Equity in Career Development of High School Students in South Korea: The Role of School Career Education
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear authors!
The paper is really well-written, seems to be on quite urgent topic for the South Korea and also on the global scale, and reflects the thoughtful empirical analysis of secondary data. Recognizing the high quality of the submitted manuscript, it still appears that, possibly, some questions could be asked and answered in the form of amendments, as to improve the paper even more:
1) it would be better and more in line with the IMRAD structure of empirical paper to come up with your two research questions right after the literature review (not before);
2) regarding section 3.2. Variables: I am not sure that career development competencies can be measured only by the student's ideas and attitudes to career development. Competences are much wider phenomenon, including also knowledge and experience. You should justify the usage by the KEEPII exactly this questionnaire for CDC and/or mention it in the limitations.
3) lines 291-292: it would be mentioned already here that the quality is measured quantitatively as satisfaction.
4) line 307: self-efficacy of whom?
5) line 479: Discussion, limitations and conclusion
6) line 492: please, explain what you exactly mean here by the reverse causality (name the variables).
Paper also needs to be reviewed for the language, the writing style is quite heavy, and some sentences would be improved in terms of syntax. In attached file, please, observe (in yellow) just a few of the most striking examples.
Author Response
1) it would be better and more in line with the IMRAD structure of empirical paper to come up with your two research questions right after the literature review (not before)
-Response: We moved research questions after the literature review (line 267-270).
2) regarding section 3.2. Variables: I am not sure that career development competencies can be measured only by the student's ideas and attitudes to career development. Competences are much wider phenomenon, including also knowledge and experience. You should justify the usage by the KEEPII exactly this questionnaire for CDC and/or mention it in the limitations.
-Response: We added some studies that used the same items of KEEP II as CDC (line 314-321) and also mentioned it in the limitations (line 615-621).
3) lines 291-292: it would be mentioned already here that the quality is measured quantitatively as satisfaction.
-Response: We erased and rewrote the sentences clear (line 329-332).
4) line 307: self-efficacy of whom?
-Response: We added 'student' (line 347).
5) line 479: Discussion, limitations and conclusion
-Response: We changed the title as Conclusion (line 536).
6) line 492: please, explain what you exactly mean here by the reverse causality (name the variables).
-Response: We added some sentences that explains the reverse causality (line 609-614).
Paper also needs to be reviewed for the language, the writing style is quite heavy, and some sentences would be improved in terms of syntax. In attached file, please, observe (in yellow) just a few of the most striking examples.
-Response: We rewrote abstracts and also restate many sentences mentioned unclear. You can see what sentences were restated. Please see the second revision.
-Response: We added KEEP II instrument into Appendixes (line 640).
-Response: We changed some titles in the Data and Methods section (line 277, 359)
-Response: We added a sentence which states relations with research questions and descriptive analysis (line 398-400).
-Response: We changed the conclusion to reflect the comments. Discussion was modified, followed by limitations and concluding paragraphs.
Reviewer 2 Report
This is an interesting paper about the role of parental background to students’ career development competencies and whether the school can play a role in that relationship. This paper comes as a response to a national initiative. I find it very important to report results from such initiatives like Career Education Act in South Korea.
The study is well- designed in terms of methodology and data analysis. However, the presentation needs improvement. There are a few ambiguities in the first parts of the manuscript (Introduction & Literature review), which I indicate on the text (pdf).
Also, the last section (limitations- Discussion-Conclusion) needs to be polished.
I would advise the authors to either split them to three separate sections. If they choose though to include them in one section, they should start with the discussion, then go on with the limitations and end with a strong concluding paragraph. The discussion sections should be expanded. This is also true for the last paragraph which functions as the concluding one.
Comments for author File: 
Comments.pdf
Author Response
-Response: We rewrote abstracts and also restate many sentences mentioned unclear especially literature review. You can see what sentences were restated. Please see the second revision.
-Response: We added KEEP II instruments into Appendixes (line 640).
-Response: We changed some titles in the Data and Methods section (line 277, 359)
-Response: We added a sentence which states relations with research questions and descriptive analysis (line 398-400).
-Response: We changed the conclusion to reflect the comments. Discussion was modified, followed by limitations and concluding paragraphs.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have considered the revisions required. However, they should elaborate more in the introduction and the confusion. Please have a look at my comments on the pdf.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Dear. Reviewer 2
We rewrote abstracts and also restate many sentences you mentioned unclear in the introduction section. You can see what sentences were restated. Please see the second revision.
-Response: changed title as high school students (line 1)
-Response: changed OLS into OLS regression (line 16)
-Response: moved sentences (line 41-49 into line 88-93)
-Response: we rewrote introduction focusing on the equity of career development and moved some sentenced related to career development competencies into the literature review section.
-Response: we agreed with your comments about adding a new section, 'Research purpose and aim' but we restated our research purpose more clearly following writing style of previous studies (line 249-250).
-Response: we restated conclusion especially concluding paragraphs adding sentences on moderating effect and significance of our results (line 608-624).
