The Effect of Robotics Education on Gender Differences in STEM Attitudes among Dutch 7th and 8th Grade Students
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The authors analyze the effect of a robotics curriculum on Duth 7th and 8th grade students' attitude towards STEM subjects and careers, using as support the S-STEM survey. The research is interesting, but it is difficult to compare to previous ones due to the differences of students ages, duration of the robotic courses and so on.
Some points must be better explained/justified on the paper in order to make sure the validity of the work. Some of them are described bellow.
"Also, identifying the participants by means of their house and telephone numbers at the beginning of the survey did not work out, as students appeared to be unable to supply this information correctly." -> this raises an alert flag to me. The authors stated that the questionaire was translated to Dutch, but did the students really understand what was being asked to them? My concern is regarding the "totally agree/totally disagree scale". I believe that besides a translation, the questions/answers should be modified to a more friendly/understandable form to be more accessible to students
"As students weren’t individually observed by a researcher, it is unclear whether they filled in their answers in a hurry or not in accordance with their true beliefs. Because the test takes 10-15 minutes, it is possible that students were not motivated or got bored quickly. Furthermore, students in the age group of twelve to fourteen might have never filled in a 5-point Likert scale before." -> this is also a threat to the validity of the work. How the findings of the work are expected to be valid if there is no control assurance of the process with the students? please provide more information justifying why the work should be considered valid despite this initial problems
"Furthermore, there was no negative effect of educational robotics on STEM attitudes, nor a positive one, which means that teaching students robotics doesn’t have a negative impact on their attitude towards STEM." -> actually, this means that it doesn't have no (negative or positive) impact on their attitude towards STEM
What are your hypotheses on why boys score higher than girls? It would be nice to see a discussion about that. Do you believe that the fact that previous researches were made in different countries may influence the result? How relevant is the country culture regarding this topic? Please describe the authors feelings about that.
Some general comments and writing errors found are listed as follows.
"analysis revealed" -> please remove additional space
"them.-Studies" -> "them. Studies"
"STEM work-force more research" -> "STEM work-force, more research"
"analyzing the different" -> please remove the line break
"seems to exists" -> "seems to exist"
"Based on previous research the following it was it was expected that there would be a more positive attitude towards STEM after the robotics curriculum than before, for boys and girls." -> please rewrite
"and technology" -> please remove additional space
"education were equal." -> "education was equal."
"STEM. Finally," -> please remove additional space
"studies by Sisman et al. (2021) [4] and Zviel-Girshin et al. (2020) [18], who found positive effects of educational robotics on STEM attitude, studied""-> please rewrite
Author Response
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The paper presents a research examining the effect that educational robotics can have on attitudes towards STEM for boys and for girls. The intro provides an excellent motivation, based on ambiguous and contradicting evidence from earlier works.
The presentation is nice and easy to follow, the analysis is careful, the conclusions truly stem from the data and the discussion is satisfying. So, if the input data were ok, this would be an excellent paper.
One point of concern regarding the design of the research is the difference between the pretest and posttest populations. In the manuscript it is mentioned that only 30 students run the experiment from end to end out of the 129 considered in the analysis.
A pretest/posttest research is based on examining the same population before and after some intervention. In this case we have the examination of different populations and no particular evidence is provided to support that the two populations are at least sufficiently similar. So, how is the validity of the analysis guaranteed? This being such an unconventional approach, a strong theoretical justification of the validity of the approach is needed. A simpler and more convincing alternative would be to redo the analysis, using only the 30 records that run the experiment from end to end.
Some minor comments:
line 54: there is an unnecessary change of line/paragraph
line 91: There seems to *exists* --> exist
line 100: Based on previous research the following it was it was expected that --> perhaps delete "the following"?
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
I'm satisfied with the current version of the paper. Please pain attention to a these minor issues still found:
"Sruvey" -> "Survey"
"and careers. [31, 6]" -> "and careers [31, 6]."
"it may be possible2" -> "it may be possible"
"younger populations. [4,18]." -> "younger populations [4,18]."
"could more indivdmonitor" -> "could more individually monitor"
Reviewer 2 Report
I was already very much in favor of this work, except for a concern regarding the matching between pre- and post- test data, as it was not clear how they were handled.
The authors have now clarified this matter. I particularly commend the authors in clearly stating, separately for each hypothesis they examine, exactly which data they have considered. Moreover, the choices they have made regarding which data to consider are meaningful and well supported.
As a result, I no longer have any concerns regarding this work.
