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Article
Peer-Review Record

Exploring the Predictors of Teacher Well-Being: An Analysis of Teacher Training Preparedness, Autonomy, and Workload

Sustainability 2023, 15(7), 5804; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15075804
by Hui-Ling Wendy Pan 1,*, Chih-Hung Chung 2 and Yi-Chun Lin 3
Reviewer 1:
Reviewer 2: Anonymous
Reviewer 3: Anonymous
Sustainability 2023, 15(7), 5804; https://doi.org/10.3390/su15075804
Submission received: 12 February 2023 / Revised: 13 March 2023 / Accepted: 22 March 2023 / Published: 27 March 2023

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Introduction:
I strongly feel that there is a need to explore a strong justification to conduct this study, which can be seen as a contribution.
It does not bring adequate reasoning to defend the need of this manuscript.

Literature review:
The hypotheses flow from the literature review. However, further relevant literature support is required for the hypotheses development.

Theoretical and practical implications:
The proposed theoretical contributions and practical implications appear to be weak. It should be strengthened. The implications are supposed to tell us what the sector can learn from the research and how they can use it.

Overall, I strongly feel that this study should incorporate more rigor to bring in the required relevance and contribution.

Limitations and directions for future research:
This section needs further exploration.

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors,

Thank you for submitting this manuscript. The topic of the paper is interesting. It invites readers to become curios to find out not only about the determinants of the teacher well-being, but also to better understand the Taiwan educational context.  Nevertheless, the paper is a scientific article, and several suggestions are relevant for its improvement.

 

Lines 4-15: The Abstract does provide a pertinent overview of the work. The abstract relates to the title, and specifies the main objective of the research. The abstract must place the question addressed in a broad context and highlight the purpose of the study. The abstract is  a clear and objective representation of the article.

Suggestion: Please reconsider the “Using data from the TALIS 2018 survey”.. Using data might be understood as not collecting any new data at all, but using those from TALIS 2018. Later on, the questionnaire seems to be re-applied to a new sample. May it is just using the survey and not the data?

 

Lines 152-194: The teacher workload is explained according to the literature review. However, in line 188, teacher workload appears as teacher workload and student behavior workload, but these two concepts are mentioned just in brackets. In 2.3. section is teacher workload well explained, but the student behavior workload just mentioned. This is as important as the teacher workload, being considered in the proposed model.

Suggestions: Please redefine 2.3. by also considering the student behavior workload and explain it with clear form of measuring it based on the literature review.

 

The authors paid attention to the quality of the presentation. The description of the analysis and the results can be clearer exposed. TALIS 2018 is explained as if this was the authors contribution in the paper and that the sample was 6441. Before explaining that the sample of the current study consisted of 3835 teachers in Taiwan, author/authors should mention that TALIS 2018 is a survey/questionnaire applied for new respondents. Otherwise, it is a confusion of two samples, both for Taiwan.

Suggestions: Please reconsider the explanations regarding the sample of 6441 participants in TALIS 2018 and the current sample of 3835 teachers. Explain the sampling method that was used and how were the responses collected and when. Which was the responses rate in the current study? If data were not collected and the data of TALIS 2018 were used, then, they would be too old data for a current study.

 

Section 2: There are the research questions presented, in the paper, but not the hypothesis defined, although relationships between variables and in the conclusion part, including the mediator role of variables.

Suggestion: Please, define the hypothesis in section 2 after each concept is described.

 

Regarding the scientific soundness some recommendations should be considered.

Line 195: The conceptual framework proposes a model which is not clear if this was an existed model in the literature and it was pretested by other authors or it is a new model of the current study. If this is a new model, how was it tested? If this is an original model, clarify this in the text and add at the title of the figure that it is the author’s contribution.

Suggestion: Please, add in the text the clarification on the methodology and in the diagram of the conceptual framework that this is the authors’ contribution. Ple

 

Lines 229-230: Authors used the two-step structural equation model. There is no explanation on why this methodology was the right one to be considered.

Suggestions: Please, explain why the methodology was used, would be the right one.

 

Conclusion section. This section is clear and well done. Limitations are exposed. Future research ideas are missing.

Suggestion: Please, add some future research directions.

Some English editing and major Journal editing rules are also important to be revised.

 

References in the text and in the list at the end of the manuscript do not follow the instructions of the journal.

Suggestion: Please check the: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions.

 

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

 Thank you for this paper which covers a very important topic.

I would like to see some major revisions.

 

Detailed comments

 

25. We need a more recent paper about this. 

 

44 to 45. I think you need to justify more clearly why the single variable teacher preparedness was used as an indicator of personal resources and a single variable teacher autonomy was used as an indicator of job resources.

 

111. It’s still not clear to me, why the article just uses those two indicators. 

 

129 -138 leads me to confirm my view that one variable doesn’t summarise teacher preparedness 

 

239-245 This paragraph need to be rewritten so that it matches more closely to Table 2. C.R. and CR should be included in the text, AVE seems to be in the wrong place. Unstandardised loadings etc should be given the names from the headings in the Table The  table should show more clearly that there are only three indices evaluating the convergent validity, not 4 which it seems as present.

 

339 to 341.You say that the preparedness was assessed in various areas including content and pedagogical knowledge, subject teaching managing classroom and monitoring student learning. It’s not clear how this relates with the measures that you actually used in the study. 

 

348. It’s not clear how the statement previous is consistent with the findings of the study. Please elaborate.

 

375. You need to explain previously that your study measured teacher workload in terms of preparation, teaching and marking. 

 

377. You say your study, used to teach responsibility for student achievement to measure student behaviour workload. Where do you say this previously? 

 

387. Are you sure that your findings indicate teacher preparedness has a great impact on well-being compared with teacher autonomy. Please elaborate.

 

 

413. Your study relied on a single indicator for personal and job resources, but this is not evident in the discussion. 

 

 

 

Minor edits

63. Put both before affects. 

90 - 91. Put the authors in name order. 

103. delete 2011 

115. Replace becoming with gaining 

121 - 122. Delete repeated text. 

144. clarify throughout that you’re talking about perceived teacher autonomy

166. Add an S to increase (increases)

191 -192 Clarify that this an hypotheses 

353. Explain where you get the measure of high perceptions of autonomy in your data. 

382.You need evidence for this statement. 

396. Could it be that the other authors use different measures of autonomy? 

 

 

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Please see the attached file.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

I congratulate the authors on their resubmission.

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