Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The research is very interesting as it discusses the important role of education for sustainable development. This fits well on the special issue of the Sustainability journal on "Education and Sustainable Development". 

Below are some comments/suggestions that could make this research more appealing to a broader discipline of readers:

1. The methods and implications of the study have already been done/discussed in previous studies. The authors must highlight the academic contribution of their study in relation to the existing literature.

2. Aside from being part of the AustrIndia-4QOL project, what is the relevance of using the case of students from Austria and India in analyzing the effect of research-education-collaboration in the context of education for sustainable development? What is the relevance of these two countries and not use other countries as cases?

3. The study examined the effect of collaboration with face-to-face (F2F) and social media (SMG) on the awareness on the importance of environmental aspect of QOL and willingness to act on more sustainable lifestyles. This only covers one of the different learning styles of students. How can you account to individual learning styles in relation to your expected changes in behavior? (Will the results differ if the sample respondents are active/passive learners, visual/auditory/physical/social learners, dependent/independent/collaborative/competitive/participative learners, ...?)

4. For the pre- and post- test questions about QOL, "7 items" for the first part (line #298) and "9 items" for the second part (line #299) were mentioned. Then they were mentioned partly on the Results section 4.2 as eight suggested specific measures. These numbers are different from the items listed in the Supplementary material. The authors can briefly describe what these "items" are in one or two sentences and fix the numbering issue.

5. The result of item #A7 (three most important global challenges) from the Supplementary file is NOT presented in the Results section. Either remove this item or discuss it in the results.

6. Explain how possible "bias" on the result is omitted from the following methodology:

(a) The assumption on the validity of using small sample size, considering the results from different groups with clear and homogeneous picture, is questionable. The authors can describe how "'sampling" was done (random, purposive, ...).

(b) It is understandable that the face-to-face group from India had only 10 students due to resource constraints. How did you assigned the respondents into groups (control, SMG, F2F) and account for possible bias from this distribution?

(c) The respondents on the post-test were only AT: 32.84% and IN: 45.47% of the pre-test. How will you explain the possible bias of the result from this difference.

7. The results mention several ρ and p-values which are not found on the tables. The result of statistical analyses (p-values, Spearman's ρ) should be added in the supplementary material and referred in the text or add in the tables. 

8. In section 4.2.1, the numbers reported are percentages of the students in a group while the numbers on Table 2 are percentage of the maximum value. These two are confusing! Either add another table for this (percentage of students) or explain the values estimated on the table.

9. Other than: "... an increased awareness and willingness to act can be seen as the first step... findings confirm that ESD can only succeed as a long-term project" (line #516), the authors can add an important message that readers may learn from their research such as policy recommendation. This makes the paper more relevant to sustainability and climate change policy.   

10. The authors can discuss the major limitations of the study and add recommendations for future research.

11. Unless this is a review article, the reference list of 86 is quite a lot for an original research article. Almost 28% of the references are 10 years and older with 5 references more than 20 years. As most of these are not crucial in developing the theoretical basis of the research, the authors can reduce the list and/or cite recent literature on this study.

12. Incomplete citation for reference #83 (line#753).

 

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Thank you for the opportunity to read your manuscript.

Some comments/suggestions:

please explain Ln 39-40: "followed a moderate-constructivist understanding of learning"; I found a very clear justification of the research question even for an international public; The discussion is not too long but is pertinent; Excellent conclusion.

- The scientific object (international relation for a better SD education) is very actual; - The readability of the text seems good; - for example in line 20, the Authors demonstrate a deep conscience about the difficulties with this type of collaboration; - in keywords I suggest the word " SD teenager education" or something like that; - please explain LN 31-34; I don't understand the "moderate constructivism" mobilized in this research; - Good methods and results presentations (for ex. LN); The discussion is not too long but is pertinent; Excellent conclusion.I suggest an improvement of the "Discussion", with more mobilization of the literature to explain/justify the results (Ln 439-489).

Author Response

Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf