The Attitudes of K–12 Schools’ Teachers in Serbia towards the Potential of Artificial Intelligence

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

===General opinion===

The paper is poorly written, with multiple errors both in language and meaning. The introducing and concluding sections are vaguely related to the main contents, the model is not based in any theory, the authors' own results show it to be a failure (which the authors do not even seem to notice), there is no proper discussion of the results.
The paper should not be published - anywhere. There are far too many errors to give a chance of successful revision.
My honest suggestion to the authors is to throw it away and redo their research in a proper way.

===The structure and contents===

*Title*: the 'Contemporary' word sounds out of place; it'd make sense in comparison to research addressing some other times, which is not the case here.

*Abstract* is written in poor language, and contains statements which are dubious or simply wrong.

r.20: 'automation has always been to improve quality and efficiency by reducing the number of human tasks, as already have been demonstrated by artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) application'

Automation predates artificial intelligence (AI) and machine learning (ML) by few hundreds years, so it's awkward giving the latter as an example of the former.

r.22: 'On the other hand' - but where's the one hand? This sentence is in no contradiction to the previous one.

r.24: 'Every job can now be automated, thanks to advances in artificial intelligence' - this is simply not true.

r.27: 'was performed on 50,66% total population' - what is 'total population' ? World population? It's not confirmed in the main part.

The *Introduction* is very long, but a real introduction should introduce the reader to the sections of the paper which follow. Here, only the final paragraph is related to what comes next, and it comes like a comet out of nowhere, as the text prior to it is about everything and nothing.

r.34: 'The Sustainable Development Goals 4 for Global Education Agenda' - you mean 'The Sustainable Development Goals' or 'The Sustainable Development Goal 4' ?

r.60: 'Perhaps the COVID-19 pandemia has fastened the automatisation process in education' - you can fasten seat belts but not the automatisation process; and why 'perhaps'?

r. 61: 'Maybe someday, the technology will be able to automate teaching completely' - this statement, like many others in this paper, belongs rather to an elementary school essay than a scientific paper. Scientific writing has to be strict and based on prior work - this is neither.

*Materials and Methods* section do not precise what Materials and Methods have exactly been used.

Its key parts look like a scratchpad, e.g. (row numbers are given):
"The research methods are 144
● Primary and secondary research 145
● Content analysis 146
● Method, technique, instrument, procedure. 147
● Survey as a test method technique, online questionnaire as a data collection 148
method. 149
● Observation (with participation), 150
● Induction, deduction 151
● Statistical methods (descriptive statistics)"

r. 163: "The research population consists of LINK Edu Alliance primary and secondary school teachers" - but what is so special in LINK Edu Alliance teachers? I guess nothing, and the real population to consider should be primary and secondary school teachers in Serbia. That would make sense, but then your sample is far too small.

r. 173: "This research is pilot research for future research studies regarding " - an unfinished sentence.

r. 183: "The 95 percent confidence interval was chosen because it was the most reliable and accurate at the same time" - this is obviously wrong, as the accurateness grows with the confidence interval and 0.95 is not the largest number close to 1. This also means the authors lack basic statistical knowledge which cast doubts on the provided values.

r. 228: "The survey was based on a developed and described model" - there is no information on what theory the model is based, who devised it, and whether it was validated.

*Results*

Figure 1 shows the proposed model to be a complete failure as the component variables of two constructs (AIinfo and AIopinion) are in most part not correlated with the constructs they are supposed to measure.

*Discussion*

There are two Discussion sections. Neither has adequate contents, i.e., they do not discuss the obtained results in the context of the prior works.

*Conclusions*

The stated Conclusions are not related to the obtained results.

r. 417: "The scientific contribution of research lies in verifying insufficiently known science and assistance in several narrow scientific fields" - this is obviously not true.

The Limitations should identify causes which limit the interpretation of the obtained results. What you list as limitations are not limitations. They rather resemble research questions for future work.

 

Author Response

Hello.

