Transdisciplinary STEM: Examples of Student Thinking within Nonformal Learning Experiences

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Dear authors,

The study is interesting and does contribute to STEM field. However, I find that the authors focused mainly on thinking and not reasoning as stated in the title. The article is not being critically written. Some supporting citations are required. Referencing style in text and format in references list should be re-check.

Thank you.

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

We changed the title to better reflect our broader focus on student thinking in STEM contexts. While we see these two terms as intrinsically related, we recognize how this might have caused some confusion given our coding structure in which reasoning is a specific (third) aspect of argumentation. We added several citations to the literature review including references to bolster arguments about the role of engineering in STEM and make further connections to the literature on experiential learning. We re-checked the reference list for formatting issues but did not find any major errors. Admittedly we are all more familiar with APA style, so we utilized other articles from this journal as a model. 

Reviewer 2 Report

Further describe the problem and its context.

 

Please expand the literature review to (1) greater describe the current knowledge on your chosen topic in terms of content and research processes used, (b) to greater demonstrate what gap exists in our knowledge both in terms of content and research methods, and (c) to explain how your study is intended to fill that gap including question(s) that drive the study. Consider a section at the end of the review in which you address this more clearly. 

 

Under the methods, expand the rationale for the study being expressed as a need to address a gap in the research literature in an exploratory manner.

 

In the results/conclusions, expand on how the data represents the qualities of which you claim it signifies because your analytical comments should bring the relationship between the quality asserted and the excerpt presented transparent and coherent making your qualitative claims clearly evidenced by the data.

 

 

Author Response

We added text in the introduction to more clearly identify the purpose of the study and how it fills gaps in our knowledge of transdisciplinary thinking with respect to non-formal learning environments (e.g., our lack of clear images of transdisciplinary STEM and incomplete picture of contextual influences on STEM thinking).  The introduction now ends with a presentation of our two inter-related research questions. We also made several statements throughout to the revised manuscript to make this explicit. For example, see lines 85-86, 135-138 and lines 261-264 at the end of the literature review section. With regard to content, we added several citations to the literature review including references to bolster arguments about the role of engineering in STEM and make further connections to the literature on experiential learning.

We begin the methods section by reiterating how our study fills an important gap and addresses the research questions we specified. We also provide additional rationale in the methods section for why our focus on argumentation is valuable and consistent with our purpose.

Finally, we added several analytic comments in the results section (especially in describing learning episodes two and three). These analytic comments are meant to link the student words/actions to our specific codes and make the relationships to our major themes and claims more explicit. See for example lines 543-546, 634-636, 680-683.

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors
It was my pleasure to review your manuscript entitled “transdisciplinary stem: examples of student reasoning within non-formal learning experiences” and advise you to prosper your current research project. In my view, your topic has touched on a critical issue in a fascinating context. However, there are many spaces to be improved in terms of argumentation, theoretical background, research method, and findings. I hope my below comments would help you develop your work into groundbreaking research in your domain.
Positioning, purpose, introduction and research gap.

•    The positioning of the paper is not entirely clear. It is better to explain the gap in this article further.
•    While this is an interesting paper, I feel that the constructs need much more precision and development to make a serious contribution to the literature. There are key limitations, which unfortunately outweigh the contributions to the extant literature.
Remedy: You need to improve your introduction.
•    What is the innovation of your work?
•    Remedy:  Explain 2 lines about the importance and contribution at the introduction end of the article.
•    Theoretical literature has not been considered and reviewed. It’s better to observe the connection between the contents. Try to explain everything except the topics in order to establish the necessary coherence.
•    Remedy: Please provide more information on the context of your study. I would like to understand the context of your empirical work better and what can be learned from selecting observations in this area?

Method.
•    Why did you choose this analyse for your research?

Conclusion.
•    The authors need to draw substantive conclusions from their results, and suggest, develop recommendations for further research.
•    How your research conclusion can be used in other articles?
•    What scale has been used for analysis? What are the results of your research and how can it help your statistical community?
•    Add limitations and directions for future research after the conclusion.
•    Using the following reference could be beneficial as these add more evidence to the literature review section:
Design the pattern of increasing satisfaction for international students: a qualitative study with the grounded theory approach. International Journal of Management in Education, 15(5), 458-476. https://doi.org/10.1504/IJMIE.2021.117589

Best of luck with the further development of the paper.

Author Response

We added text in the introduction to more clearly identify the purpose of the study and how it fills gaps in our knowledge of transdisciplinary thinking with respect to non-formal learning environments. This section now ends with a reiteration of the purpose and specific research questions addressed.
It wasn’t clear what additional contextual information is needed. We added information about the school setting and voluntary nature of the activities. We are willing to add more information as needed. It should be noted, that our knowledge of the context is limited to what was voluntarily shared with the researcher at the time video data was collected. Because the research focus was on student thinking, there was no formal data collection during the activity planning phases or facilitators’ reflections. 
In the methods section, we added further rationale for our focus on argumentation. We have previously written about the development of our CER-based coding framework, so instead of reiterating that full process we encourage readers to visit those references to see more about how it arose from the literature. We looked at the suggested IJMT article, but did not think that added anything to our analysis. Given our starting point for analysis was a framework we had already developed, our methodology does not directly align with grounded theory. 
We reorganized the Discussion section to better highlight the themes from our analysis (i.e., illustrations of the integrated nature of students thinking and role of personal authority and make the article recommendations/contribution clear. The purpose and organization of the discussion is now provided in the opening paragraph for this section. This is again reiterated in the final Conclusion section. We also added a Limitations and Future Research section as recommended, though we placed it between the Discussion and Conclusion instead of after the Conclusion as we thought that it made more sense to place it there in order to end with the final “so what”.

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear author(s)

Hope you are doing well. According to the review of this article, the corrections have been made. But You should draw your model  (Figure 1) more clearly.

 

Good luck

Author Response

We recreated Figure 1 as recommended.