“Let’s Talk about It”—Explicit Discussions as a Way to Reduce the Resistance of Religious Jewish Science Teachers to Learning and Teaching about Evolution: A Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors

The topic of your manuscript is so interesting to understand the relation religion-science and how teachers' beliefs could modify the curricula.

In relation with your manuscript, I have some points to express to you:

-Methodology

1.-Has been impossible to me find an explanation abut the ethical concerns related with your study. I suggest to authors the inclusion of a new epigraph titled, in example, "Procedure" where you could include information about:

• What kind of study is your study?
• Ethical concerns:
  • Ethical research committee
  • Consent to participate in your study by participants 

2.- Participants, I suggest the inclusion of information about the inclusion criteria followed to include the 18 participants defined in your manuscript.

-Conclusions

1.- It could be necessary include information about limitations of your study.

Author Response

Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful reading and the useful and thoughtful comments. We addressed your comments as follow:

-Methodology

1.-Has been impossible to me find an explanation abut the ethical concerns related with your study. I suggest to authors the inclusion of a new epigraph titled, in example, "Procedure" where you could include information about:

• What kind of study is your study?
• Ethical concerns:
  • Ethical research committee
  • Consent to participate in your study by participants 

We adopted an action-research approach in our study. We described this approach in detail in the section entitled “the context of the study” (see pp. 9-10). Based on your comment we changed the title of the section to “the context and approach of the study”.

The study was approved by the institutional ethical research committee. All the participants agreed to participate in the study and filled consent forms. We added a short epigraph entitled “Procedure” to explain these important issues (see p. 10).

2.- Participants, I suggest the inclusion of information about the inclusion criteria followed to include the 18 participants defined in your manuscript.

Since all the course learners agreed to participate in the research (see section 4.3, p. 10), they were simply all included in the study. This was beneficial since they represent a variety of viewpoints regarding the relationship between science and religion in the context of evolution.

-Conclusions

1.- It could be necessary include information about limitations of your study.

In the conclusion section we added the required information (see p. 32)

Reviewer 2 Report

Review:

I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article.  Although it does not provide quantitative or very robust data analysis (given the qualitative nature of the study and the extremely small sample size), it does provide some very interesting narratives on potential ways of approaching Jewish learners concerning evolution.  I believe it has merit and should be shared with the scientific community.  The article was well-written, cleanly organized, and thorough.  I just have a few small suggestions that will help in better clarifying the findings. 

First, and foremost, the article is exclusively dealing with Jewish learners.  This is excellent and much needed in the literature.  However, it took me all the way to the methods to realize that this was the population being targeted in the article.  If I was looking for literature on Jewish people, I would not have found this.  I would STRONGLY  recommend putting “Jewish” into the title and abstract. 

Second, I found the introduction to be excellent.  However, there are just a few suggestions I have for making it more robust:  1) Please include some of the ample research literature showing the robust and repeatable relationship between religiosity and evolution acceptance; this will help bolster your claims in the introduction.  2) When discussing the differences in religious beliefs between biology teachers and their students, you might consider citing several sources:  Gallup, 2016; Ecklund, 2007; Graffin & Provine, 2006.  3) On the 6^th ReCCEE practice, there are some more recent citations that you could use:  Ferguson, DG, Mann, M, Cordero, AM, Jensen, JL. (2020). Reconciling evolution: evidence from a biology and theology course. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 13:19 and Lindsay, J., Arok, A., Bybee, S. M., Cho, W., Cordero, A. M., Ferguson, D. G….Jensen, J.L. (2019). Using a reconciliation model leads to large gains in evolution acceptance. CBE-Life Sciences Education. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-04-0080. 

Third, not being familiar with Jewish religious sects, I found myself very confused throughout the paper of who was being discussed.  It became clear by the very end, but I feel like you could easily clarify it up front.  You had four sectors:  secular, traditional, national-religious, and ultra-Orthodox.  But, as you progress along with the paper, you begin to refer to them as ‘religious learners’ and ‘secular learners’.  It wasn’t until the Discussion, that I realized that the first two were both grouped into ‘secular’ and the second two into ‘religious’.  I also then realized that the data on ‘religious learners’ only pertained to those 8 individuals.  Can you please clarify right up front your broader categories?  Related to this, you outline 8 attitudes in Table 2 about human evolution from your religious learners.  Is this saying that each person had an entirely different viewpoint (since there are only 8 religious learners in the study)?  I think it would be helpful to maybe add some numbers to table 2 indicating how many participants held each attitude and whether they are of the national or ultra-orthodox sects.    

