Emotions of Educators Conducting Emergency Remote Teaching during COVID-19 Confinement

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

After carefully reading your work and basing myself essentially on the methodology and data analysis, I have some doubts about the way you have estimated your model and what you really intend to do. In fact, I see that there is a model with two dimensions and some estimated hypotheses. In the model I see several arrows and my questions are:

1. Is each arrow a hypothesis? If so, did you use only one variable (question) to estimate each hypothesis? Normally each dimension has a set of variables (questions) and these questions complete a dimension which can then be related to other dimensions by estimating a structural model of cause and effect between dimensions through confirmatory factor analysis. 

When I look at your model, I see something different. Each item has an arrow and there are three dimensions: Emotions; Positive Emotions and Negative Emotions:

2. Can you explain which questions are used to estimate the emotions dimension? What I mean by this is that you present 3 ellipses but only 2 of them are made up of variables that measure them. In short, the way you present the model causes some confusion.

3. The conclusion should be separated from the discussion of results.

I hope you can clarify the quantitative estimation of the model so that this interesting work of yours can be accepted.

I liked the work, but it seems a little confusing with the presentation of that model.

Note: I can assure you that I have many published works with EFA; CFA, ANOVA, estimated in AMOS and SPSS. I am perfectly comfortable with this type of quantitative method and I found your estimation confusing based on the hypotheses formulated and the model presented. For this reason I would ask you, more than changes, for a step-by-step clarification of what was done statistically.

Best Regards 

Author Response

In order to clarify the type of study conducted, the following actions have been taken:

1. The article has been written in an impersonal manner where appropriate.
2. The choice of study variables is explained.
3. The presentation of hypotheses has been restructured, including a second objective.
4. Within the methodology section, a fourth sub-section titled 4.4. Data Analysis has been created. Here, the procedure carried out to validate the study instrument, which was previously in the results section, is explained. The KMO and Bartlett tests have been incorporated into the study.
5. The Cronbach's alpha has been calculated for the set of items related to negative and positive emotions, respectively. This is reflected in Table 1.
6. In the Instrument section, specific items of the questionnaire corresponding to positive and negative emotions have been identified.
7. The acronym "IT" has been added to each item of the questionnaire. This primarily contributes to clarifying Figure 1 on the data analysis model, where "IT" corresponds to the term "item."
8. In the results section, the acronym "IT" has been added to each item.
9. The discussion of results has been reviewed, and a separate section for conclusions has been established to give it distinct prominence.

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Introduction

Chapter has the character of a somewhat journalistic description. I suggest introducing a more scientific writing style. This could be done by describing, for example, the state of the education system before and after the pandemic, and then move smoothly into the descriptions found in this section of the paper.

 

 

Objectives and hypotheses

I suggest introducing auxiliary objectives of the study such as developing a profile of the teacher with the most negative emotions.

I also lack an indication of what the research hypotheses set in this way and not in another way are based on. What is the rationale for such assumptions?

 

 

Results

This section contains the results with a description of the research methods. Here we learn that the authors conducted exploratory and confirmatory factor analysis. Such information should be included in the description of the research method, and in this section the results themselves. This is also where the survey questions come in. I wrote above that it would be better to introduce a separate section where the authors present the research tool itself.

Table 1 does not provide the Cronbach's alpha for positive emotions and negative emotions. It only indicates what will happen when we delete a given item. Please added this information.

 

 

How many items did the scale for positive emotions and negative emotions originally contain? What was the alpha for all item scales, and what was it after reduction?

 

General comments:

1. The article needs to organize the content in order to better understand the presented research. The main point in this regard concerns the presentation of the research tool and the description of the research assumptions. It is worth adding a subsection describing the survey, the questions their selection. This will indicate the purpose of the study.

2. The article presents factor analysis. How were the factors selected? What were the criteria, e.g. Kaiser criterion? The lack of a short description of the procedure causes the article to lose some quality. Similarly, there is no description regarding psychometric analysis in the field of emotions. Emotions involve a state of mind and are therefore an important part of psychology. This should be noted in the article.

 

3. It is assumed that scientific articles use an impersonal form. Personal phrases appear many times in the work, e.g. We ....

 

4.      Please rethink the structure of the paper. It is worth adding parts related to factor analysis and description of emotions. Factor analysis maybe part of the description of the research method. The paper contains many important elements but in my opinion they are poorly presented e.g. cronbach's alpha for scales (positive and negative emotions) appears in the text. The summary table already lacks this information. Only the value of alpha when we remove the item is given. The authors put a lot of effort into conducting the study, so it would be worthwhile to improve the presentation of the results obtained.

 

 

Comments on the Quality of English Language

 

 

 

Author Response

In order to clarify the type of study conducted, the following actions have been taken:

1. The article has been written in an impersonal manner where appropriate.
2. The choice of study variables is explained.
3. The presentation of hypotheses has been restructured, including a second objective.
4. Within the methodology section, a fourth sub-section titled 4.4. Data Analysis has been created. Here, the procedure carried out to validate the study instrument, which was previously in the results section, is explained. The KMO and Bartlett tests have been incorporated into the study.
5. The Cronbach's alpha has been calculated for the set of items related to negative and positive emotions, respectively. This is reflected in Table 1.
6. In the Instrument section, specific items of the questionnaire corresponding to positive and negative emotions have been identified.
7. The acronym "IT" has been added to each item of the questionnaire. This primarily contributes to clarifying Figure 1 on the data analysis model, where "IT" corresponds to the term "item."
8. In the results section, the acronym "IT" has been added to each item.
9. The discussion of results has been reviewed, and a separate section for conclusions has been established to give it distinct prominence.

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors,

Please, improve the conclusions with more practical implications, with real contributions and with theoretical contributions.

Best Regards 

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Following your recommendations, we have enhanced the manuscript: practical implications have been added and theoretical contributions have been elaborated. In this way, the previous last paragraph has been omitted, and, in its place, four new paragraphs have been added, with the described changes improvements.

Best regards,

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf