Effects of Design-Based Learning Arrangements in Cross-Domain, Integrated STEM Lessons on the Intrinsic Motivation of Lower Secondary Pupils

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The authors present a study on the role of design-based learning to tackle the problem of low motivation for STEM subjects in high-school students. Their work emphasizes the interdisciplinary and cross-domain value in teaching these disciplines, distinguishing themselves from other works in literature, particularly focusing in the link between biology and engineering. They present data from three distinct didactic paths that they compare. The collected data, that is subject to a sound statistical analysis and with a substantial number of students, supports the validity of their approach. In particular, they find substantial improvement in motivation comparing traditional lessons and any of their proposed interventions and they claim to find particular success within the “Design” approach. They also analyze important factors such as gender, age or initial motivation confronting the different approaches.

 

I find the manuscript well-written, organized and relevant for this journal. As a result, I recommend it for publication once the following minor comments and questions have been addressed:

• The authors mention briefly the role of both practical experiences (as their product design with DBL) and also the use of digital media in the introduction. In this direction, I believe that the introduction could benefit from also discussing the potential use of immersive/interactive experiences which could complement their approach, e.g. with recently developed tools in gamification or with the use of virtual/augmented reality scenarios. These have also been reported to boost engagement and interest from high school students in STEM. Relevant examples in e.g. physics education can be found here (https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-37387-9) but certainly references more relevant to biology/engineering could be included instead. 

• Regarding the statement in line 385-386: “Concerning the intervention attended, the results are congruent with the calculated ANOVA, as attendance at one of the two alternative interventions (Biology or Reconstruction) leads to significantly lower intrinsic motivation.”  Given that the “Design” group had a substantial higher mean initial motivation (see Table 3), I do not think that the presented results can confirm this statement. I recommend the authors to rephrase it.

• Have the authors analyzed other learning outcomes of the different interventions beyond motivation? This could be essential as one could argue that, e.g. the “Biology group” is presented with a task that requires further instruction and substantially less design openness, but could potentially lead to a better conceptualization of the underlaying models at play. As a result, there could be a case for the design of didactic paths that address the same problems through the different interventions iteratively with the same group.

• Along the lines of my previous comment, it is true that motivation was found larger in the “Design” group, possibly as the task was the least traditional lesson-like, more open and lighter in instruction, also ignoring the fact that their initial mean motivation was higher. However, I find important to include a statement that reminds the reader that this is only assessing motivation and a proper assessment would require analyzing as well the effectiveness in learning from each one of this methods and a further confrontation with the traditional approach.

There are a few small typos, e.g. missing closing parenthesis in line 298.

Author Response

We hope that the revision made could contribute to further clarification and look forward to hearing from you.

Please see the attachment.

Yours sincerely

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

Dear authors, congratulations on the study! It is a topical issue and the variety of interventions is a plus for the research. However, I would have liked the conclusions to be more detailed with specific ways of possible future uses of the results and more links to how the results are connected to specialty literature.

Author Response

We hope that the revision made could contribute to further clarification and look forward to hearing from you.

Please see the attachment.

Yours sincerely

Authors

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf