Teaching 21st Century Skills: Understanding the Depth and Width of the Challenges to Shape Proactive Teacher Education Programmes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
I have a few recommendations for the authors:
1. Use the guidelines for citing the references in the text
2. "21st-century skills are perhaps set of words" in the abstract is not clear, maybe emphasize you refer to keywords to increase the clarity of the statement.
I positively appreciate the three research questions you addressed at the beginning of your SLR.
Your review paper is thoroughly conducted and you considered all stages of a well SLR.
3. In figure 2 you have the year and the number of articles. I advise putting the number of articles between brackets or writing the year on the horizontal axis. The title of figures should include the number of papers or articles/year or publishing house.
4. Offer a more explicit explanation (but short, in a paragraph) for figure 7 to include all abbreviations referring to the subthemes identified in the research.
All themes and subthemes are thoroughly analyzed and presented in detail in the review paper of the authors.
I congratulate the authors for their capacity to synthesize all research paths and gaps in the literature but also highlighting the limit that they might have missed relevant papers.
This is a very well-done review with conclusions including theoretical and practical implications, limitations, and future research directions.
5.
4.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
I thank you, the Department Editor and the three reviewers for their feedback. The comments have guided me in revising my paper and improving the relevant text. I used Track Changes function for editing as recommended. No editor has suggested manuscript should undergo extensive English revisions. A brief explanation of how I addressed each comment is given below.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This is a very comprehensive SLR and actually goes way beyond the scope of it's remit. You might want to consider using the RP's and some of the large and extensive tables as results for another paper, which expands upon this research.
Figures 3 and 4 recommended to be done in another format, as a table or more interesting graph.
Line 233 is missing the word 'in'
The line numbers stopped after 494 and then restarted after a gap-make sure they are continuous throughout the paper.
Line 166 under 4.1: Theoretical implications- lining spacing error.
Many thanks.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
I thank you, the Department Editor and the three reviewers for their feedback. The comments have guided me in revising my paper and improving the relevant text. I used Track Changes function for editing as recommended. No editor has suggested manuscript should undergo extensive English revisions. A brief explanation of how I addressed each comment is attached
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The manuscript titled “Teaching 21st century skills: Understanding the depth and width of the challenges to shape proactive teacher education programmes” presents an interesting study, using the systematic literature review approach, on the 21st century skills from the perspective of teacher education.
The “1. Introduction” section presents a wide spectrum of background on the importance and development of these skills, the efforts made for their formalisation, and the paradigm shifts in this regard over the years. This study proposes as an objective “to suggest future research paths to enrich the extant knowledge in the area”, and three research questions are posed. Up to this point in the reading, it seems to me that the background and relevance of the manuscript are well justified.
The ”2. Methods and Materials” section explains the methodology used in this study, namely the systematic literature review (SLR) approach. This section begins by detailing the procedure for searching and selecting articles from indexed databases (Scopus and World of Science); and continues by providing statistical data on trends by year, country, publication source, and publishing houses. It seems to me that the methodological aspects are covered quite clearly and in detail, and the SLR process can be easily understood. However, I have a little observation regarding the sentence: “260 articles were removed since these were published by poor-quality publications”. ¿Could you be more specific with what is meant by the criteria for determining “poor-quality publications”? It seems to me a bit restrictive and subjective in the way it is said, without further explanation.
The ”3. Results” section begins by providing an overview of the organisation of themes and subthemes that the authors identified in their SLR. Figures 6 and 7 present a schematical idea of what was explained in the introduction to this section. This section is quite extensive and detailed, organised around the themes and subthemes identified in the SLR. Tables 1 and 2 provide valuable information that breaks down the subthemes presented before each table. This section end by presenting what, in my opinion, is the most valuable contribution of this study, that is, the synthesis of theme-wise gaps that the authors determined with respect to each theme and subtheme, in addition to proposing future research paths to each.
The ”4. Conclusions” section summarises the theoretical and practical implications of this study. An observation that I was going to make in the methodological section was related to part of the limitations defined by the authors of the study, regarding the exclusive selection of articles and not other types of publications. I consider the authors’ position regarding such limitations quite sensible.
Author Response
Dear Editor,
I thank you, the Department Editor and the three reviewers for their feedback. The comments have guided me in revising my paper and improving the relevant text. I used Track Changes function for editing as recommended. No editor has suggested manuscript should undergo extensive English revisions. A brief explanation of how I addressed each comment is attached
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
