Social Work Students’ Perception of Education Quality, Commitment, and Competence: Comparison of Indonesia and Taiwan

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Social work students’ perception of education quality, commitment, and competence: Comparison of Indonesia and Taiwan

1.      Moderate help in language and structure may improve the presentation of the paper. Some lines are vaguely written (e.g. 37-39, 49-50, 426ff, 451-452,457-459) among others that may be improved for clarity.   

2.      In lines 40-42, it is written:  “This study examines the influence of education quality and professional commitment on social work students’ perceptions about their professional competence in Indonesia and Taiwan.” I wonder if the study is about the influence … on the students’ perception.  I think it is about the perception of the students on the education quality and commitment, rather than on the influence of these variables. Please clarify what you exactly want to do.

3.      In lines 52-54, it is written: “Competency-based education identifies the knowledge, skills and attitudes required to perform professional tasks and builds educational programs that prepare students to carry these competencies into the workplace.” This may need a citation.

4.      A more robust literature review (updated) may be needed.

5.      There are some claims that need to be cited (e.g., 150-153, 457ff) and many other claims.

6.      Some other demographic information may be included in Table 2.

7.      The Discussion is not clear.

8.      The Conclusion is more of a Recommendation rather than the Conclusion of the study.

 

9.      The article has some misspelled words, wrong punctuation and some grammar lapses.  Consider subjecting the article to Grammarly or other grammar check devices.  Some are not even complete sentences A number of  sentences were stated vaguely. This article would benefit from close editing.

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 1. We really appreciated your review on our manuscript and have made the revision accordingly. Attached is the file that contains our response to your question and suggestion. Thank you very much for your work.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Introduction

In the introduction to the article, there are a few things that were not clarified. Generally, I am not sure how this research situates itself in the general literature on social work education. Again, is this research assessing students’ perception of their own professional competence? If so, this should be made clearer in the earlier paragraphs. Other concepts are used with clear explanations of their meaning. For instance what exactly is meaningful sense? What constitutes a higher level of calling? I feel the concept of commitment was not properly operationalized, especially for a quantitative study that is going to measure these. I feel that these concepts should have been properly defined and operationalized very early on in the research.

There are a few challenges with sentence construction. The authors should find someone with expertise in the English language to help edit the language. There are several grammatical and sentence construction errors.

 

Materials and Methods

If the focus of this research is on factors impeding the effectiveness of social work education, then why not make this the focus of the paper? The authors indicate some important variables that are going to be measured, including commitment and environment, etc. If these variables have been established as having effects as indicated in lines 104-106 of page 3, why omit them?

In the earlier studies, it seems the first two hypotheses have already been established so why repeat? In the literature on page 2 and 3 from lines 97-124, you clearly established that professional environment and content is positively related to competence so what is the relevance of the first two hypotheses? Why repeat these tests if they have already been established in the literature? In addition to the concerns raised regarding the first two, I do not see the difference between hypotheses 3 and 4 and hypotheses 4 and 5.

The sampling approach described is a bit confusing. Can the Authors break it down into a step-by-step approach to allow for replication? For instance, in Taiwan, what was the first stage of sampling? Was it the selection of regions; followed by a random selection of public universities and private universities before a stratified? And what was the stratified variable? Which is the stratification variable? Is it a public or private university or gender? These must be clarified to make the manuscript stronger.

 

Discussion

The discussion could perhaps be strengthened if comparisons with similar students in other jurisdictions are introduced.

 

 

Author Response

Dear reviewer 2. Thank you very much for your review on our manuscript, we really appreciate it. Enclosed is our responses toward your questions and suggestions. We hope our revision improves the quality of our manuscript and meets the journal's standards for publication. 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thank you for considering my suggestions and making the necessary adjustments.  Congratulations.