Improving Children’s E-Safety Skills through an Interactive Learning Environment: A Quasi-Experimental Study
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
This is an interesting study in an important emerging field of research. However, I have several concerns in regards to the paper, particularly in the introduction and discussion:
- The introduction contains a very large quote (line 34-43), it would be better to have this summarised and critically analysed.
- Lines 44-49 is poorly worded, I am not sure what the writer is meaning. This would benefit from being revised.
- In explaining the three major risks online (line 50) it would be helpful if these could be more clearly set out.
- Line 61 states that "the bully discloses personal information of the victim..." this is not always true of cyber bullying and should be clarified.
- Lines 81-94 - please summarise and analyse other papers rather than just repeating what is in them.
- Effectiveness is a difficult thing to measure, you should clarify further what you would expect to see in an effective result.
- Please provide a demographic breakdown for the control group.
- Were the control group also given immediate feedback on their pre test as the experimental group were?
- The questionnaire appears to be quite leading in the questions - all were positive statements, this should be discussed in the analysis of the results and consideration given as to what impact this may have had.
- From the interviews it is not clear how the researchers can be sure the children learned this information from using the system, please clarify how you made the ascertion.
- The discussion needs to be expanded on, rather than just being a statement of positive results there needs to be a discussion of weaknesses and how this relates to previous work in the area.
- There needs to be a conclusion.
Author Response
We would like to thank both Reviewers for their comments, which helped us in improving the paper. All of the reviewers’ comments have been addressed. Track changes were enabled in the revised version of the manuscript and a point-by-point response to all reviewers’ comments has been provided.
We sincerely hope that our work will meet your high standards and will be accepted for publication in your journal.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
This study was designed to evaluate the effectiveness and motivational capacity of an interactive web-based learning environment to improve children's e-safety skills. Authors describe very throroughly the variables analyzed, tests used to evaluate the intervention and learning environment. Did authors conduct some kind of evaluation also with the children's parents (interviews or similar) to understand if children were exposed already to e-safety learning or strategies? Working with children means also involving the closer family members and school educators since they tend to influence children's learning in such young stages. For future work, these variables could also be considered. Authors did a great job in describing the work and summarizing the contributions. The papers ends abruptly with the discussion, I would suggest separate conclusion, even if few sentences from the discussion section. Authors are encouraged to continue this work.
Author Response
We would like to thank both Reviewers for their comments, which helped us in improving the paper. All of the reviewers’ comments have been addressed. Track changes were enabled in the revised version of the manuscript and a point-by-point response to all reviewers’ comments has been provided.
We sincerely hope that our work will meet your high standards and will be accepted for publication in your journal.
Please see the attachment.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
