Developing Teacher Competencies for Teaching Evolution across the Primary School Curriculum: A Design Study of a Pre-Service Teacher Education Module
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
My congratulations to the authors for this well written, excellent work. The literature review is congruent with the topic addressed. The method is also consistent with the objectives. The discussion is extensive and the practical implications of this study are important in initial teacher education. I have hardly any remarks to make, just the few that follow.
Sections 2.3.1 and 2.3.2 have the same title. However, instead of advising to change the title, it would be better to merge the two sections into one.
About the participants' literal statements that are transcribed to validate or triangulate the researcher's account with the qualitative data expressed (e.g. section 4.3.2), it is customary in qualitative research to put the duly coded informant in brackets, as well as the data collection instrument where the statements appear. It would be desirable that this be done in all literal statements by participants or informants in order to properly identify sources.
Author Response
Thank you for your positive feedback on our manuscript!
Thank you for pointing out the doubling of the section headers. In fact, the content of section 2.3.1 was erroneously repeated from section 2.3. We have corrected the error (now section 2.4).
Regarding your suggestion to add the informant code and data collection instrument with coded qualitative data, we have made the following modifications: We have added participant codes to all quoted data in section 4.3.1, table 5, and section 4.4.1. We find that the data collection method that the data stems from is mentioned in the respective sections.
We also added the following sentences in lines 672 ff.: “All qualitative data that is described here has been translated from German into English. Where qualitative data is quoted directly, we provide the participant codes in parantheses (unless responses were anonymous).“
Please note that in response to reviewer 2, we have made changes to the structure of the manuscript, particularly in section 3.3 and section 4.
Reviewer 2 Report
The manuscript aims to provide a significant module integration to pre-service teacher education. It has a potential, but the first major concern about the manuscript is (self)plagiarism. During the Turnitin reporting, a 69% match was found about an article. Even if that article is written bu the same authors, there is still self-plagiarism. Regarding the manuscript, the content organization is not well-organized and reader-friendly. As a research paper, I strongly suggest that you need to follow a systematic presentation of the sections. The presentation of findings related to formative evaluation about the module is not well-designed. More schematic representation of the module can be helpful. Moreover, there are several unnecessary repetitions throughout the paper. Thus, the manuscript needs a major revision and a reconsideration of "plagiarism".
Long paragraphs should be avoided. Proof-reading can be done for a more reader-friendly version.
Author Response
Thank you for your comments on our manuscript!
Regarding your concern of self-plagiarism - we assume the Turnitin rating you are referring to is the result of the automated system identifying our preprint of an earlier version of the same manuscript, e.g. here https://doi.org/10.21203/rs.3.rs-1589409/v1. Otherwise, this manuscript has not been published in a peer-reviewed journal or anywhere else, and therefore we believe the label of self-plagiarism does not apply. Thank you for your diligence in questioning this.
Regarding your suggestions about content organization:
You suggested to “follow a systematic presentation of the sections”. Please note that since we are reporting on a design-based research study, the reporting somewhat diverts from the usual format, particularly in that the iterative design of the intervention is also presented in more detail.
We introduce the reader to the outline of the paper in lines 95-104. We have modified the paragraphs by referring to the actual section numbers hoping that this makes the outline of the manuscript more transparent to the reader.
You commented that the “presentation of findings related to formative evaluation about the module is not well-designed” and that “more schematic representation of the module can be helpful”.
Please note that a more extensive presentation of the module can be found in supplementary materials (file 1).
We do agree that the presentation of results could be structured better. We have therefore made the following modifications:
We decided to include a table of data collection methods in the manuscript in section 3 (table 4, line 609), rather than only in the supplementary materials, hoping that this makes the reported formative evaluation more transparent.
We have also modified supplementary file 3 and changed the presentation of extended results.
We changed the structure of section 4 (Results) slightly, mirroring the structure of the presentation of methods in section 3/table 4.
You also mention “several unnecessary repetitions throughout the paper”. We suspect at least one of those instances refers to sections 2.3 and 2.3.1 which were erroneously doubled, as also pointed out by reviewer 1. We have corrected those repetitions.
We also revised the language in several places by breaking up long sentences.
Round 2
Reviewer 2 Report
The author(s) revised the manuscript based on the suggestions. The current version is well-designed and well-structured.
