Measuring System Competence in Education for Sustainable Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

It would be suitable to describe the pictures better.
Figure 1 is not quite legible. The R code should be cut off.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 1,

We would like to thank you for drawing our attention to the lack of legibility and description of Figure 1. We have replaced the barely readable item IDs in Figure 1 with asterisks (p. 9, between l. 405 and 406) and adjusted the descriptive text accordingly (p. 9, l. 394-395). Additionally, we have corrected the labeling (English "Frequency" instead of German "Häufigkeit") in Figure 2 (p. 10, between l. 415 and 416).

Many thanks for your support in improving our paper and kind regards

Reviewer 2 Report

The article is very current and is of great interest to the educational community. My proposals for improvement for the authors are the following: Better write research results in the abstract Incorporate the items from the questionnaire, even if it is in an annexe. I have not read the questionnaire questions anywhere. Conclusions should include how and where the teachers can use it and assess their educational practice in ESD. Finally, the authors should review some epigraphs and their italics.

Author Response

We would like to thank reviewer 3 for his/her constructive feedback. We have responded to the four comments included in the following way.

Comment #1 – Explanation of the results in the abstract

According to comment #1 we added a section explaining our results in the abstract (p. 1, l. 19-24). Additionally, we changed the formatting of “N =” to italics (p.1, l. 16)

Comment #2 – Incorporation of the test items in an appendix to the article

The presented instrument is so far only available in German. We will calibrate the test again with minimal changes--based on the results described in this article--using a larger sample and present the final instrument including all items (translated into English) in a follow-up article. However, we think the comment to include test items is very reasonable as readers need to get an idea on how the newly developed instrument looks like. Therefore we translated a task example for illustrative purposes to English and added it as an appendix (see Appendix A on p. 13). We furthermore added a short passage in the text that refers to the examples in Appendix A (p.5, l. 233-237).

Comment #3 – Including guidelines for teachers on how to assess educational practice in ESD

This is a very important suggestion and also an important concern for us, thank you very much. An application-oriented description of the instrument will therefore be given in the follow-up publication to this one (see also response to issue #3). This publication, on the other hand, focuses on the theoretical background of system competence in the field of ESD, the development process of the instrument, and the psychometric testing.

Comment #4 – Check Italics in Epigraphs

Regarding the check of Italics in the figures - We have checked the labels again against the templates for the format and could not find any discrepancies. We only used italics for the symbols of the estimated parameters and the "Note." in the table caption. If you direct us more precisely what we need to change, we are happy to do that.

 

We hope that with these revisions you will now find the manuscript acceptable for publication, and we look forward to hearing from you.

 

Sincerely yours,

Nina Roczen

 

Reviewer 3 Report

Currently, the importance of the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) of United Nations is more than evident. This article presents the development of an instrument for evaluating the competence of the system in the field of Education for Sustainable Development (ESD), and this instrument may be relevant when it comes to achieving these objectives.

The article is well structured, easy to understand and read, and meets the standards set by the journal.

Even so, in the section ‘Discussion’, before talking about the limitations and future work with the instrument, the novel aspects of this study (with respect to other investigations already carried out in this area) should be reflected, putting citations and bibliographic references of those other research. You talk about some of this in the first paragraph of this section, but this should be more extensive and detailed.

Once the authors have made these changes, I think the article is publishable.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer 2,

We would also like to thank you for your feedback. According to your suggestion, we have included a new passage in the discussion part in which we highlight the novel aspects of our newly developed test with respect to already existing approaches, including references to the respective literature (l. 10, l. 430-442).

Many thanks for supporting us with the improvement of the paper and kind regards