I have attached the review of the article  

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

The main issues I find with this paper is the way it is written and presented. There is clearly a lack of copy-editing, which results in a paper that may feel slightly disjointed and missing the scope. The title of the paper suggests that the authors will discuss the attitudes of teachers in relation to AI, however the research methodology, does not support this. The authors discuss the merits of AI in terms of automation and what this might represent to the field of Education. In itself this is interesting, but the way the authors bring everything together, causes confusion. There are too many research methods used and the results presented show the statistical outcomes based on the validation the survey tool used. The discussion section (there is a redundant paragraph carrying the same section heading at the end of this section) does not provide any insights into the teachers' perceptions about AI and automation in particular and it is being recommended that the authors re-submit after a major revision. More specifically it is suggested that: 

• The authors revise the grammatical and typing errors in the paper; 
• The scope of the paper is narrowed and the authors adhere to the title proposed for the paper;
• A clear definition of the problem is inserted in the introduction and the introduction is split into the aim and objectives of the study and a motivation for the study. It is in addition recommended that the background and literature review are removed from the introduction and inserted into a separate section, including sub-headings where necessary. 
• The methodology is written in a clearer structured way;
• The result section needs to be re-written in a way that reflects the research questions, and the objectives listed
• The discussion provides insights and thoughts into the results collected, presenting a clear direction of the research carried out. 

Author Response

Hello

I have attached the review of the article

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article presents an interesting current and relevant topic for educational systems and science. However, the paper has important shortcomings that must be resolved to contemplate its publication.

The title is clear and concise.

The abstract should clearly contain the methodology and the results of the study.

Introduction

Despite referring to attitudes, there is no theoretical support for them. From what model are these attitudes conceived?

There are some syntactical errors that need to be corrected by revising the English wording. For example, in line 69 “only a few people are capable of guiding and guiding students.” Personalized and informal use of language should be avoided, for example in line 70 and following “To be successful, you need to have a particular way of life”.

In line 50 the term AI appears for the first time, although the description of the acronyms appears later.

data collection

Lines 155-156 “Extensive secondary research has been conducted on applying artificial intelligence 155 in education. Various case studies were analyzed to develop a questionnaire and create 156 research questions that we will be guided by” Please, clearly indicate what previous research.

Improve the description of the sample, include gender, age, educational level...

Results

The display of results is confusing

Discussion

There is no discussion of results

Author Response

Hello

I have attached the review of the article

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

Dear authors,

 

I would have the next recommendations for the paper.

 

In the abstract, the authors should introduce the aim, the material, method, results and conclusion of their research, briefly.

 

In the introduction lines, 60-72- the authors should make clear statements based on previous research, not use the words "perhaps", or "maybe".

In line 74- the second person should be replaced. Do not use personal pronouns.

 

Before the Material and Methods section, the authors must clearly describe the aim of their research.

 

The research methods should be in a sentence, do not use bullets (replace bullets from the paper). The paragraph from lines 187 to 191 should be moved to the results section.

 

Please provide ideal values parameters and methodology for the confirmatory factor analysis. (NPAR, CMIN, GFI, AGFI, RMR, etc). Did the authors perform a priory an exploratory factor analyse? How did the variables load before, and what dimensions were observed? What about reliability -Chronbach Alpha.

 

The authors should replace the yellow colour from Figure 1 and use a better image so all values can be seen. Please explains why AI info and AIoponion have zero values in figure 1.

What about the negative values loadings? 

 

In the results section, no references should exist. Please remove the paragraph describing methodology in the Material and Method section.

 

In the discussion section, the authors should also approach related previous studies and results and compare their own research results with the others.

 

Extensive English editing is required.

 

Line 412- Why is a second Discussion section?

 

Remove bullets from the conclusion section and rephrase conclusions in a more concise framework.

 

Author Response

Hello

I have attached the review of the article

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors, thank you for the effort, but it is still far from enough.

 

The language still makes parts of the paper incomprehensible, e.g.:

 

We collected 109 responses in the second phase of submitting the survey, while at the national level, were collected 800 records. Thus, our sample (109) is representative of LEA institutions.

 

Apart from flawed grammar, the reader has no idea what are the phases you are writing about, how many responses were eventually collected (109 or 800 or 500 as stated in the Authors' reply? and if 800, while only 109 were processed?), what are "LEA institutions" and why are they so special (as I wrote in the first round review, they do not seem to be special in any way, at least they were not presented as such in the paper, so choosing this group is simply convenience sampling from the large population of Serbian teachers - which is not a crime, but should be described like that).

 

Even not all of my first-round technical remarks were addressed, e.g., there is still "Sustainable Development Goals 4" - and note that I did only report a sample of technical issues, not all of them.

 

The survey description you added ("We designed our survey based on McKinsey Global Teacher and Student Survey") is insufficient, as the reader still does not know: how many questions were asked and what exactly they were. And there is no reference to the original publication ("McKinsey Global Teacher and Student Survey").

 

And I still disagree that "the 95 percent confidence interval is the most reliable and accurate".

 

I appreciate the improvement in the presentation of the results, but the discussion still lacks comparisons between the Authors' results and the prior works.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

I have attached the paper with the required corrections. 

Thank you because through the requests we have become more efficient.

Reviewer 2 Report

Changes have been noted. Revised version is improved. 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

I have attached the paper with the required corrections.

Thank you because through the requests we have become more efficient.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

The article has notably improved its quality and is ready to be published

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

I have attached the paper with the required corrections.

Thank you because through the requests we have become more efficient.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 4 Report

The authors made extensive adjustments based on the recommendations. The English should be further verified regarding expressiveness and shorter sentences. In the new paragraph on metho, the sentence is hard to read. I would also recommend that the discussion sections to begin with a paragraph where the authors state the aim of their research and briefly results.

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

I have attached the paper with the required corrections.

Thank you because through the requests we have become more efficient. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 3

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

 

again thank you for your effort, but although you have addressed smaller issues, you have not addressed the big ones.

 

The main problem with your paper is chaos and inconsistencies with provided data. For instance: 

 

In row 55: "This research has a statistical population of 152 LEA teachers. We collected 109 responses in the second phase of submitting the survey, while at the national level, were collected 800 records. Thus, our sample (109) is representative offor LEA institutions and its population."

In row 141: "The exploratory research was done among 152 K-–12 teachers in Serbia"

 

As I wrote in the previous round review, as a reader, I still have no idea what was the number of responses: 109, 152 or 800?

 

Besides, you are talking of three different statistical populations: (1) LEA teachers - this seems to be the one actually used, but not stated in the title, research aims and conclusions; (2) LEA institutions - you mention it in row 57 but provide no data on how many there are and how many of these you have surveyed; (3) K-12 teachers in Serbia - which is what you should have been surveying according to the title and research aims, but your sample (of 152) is inadequate for such a large population (800+152 probably would be good but you provide no results for the 800).

 

 

The second main problem with your paper is that it contains many passages written in incomprehensible English. A good example from row 184: 

 

"First, the average data was planted to be examined that teachers use for the following activities in the total time which is teachers will spend on their work."

 

I wrote about it already in the round 1 review, I suggested using help of a native speaker, but you ignored it as the bulk of the text was not corrected, while it should have been. Yes, I can see you have corrected the few particular sentences I included in my previous round reviews, but as I noted, these were examples, like the sentence from row 184 above, it was not the list of all bad sentences of your paper. I am not your proofreader, I will not point to you all your errors. Please contact any professional proofreading services company to correct your language.

 

Regarding the discussion of prior work, I have noticed you added "We have found similarities in obtained results with other studies we have analysed [35, 47, 48, 49, 50, 51]" - but this is not how this should be done: please explain what these similarities exactly were and give references to respective papers, not all of them in a bulk.

 

For the reasons above, I still cannot see your text as fit for publication.

 

Author Response

I have attached review number three of reviewer one.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx