How K12 Teachers’ Readiness Influences Their Intention to Implement STEM Education: Exploratory Study Based on Decomposed Theory of Planned Behavior

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

line 263 - not sure what you mean by "backbone teachers"

Lines 352 & 383 - use of "quite good". If your measures meet the criteria of all the ones listed, then there is no need for a the value of "quite". If it aligns with 'good model' requirements, then that is all that is required.

Why was informed consent not required? All survey participants should have been asked for consent before completing the quesionnaire.

Author Response

1.For clearer expression, we have replaced ‘backbone teachers’ with ‘high performance teachers’.

2.For more accurate expression，we have replaced ‘quite good’ with ‘good’

3.About Informed Consent Statement，the informed consent was provided in the survey, so we have added relevant instructions in the paper as: The informed consent was provided in the survey so all the participants knew they were participating in an evaluation study and the data they provided was anonymous.

Reviewer 2 Report

The manuscript appears original, having an 18% similarity in anti-plagiarism software (see attachment) which is quite good.

To improve the manuscript, please allow me to make some suggestions and recommendations to the authors.

First of all, I think that the concept of STEM education should be explained more extensively, what it implies (including the acronym), and why this concept of education was chosen.

STEM education also has a successor, called STEAM education that incorporates the arts, and has the ability to expand the boundaries of STEM education and application. STEAM is designed to encourage discussion and problem-solving among students, developing both hands-on skills and  appreciation for collaborations. Rather than teaching the five subjects as separate and discrete subjects, STEAM integrates them into a coherent learning paradigm based on real-world applications.

I would like the authors to emphasize more the STEM concept, its main characteristics, possible pluses and minuses, because it already seems to be replaced by newer concepts. And it there are strong opinions that an art-enriched STEAM curriculum may be a better option for students.

 

I suggest the authors to use the template of this journal, especially in the part of inserting citations in text [1], [2], etc., because their current citations appear as superscript formatted text (smaller letters just above the line of text).

Also, some citations are missing from the manuscript, and some errors appear in the PDF file received for review [Error! Bookmark not defined.] (see pages 5, 7, 13, 15).

I also recommend re-reading the manuscript carefully, possibly even by a native English speaker, because some expressions may appear that sound a little strange in a scientific article (e.g., "teachers' STEM teaching intentions" teachers teaching...)

I suggest the authors to put the figures at a slightly higher resolution, because when you zoom in to see the rather small text in the figures, they appear pixelated (figure 1, 2).

I recommend the authors to at least place the smaller tables within the same page, not to be broken on two different pages (e.g. Table 7)

Otherwise, I did not notice other problems, and with few improvements the article can be published.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

1.We have added explanations about STEM education and why we choose this concept as follows: After STEM education was put forward, STEAM education appeared, as well as I-STEAM, STEAMx and so on derived from STEAM education. For ease of expression, this research use STEM education to refer to STEM, STEAM and so on, which are the same type of concepts related to STEM education.

2.We have revised the citations according to the template of Applied Sciences.

3.We have used the language editing service of MDPI, and revised some expressions in the text.

4.In order to improve the clarity of the pictures in the text, the resolution of the pictures has been improved.

5.Regarding the presentation of tables, all tables except table 4 have been checked to ensure that small tables are displayed within the same page.