Comparing the Use of Educational Technology in Mathematics Education between South African and German Schools

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Name of the Paper:  Comparing the use of educational technology in mathematics education between South African and German schools

The paper attempts to use a mixed methods approach to compare the use of educational technology in mathematics education between South African and German schools using the empirical survey along with semi-structured interviews and classroom observations. Feedback from mathematics teachers and principals was sought for further comparison of used technology and arriving at the hindering barriers in teaching mathematics.

 General Observation:

1)      The abstract needs to be fine-tuned to exclude unnecessary descriptions.

2)      Authors may refer the lines nos 210 and 211: “ Semi-structured face-to-face interviews, which ranged between 30 and 50 minutes, ….. digitally recorded and transcribed. Some background information of the participants i.e. “mathematics teachers, principals, and deputy principals “ may be provided to gauge the authenticity of the feedback.

3)      Please explain “Figure 1 Similarities and differences in how South African and German teachers use educational technology in mathematics”. The comparison looks okay until the problem-solving tool. Further, the comparison is not found because of the absence of educational tools in either South African or German schools. For instance, motivational tool is absent in South African schools. A detailed explanation for these missing educational tools, in either case, will help to know the status of the teaching level.

4)      A similar explanation is needed in Figure 2. Barriers to the integration of educational technology in mathematics education in South 347 African and German schools

5)      Please refer to Table 3. “The correlation between using educational technology at school- and learner-level and the mathematics achievement of learners" The comparison between the mathematics teachers’ gender would lead to gender bias. Such information about age, experience, gender, and educational background may be provided under descriptive statistics to draw the comparative inference.

6)      Similarly, the gender conflict could be “Student-level predictors (Level-1)" and " The learners’ gender”

7)      The broad objective of the paper is to compare educational technology in mathematics education between South African and German schools hence line no.654 “In line with the findings of Ruhle 2022 and Spaull and Makaluza 2019, these findings showed that in South Africa girls achieved higher mathematics scores boys” would be deviating from the objectives and leading to gender bias.

8)      There are some typos and grammatical errors hence editing is needed for instance: 2 000 to 3 000 euro, Line no.655 mathematics scores boys, Line no.694, etc.

 

9)      The finding looks general and most commonly found in teaching-learning, the researchers may stress the novelty while comparing both schools.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report (Previous Reviewer 2)

I appreciate that the article is a significant improvement over the first version. Unfortunately, despite the warnings, there are still erroneous references to sources on lines 274-300. It is imperative that the formatting be consistent with the journal's rules.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report (Previous Reviewer 1)

Thanks for the modification. 

The following comment does not belong to my review comments:

"I appreciate that the article is a significant improvement over the first version. Unfortunately, despite the warnings, there are still erroneous references to sources on lines 274-300. It is imperative that the formatting be consistent with the journal’s rules."

New comment:

The inference from Level-1 and Level-2 models may be derived and explained explicitly with calculated values. Further, it needs more clarification to abbreviated terms used to understand both the models.

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

This manuscript is a resubmission of an earlier submission. The following is a list of the peer review reports and author responses from that submission.

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

 Name of the Paper:  Comparing the use of educational technology in mathematics education between South African and German schools

The paper attempts to compare the technology usage while teaching mathematics in schools of two different countries, i.e.  South African and German schools, by using multiple explanatory case studies. They found that the South African schools use YouTube, Quizzes, and Green Shoots (online mathematics curriculum) as a presentation to help students to learns performing calculations, and further explore various concepts for improving problem-solving teaching strategies to help students in learning. Surprisingly, the use of the popular teaching-learning supplementary tool like YouTube has not been used in German. The German teachers use Lego WeDo 2.0 programming software for motivational purposes and as a substitute, teaching method to teach various mathematical operations to develop a skill for problem-solving and critical thinking.

Their studies conclude that insufficient technical support and lack of continuous professional development hindered teachers from both countries to use educational technology in mathematics instruction optimally. Further, their finding about the perceived ease of use did not influence these teachers’ actual use of educational technology in instruction looks disjoint with most of the studies.

General Observation:

1)      Please refer to the abstract” perceived ease of use did not influence these teachers’ actual use of educational technology in instruction” looks disjoint with most of the studies and may be explained properly giving proper justification.

2)      Many phrases ate unnecessarily capitalized, for example “Trends in Mathematics and Science “ etc. and abbreviated, for instance teaching and learning (T&L).

3)      The citation of Birgin et al. (2019 [12]) can be changed to “Birgin et al. 12]” similar to Umugiraneza, et al. [13]

4)      The sub-section 3.1. The context of the study is more like a literature review hence may be moved to a review of the literature.

5)      The authors may justify the research methodology along with its pros and cons.

6)      Please edit to delete dissimilarity in font size in line number 186:  “The schools in South …”.

7)      "Bingimlas [38] explained that..... mathematics T&L." and  “However, in this study, only the support from principals and colleagues is addressed.” Maybe suitably modified. Further, it may be clarified for technical and administrative support.

8)       Language plays an important role in understanding the various fundamentals or concepts of mathematics. The authors did not clarify the IT-based tools used by teachers in teaching mathematics.

9)      Please refer to the abstract “Furthermore, perceived ease of use did not influence these teachers’ actual use of educational technology in instruction”, and Researchers who used the Technology Acceptance Model (TAM) also found that “perceive usefulness” in fluences teachers’ attitude towards using educational technology, which in turn influences their intention to use it in T&L [27,28] contradicts each other.

10)  Defending a small sample size may not be justified at the cost of findings: ”We acknowledge the sample size is small, but this was due to the number of schools the South African researcher could arrange to visit during her time in Germany".

11)  How the “Barriers to the integration of educational technology” are identified is not clearly explained.

 

12)  The paper lacks systematic research methodologies to support its findings.

Reviewer 2 Report

The idea of comparing schools is certainly very interesting and beneficial. I appreciate the theoretical grounding. The research sample, while I fully understand the reasons for its limitations, is very small to the point of insufficient. I consider the processing of semi-structured interviews to be a little bit confusing. The readability of the article would certainly be improved by the use of graphical representation of the obtained data.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

 

The topic of educational technology could potentially be included in the Sustainability journal’s scope. However, once I have read the paper, I think that this manuscript is not suitable for publication in Sustainability.

 

I realized that there is no set of data that could be analyzed and the results cannot be checked or reproduced. There are no tables or graphs, so the content of the conclusion sections are mere conjectures. 

 

I hardly recommend resubmitting this paper to another journal focused on pedagogy and teaching methodology matters.