Fourth, I have a major issue with Table 1, the age of the earth!  The table says it is 5.6 million years old, when in fact, it over 4.5 billion years old (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-age-earth/?q=&page=1&per_page=25).  I am hoping this was simply a typographical error.  It most definitely needs to be fixed. 

Author Response

Reviewer 2:

 I thoroughly enjoyed reading this article.  Although it does not provide quantitative or very robust data analysis (given the qualitative nature of the study and the extremely small sample size), it does provide some very interesting narratives on potential ways of approaching Jewish learners concerning evolution.  I believe it has merit and should be shared with the scientific community.  The article was well-written, cleanly organized, and thorough.  I just have a few small suggestions that will help in better clarifying the findings. 

 Dear reviewer,

Thank you for your careful reading and the useful and thoughtful comments. We addressed your comments as follow:

First, and foremost, the article is exclusively dealing with Jewish learners.  This is excellent and much needed in the literature.  However, it took me all the way to the methods to realize that this was the population being targeted in the article.  If I was looking for literature on Jewish people, I would not have found this.  I would STRONGLY  recommend putting “Jewish” into the title and abstract. 

We added the word “Jewish” to the title and keywords

 Second, I found the introduction to be excellent.  However, there are just a few suggestions I have for making it more robust: 

 1) Please include some of the ample research literature showing the robust and repeatable relationship between religiosity and evolution acceptance; this will help bolster your claims in the introduction. 

2) When discussing the differences in religious beliefs between biology teachers and their students, you might consider citing several sources:  Gallup, 2016; Ecklund, 2007; Graffin & Provine, 2006. 

According to your comment the suggested references were added to the introduction (see pp. 1 and 3) and to the reference list. Gallup (2017) was already included in the manuscript and was changed to Gallup (2020) based on the information in Gallup’s website.

3) On the 6^th ReCCEE practice, there are some more recent citations that you could use:  Ferguson, DG, Mann, M, Cordero, AM, Jensen, JL. (2020). Reconciling evolution: evidence from a biology and theology course. Evolution: Education and Outreach, 13:19 and Lindsay, J., Arok, A., Bybee, S. M., Cho, W., Cordero, A. M., Ferguson, D. G….Jensen, J.L. (2019). Using a reconciliation model leads to large gains in evolution acceptance. CBE-Life Sciences Education. https://doi.org/10.1187/cbe.19-04-0080. 

 According to your comment the two suggested recent citations and references were added to the manuscript.

Third, not being familiar with Jewish religious sects, I found myself very confused throughout the paper of who was being discussed.  It became clear by the very end, but I feel like you could easily clarify it up front.  You had four sectors:  secular, traditional, national-religious, and ultra-Orthodox.  But, as you progress along with the paper, you begin to refer to them as ‘religious learners’ and ‘secular learners’.  It wasn’t until the Discussion, that I realized that the first two were both grouped into ‘secular’ and the second two into ‘religious’.  I also then realized that the data on ‘religious learners’ only pertained to those 8 individuals.  Can you please clarify right up front your broader categories?  Related to this, you outline 8 attitudes in Table 2 about human evolution from your religious learners.  Is this saying that each person had an entirely different viewpoint (since there are only 8 religious learners in the study)?  I think it would be helpful to maybe add some numbers to table 2 indicating how many participants held each attitude and whether they are of the national or ultra-orthodox sects.    

 The number of expressed attitudes presented in Table 2 is greater than the number of learners, because attitudes evolved along the three stages of the course, so that each learner could express more than one attitude. We added this clarification on p. 25. Based on your comment, we added the number and types of students who hold each attitude. The frequency of each attitude was calculated separately.

Regarding your comment about the religious sects, we have now refrained from using the term “religious”. We always specified explicitly the type of sector we referred to.  In the revised manuscript you will be able to see, painted in light-blue all the relevant corrections, and in green – all the cases where we had already used the explicit denomination.

Fourth, I have a major issue with Table 1, the age of the earth!  The table says it is 5.6 million years old, when in fact, it over 4.5 billion years old (https://www.nationalgeographic.org/topics/resource-library-age-earth/?q=&page=1&per_page=25).  I am hoping this was simply a typographical error.  It most definitely needs to be fixed. 

Thank you for the EXTREMLEY important comment! This typographical error was fixed (see Table 1).