GIReSiMCo: A Learning Model to Scaffold Students’ Science Process Skills and Biology Cognitive Learning Outcomes
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Dear Authors,
Thank you very much for the opportunity to review your manuscript on "The New Guided Inquiry Model to Scaffold Students Science 2 Process Skills and Biology Cognitive Learning Outcomes ". I added some specific comments to the sections of your manuscript below.
Overall, I think your manuscript can be considered for publication if you can conduct major revisions as suggested in my comments below. My main concerns are: As you are suggesting a new model about inquiry-based learning, you should refer more extensively to state-of-the-art papers on inquiry-based learning and make clear what similarities and differences exist between already proposed models and your new model. Based on your questions provided in Appendix 1, I doubt that you were assessing and evaluating science process skills. Please more explicitly define the concept of science process skills in your study and make clear how the questions are able to assess them. Finally, I recommend sending your manuscript to a professional language editing service before submitting the revision.
I am looking forward to read your revised manuscript again.
Specific comments:
Section 1.1
It is not clear what SPS means, please add an explicit definition. Does it refer to science process skills? Then, it should be plural, not singular. It seems to be similar to established terms like "scientific reasoning". I suggest making similarities and differences to such terms explicit; you might wish to look at the recently published special issue on scientific reasoning in this journal: https://www.mdpi.com/journal/education/special_issues/Scientific_Reasoning_Science_Education
"Through a routine and gradual training process [...]". I don't understand this. From my point of view, scienctific discovery is not a routine procedure and it might be not very fruitful to foster SPS in a routine training process.
Lines 52-53: You write "in another study" but report several studies.
Section 1.2
As your section 1.1 is already rather long, I suggest merging 1.1 and 1.2 and restructure your manuscript as follows: one section on "science process skills"; one section on "inquiry based-learning"; one section on your new "GIReSiMCo" model. The first two sections would need stronger references to internationally highly-references articles. At the moment, it seems that you refer to Turkish/ Asian publications a lot.
In the section on "science process skills", I suggest to provide a clear definition of SPS and to make relationships (similarities/ differences) between SPS and other constructs (such as scientific reasoning) explicit.
In the section on "inquiry based-learning" you should make clear why this kind of learning is appropriate for fostering SPS but - on the other hand - which limitations can be found in recent approaches. Ideally, these limitations could directly lead to your proposal of a new model for inquiry-based learning, which will be introduced in the subsequent section.
In the section on your new "GIReSiMCo" model, you should make more explicit which elements are new. I strongly suggest referring to more papers about inquiry-based learning and, for example, creating a table with the main steps proposed in inquiry-based learning in the different papers. Such a table could be used to highlight the elements in your model better.
Section 2.1
As you have to control groups with the guided inquiry learning model and the RMS model, you should explain both models in the theoretical background of your study a little bit more. It would also help clarify what the "conventional learning model" is. (I recognized that such a description is provided later in the manuscript. I suggest placing it earlier in the text.)
Section 2.2
Please make clear what do you mean by "academic abilities."
Section 2.3
Please make the indicators in table 3 clearer. The descriptions are still vague. I also do not understand how you evaluated the validity of your questions. What are the nine questions you are referring to? What is the rationale behind your method for testing validity? Why correlation?
Section 3.1
Please reduce the number of provided decimal places to three or two throughout your manuscript.
There is no need to provide a table with tests of normality and homogeneity. It is enough to report on these tests and their results briefly.
Line 287: if I understand correctly, Table 6 shows an effect of the type of model, not that there is an effect of the GIReSiMCo learning model. You should add posthoc tests to see the differences between the four models.
Please explain what LSD notation in Table 7 means. This is not clear. Generally, you should explain your statistical findings more clearly to help the reader understand your findings (e.g., what does "critically corrected" in Table 7 mean?). You provide such an explanation for Table 10 but not for the other Tables/ findings.
Appendix 1
I do not see that your questions address something like science process skills (maybe because I missed a clear definition of these skills). From my point of view, most questions need science content knowledge to be answered correctly. (For example, question 1 requires students to know the differences between prokaryotic and eukaryotic cells, question 2 requires students to know about plant and animal cells.)
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
See attached file
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
The proposal you present in this paper is interesting and relevance to the field of science education, as it is a good model to improve the development of science skills and science teaching. However, there are some aspects that can be interesting to comment in order to improve this manuscript.
Comments for author File: Comments.pdf
Author Response
Please see the attachment
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
