.

Reviewer 3 Report

Responses provided by the authors are elusive and do not really address the points raised. Statistical reporting is still inaccurate and shows little familiarity with the analysis technique used. Parametric tests assumptions should not be assumed but actually tested, and reported.

 

Ethical approval details should be fully disclosed and reported in the manuscript as per the journal policy on ethics.