From Ideal to Practical—A Design of Teacher Professional Development on Socioscientific Issues

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Overall, I did enjoy reading this article and what has been argued. I did notice that in the introduction, many of the references are dated. Section 1.1 is rather insightful which is followed by 2.1 which is done well. A few layout issues that could be easily sorted such as the abbreviation CER on page 5 is not spelled out until page 6. Similarly, there are a few typos/errors in the text that should be corrected through editing. A question for Table 4 is what is P-value - is this significance, the symbol for significance is the Greek letter rho, as the text on page 12 then uses a lower case p.

This reviewer would have expected ethics to be explicitly addressed within the text as to participants providing informed consent and as volunteers. 

Dear Authors,

Overall, the English usage is done well however there are some errors.

A few examples, Page 8, line 378 -  "The rest 22 hours" should be "The rest of the 22 hours" or "the remaining 22 hours"

Page 9, line 410-11 - "who did not took part in the PD." should be "who did not take part in the PD."

Page 11, line 459 - "analyzed using he Atlas.ti software" should be "analyzed using the Atlas.ti software"

Author Response

Dear author thank you very much for your feedback and helpful comments. 

 

I have addressed the CER  acronym in the first time it appears as you noticed. 

I added in the PD population section information about the consent of teacher to take part in the PD and the research. 

Thank you so much for noticing the typos. I have fixed them all. 

Kind regards. 

 

Reviewer 2 Report

An example of the limiting resources referred to in lines 114, 115, 116 could be helpful.

Not explaining conditions for attitude change in line 127 makes the paragraph unbalanced.

The sentence on lines 133-137 should be rewritten or broken in to two smaller sentences. Again, the resources needed are not delineated.

 I don't see where Desimone's sustained duration is explained anywhere before or after line 157

The description of argumentation in paragraph 2.2.2 seems to contradict itself in the last sentence.

Citing an overemphasis in standardized testing in line 355 is making an  judgement unnecessary to the study.

Line 426 begins with a typo.

The table 4 heading should be reformatted.

Sentence 237 seems to be out of place. It could use further development.

This is well done, interesting article. I enjoyed reading it.

 

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, 

Thank you so much for your insights and comments. Attached is a file that shows in a table the way we addressed each of your comments. 

Kind regards. 

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Excellent research and article! I really enjoyed reading this, and I love the topic. We definitely need to develop PD and classroom materials to assist in teaching/guiding SSI conversations. 

The only suggestions I have are to wordsmith the Abstract, which sounded awkward in spots (Line 10: replace "as well as" with "and"; Line 11: remove "promising as it may be", Line 15: "or" should be "for") Other minor things include removing filler words such as "Nonetheless" and "Moreover" throughout the article.  They weaken your statements.

Author Response

Thank you so much for your kind words about our manuscript. Your feedback is very much appreciated. 

We have edited the abstract and removed filler words were it was unnecessary as suggested. 

Kind regards. 

 

Reviewer 4 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to review this comprehensive and informed paper. I loved the practitioner insights in this paper, both the remarks of the authors and what the authors chose to illuminate from the teacher interviews.

This is a well developed manuscript based solidly within the literature and on thorough and detailed research into the practicalities of teaching socio-scientific issues. The investigation of an iterative professional development curriculum over three years has proved both the value of doing this type of research and the value of professional development programs. Even as these are not well funded, PD programs are necessary.

The only changes I suggest to the manuscript would be for the place of the research to be identified in the abstract and introduction, at the author's discretion. I think place is important and needs to be identified clearly in research papers, but that is my 'downunder' view. 

A more direct comment could be added, at the authors' discretion, that one of the significant reason teachers are reluctant to teach/facilitate SSI learning in formal education is because SSIs are shaped as political. Particularly, when the politics of a state or country become divorced from scientific reality, science teachers may indeed feel under threat to raise SSI matters in science classrooms. Discussing the politicisation of science and scientific knowledge is part of the dilemma of teaching SSIs. But it's our reality as science and sustainability educators and researchers. 

The practical advice section (learnings from implementation) is excellent. 

Anyway, a most enjoyable and thoroughly prepared paper.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, 

Thank you very much for your kind words, we appreciate your feedback. 

Following your suggestions we added in the abstract the country in which the research has been conducted. 

Thank you very much for your comment about the time we live in, in which science is wearingly getting more and more politicized. We addressed this in the paper in the introduction section. From what we have learned from the literature on this subject it seems that teachers are concerned of loosing  the allegedly neutral characteristics of science and be portraited as biased. 

Kind regards.