Nationality as an Influential Variable with Regard to the Social Skills and Academic Success of Immigrant Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I really appreciated the opportunity to read this interesting study that explores the influence of age, gender, nationality and place of residence on the probability of developing social skills and social wellbeing.

Abstract: The goals are not crystal clear. The following sentence lacks the term of comparison “we find that students who emigrated from the European continent present better social skills, better social wellbeing and greater academic success”.

Introduction: I would move the objectives to a second part of the paper and try to introduce them more clearly. In particular, the second objective is not clear.

Conceptualization: Social skills and academic success paragraph: I would try to give a more accurate definition of social skills and academic success by referring to the most recent literature.

Hypothesis: The literature cited in the introductory part of the text could be reorganized to guide the reader towards the objectives and the predictions. The second prediction (i.e. “In an online learning context, students who belong to a nationality with higher social skills will have greater academic success.”) does not seem well-justified and seemed to come out of nowhere.

The literature background should be rewrite in order to better introduce the topic of this study, the research questions, the aims and the predictions.

 

Author Response

You can find our answer in the cover letter

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Is a very good article, with an excellent theoretical and pratical discussion.

Author Response

AUTHOR RESPONSE

Positive comment from this reviewer is appreciated.

Reviewer 3 Report

Th(38-41) identifying the objectives of the research.  then, it is at (154-156) the reader learns of the specific hypotheses to be tested.  This needs to be clarified. There is also discussion about "lower levels of integration" that lead to a lack of social skills but this is not really tested so the reader wonders why this is part of the argument.  The author(s) need to discuss the SSYI instrument.  It is unclear as to how this document was "tested" for immigrant versus "native" students. It would seem that the "test" is culturally biased and this has to be discussed at the end of the paper.  On the issue of "nationality", the reader is confused--is it "continent" or is it "cultural".

 The claim that all the students are equally fluent in Spanish is simply not true.  They may have all passed some basic test, but that does not tell the researcher how well the student fully understands the language.  Previous research has documented that there is a difference between "hard" and "soft" language acquisition. Moreover the research says nothing about the schools themselves and how they have dealt with the "on-line" school programs.  There is some discussion regarding "intercultural schools" vs. "non-intercultural schools" and that would have been an important comparison.  Or alternatively, the researchers could have compared high SSYI test scores for "native spanish" students compare with non-native spanish students and look at the differences.   It says nothing about how the student is relating to his/her family, social context, etc. Again, previous research shows that these contextual factors are important in dealing with the second language. Spanish is a romance language and has some similarities to other romance languages. But when you compare Chinese with French or Latin America spanish, the difference is major.  It would have made more sense for the researchers to take all the "high scores" on the SSYI test (regardless of the "nationality" of the student) and then run a regression with regard to social skills/academic achievement. In other words, what would the model look like if you took all nationalities that scored high on the SSYI test and compared them with those who scored low.

Finally, I find the continual justification for decisions to be tedious for the reader. Make a case at the beginning and then move forward.

Author Response

You can find our answer in the cover letter

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf