Physics Teachers’ Perceptions about Their Judgments within Differentiated Learning Environments: A Case for the Implementation of Technology

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The subject is interesting and well selected. The sample could be larger. It would be interesting to know how many students each physics teacher has, as it is relevant in the way of observing them. Likewise, knowing the type of teaching methodology used by the participants could help to better understand the context.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I have had the opportunity to read the manuscript "Physics Teachers’ Perceptions about their Judgment within Differentiated Learning Environment : An Implication for Technology Implementation". I find the study to be very well structured and the aim of suggesting the technology implementation to assist the teachers’ judgments worthy, but with shortcomings in generating general conclusions. Very often the results (“findings”) are based on the opinion of just one teacher (or it is simply written on this way). It is well known that In qualitative research the subjectivity of respondents, their opinions, attitudes and perspectives together contribute to a degree of bias. Validity, then, should be seen as a matter of degree rather than as an absolute state.  

For instance, in the abstract you mention that the teachers "creatively designed learning transformations to accommodate the spectrum of students' abilities", but in the Results I find only maybe two citations in which transformations in teaching are mentioned. Did the majority of teachers carry out the transformation, or only a part of the teachers? I mean, we cannot give a general opinion based on one or two examples. It is the same with the conclusion about "workload". The text mentions only one teacher (with a specific citation) who stated this as a problem. According to this, can you please comment on the validity and reliability of your qualitative research, as well as the statistical validity of the conclusions.

I am also concerned about the representativeness of the sample, as the study was conducted with a sample of 8 teachers, among the very high number of physics teachers in Indonesia. Therefore, I would like to say that these results cannot represent general opinion or situation, and consequently need to be strengthened perhaps by some short quantitative analysis.

Although there is no general suggestion how many reviews should be made within a certain maximum number of the whole sample (e.g. all the secondary school  physics teachers in Indonesia), and one can conduct interviews with as many people as necessary in order to gain the information sought, but the sample actually depends on the purpose of the interview. In your case, the purpose is mainly to make generalization that teachers think ICT should be implemented in order to help them to make a judgments. Therefore, number 8 is, by my opinion, too small. Why not try to include some more teachers with higher possibilities and knowledge in ICT, as Yoga? Cause, from the text, except Yoga, only Fika and Hendro mention machine learning, but in the way that they just heard for it and think it could be applied in the educational practices.

Has the mentioned RQDA package structured the teachers' answers in such a way that you can distinguish from them how many teachers answered your (same/similar) questions in the same/similar way? If so, it would be necessary in each individual subsection of chapter 3.1. and 3.2., in addition to stating only one quote/opinion, state several of them or state how many teachers (out of 8 in total) declared it. For example, write down an exact number of teachers (out of 8) who stated that machine learning should be introduced into teaching as a tool to help with teacher judgments.

My suggestion is that you increase the number of interviews or that, in addition to the qualitative analysis, you introduce some quantitative ones, which will reinforce or confirm your statements. For example for the "workload" itself, it would be possible to determine the average workload of teachers in Indonesia, in the sense that the data on the total number of students taking physics and the total number of physics teachers is presented, and in this way confirming the overload of teachers and the difficulty of implementing individual judgment. Also, proposing and introducing advanced ICT technology requires the preparation of teachers for its use. Do you think it could be implemented and in what way in secondary schools in Indonesia, and could it be implemented in all regions of the country? Your sentence in 3.2.3 suggests that the implementation of suggested ICT technologies is very questionable: "Limited technological resources that have arrived to them, however, made this was slightly irrelevant to our implication of this article.".

Specific comments:

Please, for all abbreviations in the text insert firstly the full name and then abbreviation in the brackets. Some abbreviation are firstly mentioned still at the end of article, and they are surely mentioned before (e.g. ML, EDM). Please insert abbreviations by the first occurrence.

Narrated text should be everywhere in italic (please just check the recommendations for authors). And please, if in narrated text there is something that is not said very clear, please explain it below. For instance, in 3.2.2.3.: Yoga wanted to say that and that… Because, very often narrated texts are not clear or are not translated very well, and it is not clear what question they were asked. So, please think about adding the questions also.

In attached pdf file I put yellow parts of the text that are not clear and should be reformulated. Proofreading by native english speaker would be desirable (pay special attention to all the narrated text Example from 3.2.3.3.: “I try to privately talk to them. We’ll talk outside the class.” -  it is not clear did he/she talk with them or he/she will.

Page 2, row 69, 70, 71

Please, could you be so kind and comment how exactly zonation-based policy affects the higher diversity. It is known that Indonesia is country with diverse ethnicities, religions and languages, but it is not clear how would non zonation-based policy help to make diversity lower.

Page 3, row 107, 108

How can you be so sure that physics teachers in general have professional competences to maintain monitoring activities during the learning process? Verb “assert” is somewhat to hard to use as there can be some non-professionals giving lectures in physics, as the professional physics teachers shortage is worldwide problem. Also, professionals very often need some more lifelong education or training in order to strengthen some professional competences.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Many thanks to the authors that gave me the opportunity to review this paper. The subject is very interesting, and the article is informative concerning Physics Teachers’ Perceptions about their Judgment within

Differentiated Learning Environment.

 

There are however several points that should be reconsidered:

 

1.     The main point of the paper is the implication for technology implementation in teachers’ judgment. This point (digital technologies) is not adequately reviewed in the introduction. In fact, there is only one sentence concerning this point, including only 27 and 28 references. All the rest relevant to this point references are included in the Discussion. To my opinion those paragraphs should be moved from Discussion to Introduction, in order to improve and strengthen Introduction and the hypothesis of the study.  For example, Lines 595-620should be in the introduction. It includes new literature [43-46] and does not come as a result from this study’s data analysis. In fact, this is the main hypothesis of the study. The issue is to make clearer how the data analysis of this study answers this hypothesis. In other words, to clearly connect this hypothesis to the results. It seems that there is a confusion between Introduction and Discussion. All these references about LMS and computers and new technology and Machine Learning that could help teachers’ judgement is almost absent from the Introduction and appears suddenly in the Discussion. This is problematic. Lines 628-634 also matches more to the Introduction section and should be moved there for the same reason.

 

2.     This first paragraph of the Results section should be in the Methodology section. An example for each category and the way that has appeared from the data analysis could also be helpful.

 

3.     Line 621 “The technology that we suggest in this article could be assumed as the implication of 621 our study.” The question is How does this implication comes from the data analysis results?

 

4.     The manuscript needs language editing. There are many language problems such as: 

 

a)     How are the physics teacher's experiences, Line 91

b)    To what extent are limitations that teachers encountered, Line 95

c)     Line 106, Line 110

d)    Line 144-145

e)    our participants are at least speak 2 languages, Line 196

f)      Line 306-309, and 319-322, should be in italics

g)     tend to became, Line 563

h)    how teachers expects and predicts, Line 576

i)      but the obtained judgment could not for generalization, Line 591

j)      We recommends recent development, Line 622

k)     Etc.

 

5.   The references should be better presented. For instance:

a.     Reference 1, Pages are missing (at least).

b.     ….

c.     Reference 52, Pages of the manuscript are missing

d.     Reference 53, Check again the publication year

e.     Reference 57, part of Proceedings, The reference should be impoved.

 

 

 

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 2 Report

I appreciate the time and effort which the authors invested during the revising the manuscript in accordance with my previous review. Their changes and responses to my concerns have satisfied my doubts and I think paper is appropriate for publication after adding few sentences/explanations pointed below.

-        In the Response 1 you said: “As stated in page 3 row 111-112 of our revised paper, “Phenomenological study has been used to investigate the extent of physics teachers’ experiences and limitations in making judgments over the time”. Please add after this sentence some references that you mentioned in the Response 1, in order to discuss generalizability in qualitative research also in the manuscript.

-        Please add in the text of the revised version constatations concerning the validity. In the Response 2 you wrote: „We have followed several techniques in our paper to address validity of the qualitative findings, including “peer debriefing” in page 6 row 246 through several discussions with other authors and “member checking” in page 6 row 249”. You can add to the manuscript a sentence similar to this, citing the mentioned references…

-        I agree that it is impossible to collect quantitative data within 10-day revision from the editorial policy, as you mentioned in the Response 4. I appreciate your explanations in point 4 and I would like you to include a similar paragraph in the manuscript (including mentioned references), in order to clarify that your sample is actually acceptable and often used in this type of research.

Author Response

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Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear all, thank you for the opportunity to read this manuscript. Please find attached some last comments for further possible consideration.

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf