Key Competences for Sustainability: Technical Project Supported by Ecodesign of Educational Spaces to Achieve SDGs

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors

Thank you for your research article "Key competences for sustainability: Technical project supported by ecodesign of educational spaces to achieve SDGs" that is a meaningful contribution towards implementing SDGs in education. You tried to reveal students' perspective of educational spaces which definitely enriches understanding of sustainable educational environment, but there are still some points that need to be completed. Please see the included comments in the PDF document for more details. 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The necessary changes have been made to meet your estimates.

*Line 134: a full stop has been added.
*Line 303 and 343: The two images have been replaced by others of higher quality. 
*Line 317: has been modified.
*The term student is indeed more appropriate for the age of these pupils.
*The explanation of the statistical study has been included in the article, in the method section.
*Several quotations are from before 2017, as ecodesign and the project method have been in use for a long time. However, other quotes related to the SDGs are from after 2015, the year of their enactment.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you to the authors. This was considerably outside my area of expertise, but I did find it very interesting nonetheless. The narrative tone across sections 1 and 2 are very detailed, but gives good context to the reader so they can go along with the development of the education spaces.

The critical issue here though is an obvious one; the authors describe “the students” (the number of students is never actually given) routinely throughout the document about what they do or don’t say, what competencies they have developed and so on. The authors also include the ‘eight items’ of the survey given to students. But then there is no data provided on how the students responded to the survey.

The paragraph on lines 430-434 is particularly problematic, given that this is the basis for many of the claims of student competence throughout other sections: “Analysing the students' responses after completing the questionnaire, a good level of sustainability competence is evident, as most of the participants obtained results that indicated a good level of sustainability knowledge after using ecodesign to project an educational space in its three dimensions (technological, physical and environmental), strengthening the Architecture-Education and Engineering-Education binomials”. What is a “good level” here, in any of these cases? 50% of responses? 80% of responses? For all three dimensions? Where these analysed separately?

I would suggest that the authors need to either ramp up or tone down the narrative about what the students did, or didn’t say. There is a good paper here already, so I would suggest (or at least consider) if this paper could be reframed to be more about an example of a good learning activity (and section 1 places this within the literature) and drop the façade that there is student evidence to support this assertion. If you drop the survey (which isn’t discussed in any detail in the results anyway), would it be enough to say, for instance, that the examples of student work shown in the figures (are these student work samples) is enough to demonstrate that the objectives of the lesson were met?

Or, as the survey items read as open-response items, could the authors include at least some quotes from responding students so the reader can better understand why these students exhibited a “good level of sustainability competence”.

A minor point: Table 1 and 2 could be moved to section 1 – the link between key competencies for sustainability and key competencies in technical drawing would be good to interrogate earlier, given that there are many technical drawings throughout section 2.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The necessary changes have been made to meet your estimates.
Tables 1 and 2 have been moved to section 1 of the article.
We thank you for your input and the great value you express on the project itself, however, the statistical analysis has been included at the request of other reviewers.

Reviewer 3 Report

I appreciate the opportunity to contribute to the evaluation of this important paper. It is an excellent opportunity to learn and share academic knowledge. I highlight the scope of the study and the adopted methodological procedures—an interesting presentation of the article. I appreciate students' involvement in research.

I also list some opportunities for progress to improve the paper:

1) I recommend supplementing the overall evaluation of the achieved results, the further use of these results and the authors' further research intention in this area - conclusion.

2) Add information about the questionnaire survey - number of students involved, survey results, etc.

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The necessary changes have been made to meet your estimates.
The statistical analysis carried out has been included in the method section. In the results section we refer to the results obtained from the descriptive study carried out. On the other hand, both the limitations encountered and the intention to continue research in this field are included at the end of the article.

Reviewer 4 Report

Presented article is mixing theory, analysis and conclusions. I suggest few changes:

1.  Introduction should refer to the concept of 'key competences' because it was earlier analysed in science and 'key competences for sustainability' can't be fully understand without it. In the theoretical part especially interesting should be the link between the two concepts.

2. Table 1 and Table 2 should be rather presented in Introduction as the extention of the concept of 'key competences'

 

3. Generally in such for the article is presenting more the project that 'key competences' in special way. I doubt if the title fits to the text. In my the authors should think about it once more

4. The bibliography is quite poor. I suggest to enrich it with articles about key competences, for example the EU or / and American approach to the idea, with books of M. Castells (and [probably] Z. Bauman) regarding the (post)modern/ Internet and ICT society,

also such articles as for example:

Wylęgły, K. (2021). The Internet - a risk-taking space for university students. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 12(1), 413–425. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs2021.1.413.425

Sanecka, E. (2017). The dark side of social media: Associations between the Dark Triad of personality, self-disclosure online and selfie-related behaviours. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 8(2), 71–88. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs20172.71.88

Ivanova, E. . (2020). Internet addiction and cyberchondria - Their relationship with Well-Being. Journal of Education Culture and Society, 4(1), 57–70. https://doi.org/10.15503/jecs20131.57.70

 

Regarding problems of teaching in higher education/ students development- we have also more sources, which could explain better and wider the mentioned problems (especially in Spanish ;-)  

Author Response

Dear Reviewer,

Thank you very much for your comments and suggestions. The necessary changes have been made to meet your estimates.
1.    Quotations related to the concept of key competences have been included in the introduction.
2.    Tables 1 and 2 have been moved to section 1 of the article.
3.    After the modification of points 1 and 2, we think that the term key competence becomes more relevant in the theoretical framework of the article and that is why it should appear in the proposed title as well as the technical project through which the pupils have achieved these competences.
4.    Bibliography related to key competences has been included.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear Authors,

Thank you for making the changes and updating the manuscript. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your second review and for your kindness.

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you to the authors to continuing to progress this interesting article. My two previous points have been addressed to different degrees. It's good to see tables 1 and 2 now at the front of the article. 

The added descriptive statistics gives a least a level of quantitative analysis one would expect for some of the claims made ("a good level of sustainability competence is evident..."), but it still reads a bit shallow and lacking in depth. But perhaps this is enough to at least show this was considered, and is not the main focus of what is otherwise an interesting paper. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer
Thank you very much for your second review and for your kindness.

Reviewer 3 Report

I recommend this paper for publication. The topic is very actual. The paper is written professionally. The work presented in the paper is novel, which will enrich the Journal's content. I have no objection or recommendation. 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you very much for your second review and for your kindness.