Examining the Effectiveness of Computer-Supported Collaborative Learning for Language Proficiency Purposes

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The scholars concluded the article with this admission (limit of number of learners and typology)

"Our study has its limitations. The study was conducted only in Russia, cultural differences may influence the results of students in other countries. In addition, the study included only the students specializing in humanities"

In any case most of researches conducted during pandemic period (also about teaching learning) have not a large number of participant.

Author Response

Thank you for your comment and approval!

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

I find the study interesting and relevant. I wholeheartedly recommend it on the condition that he following comments are considered and implemented:

1) It is not clear what you mean by six groups - was these three groups in one semester, and three groups in another, and were these the same students in these groups; in other words, was it actually three groups across two semesters or each semester you had different students?

2) The second paragraph in the introduction seems more fitting for the methods section.

3) You mention undergraduate students, but it is not clear what year they are.

4) Your 3rd research question about the effectiveness of CSCL cannot be answered with this research. No conclusion can be drawn from your study regarding the effectiveness, as your primary aim was to examine how group-forming influences scores. You should remove any reference in your abstract, discussion, conclusion to proving the effectiveness of CSCL.

5) It is not clear how you tested academic performance and how this is different from how you tested English proficiency (50-item test).

6) One of my main concerns is that you haven't showed how students actually collaborated, which is the central idea of your paper. Apart from listing applications, you did not provide an example of what kind of teamwork was involved in these applications. How can you prove it was team instead of individual effort?

7) It is important to be transparent regarding the number of students per group, especially in statistical analysis, as this might call for different statistical procedures if the number of students was not equal or it was generally too small.

8) Connected to 4), you state "According to the results on academic outcomes students improved their English proficiency in all groups, which confirms the efficiency of computer-supported collaborative learning approach for English learning purposes." It does not. This is overinterpretation.

9) Limitation of study needs to be expanded to include things such as sample size.

To conclude, you have written a very interesting paper on a relevant topic and have done a great job with the theoretical background and the presentation of the results, but these issues above need to be resolved to make the paper better. 

Author Response

Thank you for your comments. Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 3 Report

Dear authors,

The topic of your article is interesting and actual. Unfortunately, it is not clearly presented.

Please find below my suggestions:

you say 3 majors research questions, but you state 4

the last 2 RQ are not clearly stated in the results

you should attach the questionnaires,

how have you validated the questionnaires?

how do your findings contribute to previous studies? You haven’t linked them to any other results.

what other studies have appeared on this particular aspect you have investigated?

proofread the article carefully. it has many repetitions, e.g. this, curricula appear in 3 sentences in a row

Author Response

Thank you for your comments! Please see the attachment.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 3 Report

Well done!