Parent–Preschooler Writing on an Internet Forum as a Potential Platform for Promoting Respectful Online Discourse and Executive Functions

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The introduction to this manuscript lays out a socially relevant and unique topic of inquiry—if parents engage in online writing forums with their preschool-age children, will this foster empathy and executive function (EF) skills that teach children positive online communication habits and prevent future cyberbullying? Given the risks that older children and youth encounter online, this topic is of high applied significance and as far as I know, the focus on earl childhood makes an important contribution to the literature.

The introductory section is clearly laid out, and I appreciated the inclusion of meta-analyses. It would be helpful to include the effect size for parent effects on cognitive empathy and comment on the strength of parental influences compared to other environmental factors (lines 55-60). One aspect missing from the introduction is whether bullying (either online or in person) is much of an issue for this age group. This relates to research questions 2 and 3—is there any reason to expect that preschoolers would engage in negative posting or bullying? This seems unlikely, given the social conventions of letter-writing, the fact that children are monitored by their parents in the context of forum intended to build an empathic, positive online community, and the likelihood that children would need considerable assistance from their parents in composing their written messages.

With 10 weeks of writing forum participation among 174 children, the authors have a nice-sized corpus of written comments to analyze. Presentation of the coding process and results was clear. Not surprisingly, the content focuses on items and events that young children value (e.g., fun activities, favorite foods) and the topics of discussion are concrete. Note that coder agreement on posts was fairly low (174).

There are two limitations of this work. First, we see only the written products. Without observation of the dyads actually composing these messages, we cannot tell how much is child- vs. parent-driven, what kind of discussion/scaffolding occurs, and what about the nature of this interaction might actually comprise the EF-promoting guidance that is at the heart of the study conceptualization. Examples of parental support for EF could include helping children think through their intended message, deciding which messages to respond to, helping the child reformulate their message for clarity and relevance, perspective-taking on how the recipient may react, and the many supports related to spelling, capitalization and other mechanical aspects of keyboard writing.

Second, the coding system does not do much to reflect the original interest in empathy and executive function. An absence of negative content does not necessarily imply that parents taught children about empathy as they wrote together. What aspects of the messages imply that children are being empathic, or otherwise taking the reader’s perspective into account? These data seem better suited to an analysis of the social functions in early written communication and how children acquire social conventions about the content of written correspondence. In that regard, the relative rarity of prolonged message threads is very interesting, as well as the length and discourse complexity of individual posts. How might children start to learn that good writing includes multiple related statements?

Given the interest in empathy, the focus in the discussion on neglected messages (those with no responses) is very appropriate. Was there anything distinctive about those message, perhaps in terms of content, or being posted after activity on a thread had dies down? I also wondered about children’s personal relationships: did children primarily correspond with their in-class friends or provide longer messages or more replies to their friends? Were those children neglected on the forum less popular among their peers?

The corpus was analyzed as a whole without taking into consideration who wrote what. I was curious whether particular children (or classrooms) were high-volume posters, wrote more complex messages, posted more affiliative comments, posted more opening questions of the kind that elicit wider conversations, or were more likely to be the sole responder to a peer’s post. Again, if this were the case, observational data could show that some parents specialize in teaching their children how to connect with their audience.

In sum, this is a creative study with ambitious and important underlying ideas. The nature of the data limit what conclusions can be drawn. It seems like a great start to a new line of work.

 

Author Response

Ref.: Manuscript ID: education-2496313
Title: Parent-preschooler writing on an internet forum as a potential platform for promoting respectful online discourse and Executive Functions
Dear Editors,
Thank you very much for the thorough review process. It helped us improve our manuscript. Below we copied the reviewers’ comments, and following each comment, we noted our response. As you will see, we considered every point and made our best efforts to take it into account. We hope you will now deem the revised manuscript suitable for publication in the special issue on Pedagogical Possibilities for Early Childhood Education in Education Sciences. 
Sincerely, 
The authors

Reviewer #1:
We thank the reviewer for reading our paper and the important issues they raised. We revised the manuscript and did our best to address them. We marked in green the major changes that we introduced. We think that the paper is now improved.

Comment: The introduction to this manuscript lays out a socially relevant and unique topic of inquiry—if parents engage in online writing forums with their preschool-age children, will this foster empathy and executive function (EF) skills that teach children positive online communication habits and prevent future cyberbullying? Given the risks that older children and youth encounter online, this topic is of high applied significance and as far as I know, the focus on early childhood makes an important contribution to the literature.
In sum, this is a creative study with ambitious and important underlying ideas. The nature of the data limit what conclusions can be drawn. It seems like a great start to a new line of work.
√ Answer: Thank you. We were very happy and excited to read that you think that the research is meaningful. The English was checked and corrected by an English language editor.   

Comment: The introductory section is clearly laid out, and I appreciated the inclusion of meta-analyses. It would be helpful to include the effect size for parent effects on cognitive empathy and comment on the strength of parental influences compared to other environmental factors (lines 55-60).
√ Answer: Thank you. We added the effect size of the environment on the development of empathy, as found in the study of Abramson et al. (2020). (see p.2) 
We did not find a study that examines the effect size of parental influence compared to other variables. 

Comment: One aspect missing from the introduction is whether bullying (either online or in person) is much of an issue for this age group. This relates to research questions 2 and 3—is there any reason to expect that preschoolers would engage in negative posting or bullying? This seems unlikely, given the social conventions of letter-writing, the fact that children are monitored by their parents in the context of forum intended to build an empathic, positive online community, and the likelihood that children would need considerable assistance from their parents in the context of forum intended to build an empathic, positive online community, and the likelihood that children would need considerable assistance from their parents in composing their written messages.
√ Answer: In line with the reviewer's request, we added a paragraph about isolation as a version of bullying and about bullying and social isolation in preschool. (see p.2)   
 
Comment: With 10 weeks of writing forum participation among 174 children, the authors have a nice-sized corpus of written comments to analyze. Presentation of the coding process and results was clear. Not surprisingly, the content focuses on items and events that young children value (e.g., fun activities, favorite foods) and the topics of discussion are concrete. Note that coder agreement on posts was fairly low (174).
√ Answer: We clarified the coding process and added that disagreements were discussed and resolved. (see p.4)

Comment: There are two limitations of this work. First, we see only the written products. Without observation of the dyads actually composing these messages, we cannot tell how much is child- vs. parent-driven, what kind of discussion/scaffolding occurs, and what about the nature of this interaction might actually comprise the EF-promoting guidance that is at the heart of the study conceptualization. Examples of parental support for EF could include helping children think through their intended message, deciding which messages to respond to, helping the child reformulate their message for clarity and relevance, perspective-taking on how the recipient may react, and the many supports related to spelling, capitalization 
Second, the coding system does not do much to reflect the original interest in empathy and executive function. An absence of negative content does not necessarily imply that parents taught children about empathy as they wrote together. What aspects of the messages imply that children are being empathic, or otherwise taking the reader’s perspective into account? These data seem better suited to an analysis of the social functions in early written communication and how children acquire social conventions about the content of written correspondence. In that regard, the relative rarity of prolonged message threads is very interesting, as well as the length and discourse complexity of individual posts. How might children start to learn that good writing includes multiple related statements?
√ Answer: Thank you for the important feedback and suggestions. Indeed, we do not have data on the nature of the interactions, and it is a limit. We wrote about this in the limitation section. (see p.10) 
We agree that examining expressions of empathy throughout the writing is essential. Following your recommendation, we reanalyzed the data for expressions of empathy. In our analysis, we included a wide range of such expressions. We added a sentence in the Data Analysis (see p.4) and a section to the results section (see page 8).
 
Comment: Given the interest in empathy, the focus in the discussion on neglected messages (those with no responses) is very appropriate. Was there anything distinctive about those message, perhaps in terms of content, or being posted after activity on a thread had dies down? I also wondered about children’s personal relationships: did children primarily correspond with their in-class friends or provide longer messages or more replies to their friends? Were those children neglected on the forum less popular among their peers?
√ Answer: Thank you! Following your comment, we reanalyzed the content of these posts. We found that, generally, they looked like other posts. Yet, some were unclear or had a short one-word message. We referred to it. (see p.7) 
As to the personal relationship of the children who did not receive comments, we do not have data to answer this question. We added this to the limitations. (see p.11)

Comment: The corpus was analyzed as a whole without taking into consideration who wrote what. I was curious whether particular children (or classrooms) were high-volume posters, wrote more complex messages, posted more affiliative comments, posted more opening questions of the kind that elicit wider conversations, or were more likely to be the sole responder to a peer’s post. Again, if this were the case, observational data could show that some parents specialize in teaching their children how to connect with their audience.
√ Answer: Our analysis showed that many children used empathic references and not specific children. In the Discussion, we have added clarification regarding this. (see p.10)

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

I really enjoyed reading the first part of the paper. There was a clear structure, had up-to-date sources and sounded like an interesting topic. However, there were then major issues especially in methodology and discussion that left me very confused. The paper needs a big amount of reflection to address the following issues.

The second part of the second research question needs reformulation (maybe something like How can the messages be categorized concerning respect and polite behavior or nature?). Moreover, I do not feel like this was really part of the paper. Fore example in the discussion “unfriendly gestures” were mentioned, but they were not part of the results. Does this mean that there were no unfriendly gestures?

I do not understand the following sentence “It can be seen in Table 2 that the categories that came up in the children's posts were: 234 sharing experiences, greetings, and best wishes (n = 94), contacting the preschool group 235 (n = 84), and sharing feelings and desires (n = 68).” The categories that came up were more than these? And were do these numbers come from, they are differently in the table? And what is meant with “contacting the preschool group”? This expression is only used here in the whole paper.

In Table 3 you can find sub-categories to 4 categories. However, these categories were not called like this in Table 2. Moreover, a lot of categories from Table 2 are missing, did they not have subcategories? I would carefully rethink about the categorization, that is the main weakness of the paper. Why are “animals” for example a category, but “family” and “friends” only sub-categories? Why is “Hobbies” a category and does not belong to “sharing experiences”? Why is “after-school activities” a category and “preschool events” a sub-category? I could go on like this, but you see there it needs clarification and restructuring. Also, I do not understand the ordering of the categories in the table.

In the comments section the word “category” is used differently than in the posts section. For posts, comments are based on the content, for comments, based on the characterization (response,…). This makes the paper hard to follow.

In the discussion it is said “Interestingly, children who received fewer comments tended to participate less in the online discourse.” – This was not part of the results, where does this suddenly come from? Also, I am very surprised about “However, they did not understand enough that unethical and disrespectful discourse also meant ignoring the posts of others.” – did you examine this?

“We also found that posts that included questions received significantly more comments than posts that were written as sharing information” – there were no analysis of significance mentioned in the paper?

“The findings of the present study revealed that preschool children's online conversations (with parental support) were short.” – The length of posts/comments was not a topic in the paper, where does this come from?

You use expressions like “the children shared” or “with the help of the parents the children …”, I would change these expressions all to “the posts” etc., because you examined the posts and you do not know who wrote them.

Also, some minor comments:

·         When using the abbreviation “EF” in the abstract write “Executive Functions” or “Executive Functions (EF)”

·         The 2 last sentences in the abstract do not belong to the abstract

·         Keywords are separated with comma and semicolon

·         Section 2.2: close bracket

·         Page 4: I think there is I mistake with numbering the list: a. Should not be part of the list and the formatting of the list should be the same. Also please use different words than steps, it is confusing for example here “In the second step, we analyzed only the posts according to the following steps”. I would prefer a numbered list because it is in a chronological order. However, then do not call the 3 main steps “steps”.

·         A source for the reliability that coding 21% of the messages by 2 persons and the according agreements is sufficient.

·         There is an error with the table caption of Table 2 (I think the first should be deleted). Also, for better readability please position the table (and all the others) on one page each.

·         Generally, Oxford comma is missing sometimes.

Author Response

Ref.: Manuscript ID: education-2496313
Title: Parent-preschooler writing on an internet forum as a potential platform for promoting respectful online discourse and Executive Functions

Dear Editors,
Thank you very much for the thorough review process. It helped us improve our manuscript. Below we copied the reviewers’ comments, and following each comment, we noted our response. As you will see, we considered every point and made our best efforts to take it into account. We hope you will now deem the revised manuscript suitable for publication in the special issue on Pedagogical Possibilities for Early Childhood Education in Education Sciences. 
Sincerely, 
The authors

Reviewer #2:
We thank the reviewer for reading our paper and the important issues they raised. We revised the manuscript and did our best to address them. We marked in green the significant changes that we introduced. We think that the paper is now improved.

Comment: I really enjoyed reading the first part of the paper. There was a clear structure, had up-to-date sources and sounded like an interesting topic. However, there were then major issues especially in methodology and discussion that left me very confused. The paper needs a big amount of reflection to address the following issues.
√ Answer: Thank you very much for the important and detailed feedback. We revised the manuscript according to your comments and hope it is more coherent now. The English was checked and corrected by an English language editor.   

Comment: The second part of the second research question needs reformulation (maybe something like How can the messages be categorized concerning respect and polite behavior or nature?). Moreover, I do not feel like this was really part of the paper. Fore example in the discussion “unfriendly gestures” were mentioned, but they were not part of the results. Does this mean that there were no unfriendly gestures?
√ Answer: Following your comment, we revised the manuscript. We made sure that we used consistent and appropriate terms throughout the manuscript.  We rewrote the research questions (see p.3). We made sure that we answered the research questions and discussed our results.

Comment: I do not understand the following sentence “It can be seen in Table 2 that the categories that came up in the children's posts were: 234 sharing experiences, greetings, and best wishes (n = 94), contacting the preschool group 235 (n = 84), and sharing feelings and desires (n = 68).” The categories that came up were more than these? And were do these numbers come from, they are differently in the table? … what is meant with “contacting the preschool group”? This expression is only used here in the whole paper.
√ Answer: Thank you for the important comment. It was a mistake. We corrected the numbers in the result's explanation below Table 1 in accordance with the numbers in this table. (see p.6)

Comment: In Table 3 you can find sub-categories to 4 categories. However, these categories were not called like this in Table 2. Moreover, a lot of categories from Table 2 are missing, did they not have subcategories? I would carefully rethink about the categorization, that is the main weakness of the paper. Why are “animals” for example a category, but “family” and “friends” only sub-categories? Why is “Hobbies” a category and does not belong to “sharing experiences”? Why is “after-school activities” a category and “preschool events” a sub-category? I could go on like this, but you see there it needs clarification and restructuring. Also, I do not understand the ordering of the categories in the table. 
√ Answer: Thank you for this important feedback. We understand that some data were less meaningful for the present manuscript. In line with your comment, we changed the results section. We deleted the information on the topics' subcategories and added an analysis of empathy-related expressions. (see p.8).

Comment: In the comments section the word “category” is used differently than in the posts section. For posts, comments are based on the content, for comments, based on the characterization (response,…). This makes the paper hard to follow.
√ Answer: For better clarity, we rewrote the analysis section and used the term "category" only for the posts. (see p.5, 6)

Comment: In the discussion it is said “Interestingly, children who received fewer comments tended to participate less in the online discourse.” – This was not part of the results, where does this suddenly come from? Also, I am very surprised about “However, they did not understand enough that unethical and disrespectful discourse also meant ignoring the posts of others.” – did you examine this?
√ Answer: Thank you for drawing our attention. We deleted these sentences from the discussion.

Comment: “We also found that posts that included questions received significantly more comments than posts that were written as sharing information” – there were no analysis of significance mentioned in the paper?
√ Answer: Thank you. We saw that this data was missing, and in line with your comment, we added it to the results. (see p.5)

Comment: “The findings of the present study revealed that preschool children's online conversations (with parental support) were short.” – The length of posts/comments was not a topic in the paper, where does this come from?
√ Answer: Thank you. We removed the word "short". (see p.9)

Comment: You use expressions like “the children shared” or “with the help of the parents the children …”, I would change these expressions all to “the posts” etc., because you examined the posts and you do not know who wrote them.
√ Answer: As the reviewer suggested, we changed expressions like “the children shared” or “with the help of the parents, the children …” to the terms "the posts" or "they shared …". (see example, p.5)

 Also, some minor comments:
a.     When using the abbreviation “EF” in the abstract write “Executive Functions” or “Executive Functions (EF)”.
√ Answer: We added in the abstract: Executive Functions (EF). (see p.1)
b.    The 2 last sentences in the abstract do not belong to the abstract.
√ Answer: We the two last sentences and rewrote the end of the abstract. (see p.1)
c.    Keywords are separated with comma and semicolon.
√ Answer: We corrected it. (see p.1)
d.    Section 2.2: close bracket.
√ Answer: Thank you. We corrected it.   
e.    Page 4: I think there is I mistake with numbering the list: a. Should not be part of the list and the formatting of the list should be the same. Also please use different words than steps, it is confusing for example here “In the second step, we analyzed only the posts according to the following steps”. I would prefer a numbered list because it is in a chronological order. However, then do not call the 3 main steps “steps”.
√ Answer: Following your comment, we better explained the analysis process. 
f.    A source for the reliability that coding 21% of the messages by 2 persons and the according agreements is sufficient.
√ Answer: We added a sentence and explained that each disagreement was discussed and resolved. (see p. 4) 
g.    There is an error with the table caption of Table 2 (I think the first should be deleted). Also, for better readability please position the table (and all the others) on one page each.
√ Answer: Following your comment, we decided to remove Table 1. Instead, we wrote a short paragraph that describes these results (see p.5). 
h.    Generally, Oxford comma is missing sometimes.
√ Answer: We corrected it.

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

Good structured article and easy to follow. Excellent evaluation of the theoretical framework.

The research topic is very current and relevant.

 Overall, the language used is very good.

Data analysis was done meticulously and clearly presented in the form of tables.

I encourage you to more fully illuminate your analysis process. 

Please add a new section with the “Conclusions” of your research. Conclusions should provide sufficient information that would allow a reader to actually understand the contribution of this research.

Author(s) need to mention ethical issues for their study. This is a very important issue especially in a forum. I propose to add the following reference in the 2.3 Procedure:

Petousi, V., & Sifaki, E. (2020). Contextualizing harm in the framework of research misconduct. Findings from discourse analysis of scientific publications, International Journal of Sustainable Development, 23(3/4), 149-174, DOI: 10.1504/IJSD.2020.10037655

 

I wish you the best of luck with the revision of your manuscript.

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Ref.: Manuscript ID: education-2496313

Title: Parent-preschooler writing on an internet forum as a potential platform for promoting respectful online discourse and Executive Functions

Dear Editors,
Thank you very much for the thorough review process. It helped us improve our manuscript. Below we copied the reviewers’ comments, and following each comment, we noted our response. As you will see, we considered every point and made our best efforts to take it into account. We hope you will now deem the revised manuscript suitable for publication in the special issue on Pedagogical Possibilities for Early Childhood Education in Education Sciences. 
Sincerely, 
The authors

Reviewer #3:
We thank the reviewer for reading our paper and the important issues they raised. We revised the manuscript and did our best to address them. We marked in green the significant changes that we introduced. We think that the paper is now improved.

Good structured article and easy to follow. Excellent evaluation of the theoretical framework. The research topic is very current and relevant. Overall, the language used is very good. Data analysis was done meticulously and clearly presented in the form of tables.
√ Answer: Thank you very much. 

Comment: I encourage you to more fully illuminate your analysis process.
√ Answer: In line with your comment, we rewrote our analysis process. (see p.4, 5)

Comment: Please add a new section with the “Conclusions” of your research. Conclusions should provide sufficient information that would allow a reader to actually understand the contribution of this research.
√ Answer: We added a conclusion section. (see p.11)

Comment: Author(s) need to mention ethical issues for their study. This is a very important issue especially in a forum. I propose to add the following reference in the 2.3 Procedure: Petousi, V., & Sifaki, E. (2020). Contextualizing harm in the framework of research misconduct. Findings from discourse analysis of scientific publications, International Journal of Sustainable Development, 23(3/4), 149-174, DOI: 10.1504/IJSD.2020.10037655
√ Answer: We elaborated on the ethics of the study. We read and added the recommended reference. (p.4)

 

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf