Investigating Student-Generated Questioning in a Technology-Enabled Elementary Science Classroom: A Case Study

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The topic is very interesting and important in the field of educational technology. Overall , the paper is well structured and written.

I have below comments:

1.      Line 111-119 may be moved to the section of Introduction as one of the reasons or background information on why you conducted this study.

2.      In P 146, can the author provide more details about the unique features of e SMILE platform? And how does it facilitate students to generate questions?

3.      Can the author describe Pre-/post-tests on conceptual understanding of heat in the instrument section?

4.      Can the author describe interview questions in the instrument section?

5.      In the section on data analysis, you may also introduce how to analyze test results and interview responses.

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Please review and attend to writing style errors such as below:

Abstract:

The authors may want to be specific right away regarding what the problem the paper aims to provide solutions for. Saying “This study is aimed at providing solutions to problems in the field of science and technology education as well as approaches to improve its effectiveness” is very broad. Actually, this sentence can be deleted.

 “Considering the academic literature and the 8 scholars' areas of interest.” – This sentence sounds incomplete and can also be deleted.

“positive causal relationship between students’ generated questioning to and student cognitive

performances,” -  this must be a typo. Please correct so the sentence flows better.

Introduction

p.2 line 70-71   The role of student-generated questions is central to students’ active participation in the learning process students actively construct knowledge of concepts and processes through these experiences – rewrite for clarity

p.2 line 79-80   The interactive nature of technology that can help rid of the passivity of the traditional didactic learning model, where students are taught by a direct transmission of knowledge. – awkward sentence

Results: please make sure students’ quoted statements are properly indented as a quotation and cited.

I am curious what the teacher does after seeing all the student questions in SMILE? For all the RQs, what is the evidence of student and teacher learning? How does the teacher know that students are actually learning through the questions posted in SMILE? How do the teachers adjust their teaching in reviewing the student questions? Some of these questions can potentially be supported with the kind of investigation the study conducted. However, the selected qualitative elaborations to support the quantitative results were not very convincing. If there are no quality responses in terms of participant experiences, I invite the authors to examine the data and discuss the reasons. 

Discussion: “Teachers regularly used SMILE to pose questions that required all students to answer”. And then, “The teachers' questions functioned as models for students to pose similar ones for their peers to answer, thereby reinforcing conceptual understanding through more practice”.  To clarify if the students “answers” in the first statement is actually in question form. In other words, the teacher pose model questions and students answer by posing their own questions for peers to respond to?

“there was no evidence that these questions led to students conducting their own investigations or influencing the direction of the teacher-led demonstration”.

“students’ questions were narrowly confined to questions that resembled exam questions, instead of reflecting their own curious nature”.

“The missing part in questioning was the level of questions, as the most of students were found asking the exam-related or teacher-guided questions”.

“tension between encouraging divergent questions, which explore new possibilities that drives discussion, and convergent questions, which focuses on clarifying one's thinking to arrive at "correct" explanations”.

These are very interesting implications that perhaps can be investigated to answer my questions above. I believe it would be helpful to point out in the results section the kinds of quality in the responses that were coded for and include qualifying statements to what degree the results presented actually met the coding targeted for the data. The coding process can also be elaborated under Methodology.

There are several sources cited in the Discussion section (e.g., Bloom’s taxonomy) that was not found anywhere in the expanded Introduction/Literature review section. While the authors may find the reference is only relevant in certain parts of the discussion, the main ideas should be part of the conceptual framework for the study as it extends the analysis and interpretation of the data.

 

Implications: “we would study how to gradually shift the balance towards divergent questions”. This is something that would indeed be very valuable in terms of research and intervention. I encourage the authors to pursue this inquiry. 

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf