Girls in STEM: Addressing SDG 4 in Context
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
The publication submitted to me for review analyses issues that are currently significant and relevant. I make several observations that I think would improve the overall quality of the article.
My main observations would be as follows:
- The summary provides quite an extensive presentation of the project program but insufficiently presents the research methodology and the results presented in the publication itself. This needs to be revised without increasing the scope of the summary.
- The introduction must present the latest exploration of the problem selected for the analysis. As is known, this topic is quite widely analysed all over the world due to its relevance.
- Presenting research participants, it is not clear enough how research participants from the entire population were randomly selected. What is the size of the population and what determined that namely such number of students was selected to participate? A more thorough description of the sampling process of the study is needed.
- It is said that many research methodologies are employed in the study: surveys, interviews, and portfolios/artefacts, but the paper does not present them in detail. The descriptions of all studies and specific methodologies whose results are provided here must be consistently presented. The methods used for analysing results must be indicated too.
- A lot of space in the publication is devoted to the presentation of the project, but is it really necessary to provide such a long description with photos in the research paper? I would recommend leaving essential information that is directly related to the research results and their analysis as well as to the problem questions raised.
- The paper must include a substantiation of ensuring that ethical principles of research are followed. The ethical aspects (consents and the like) of using photographs and the people seen in them must be provided.
- In the part of Discussion it is necessary to better highlight the obtained results, integrate and discuss them by comparing with the results of the already conducted studies.
Author Response
As per attached document. The authors thank the reviewer for helpful commnets.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors address the important and topical issue of research on the development of STEM education and specifically its increase in female students. However, the manuscript presents aspects that should be considered for the improvement of the work:
Authors should carefully review the Sustainability journal guidelines and develop the work in accordance with them. The aspects to be reviewed are the citations in the body of the text, the presentation of tables and figures and the citations in the bibliographical references section.
A scientific article has to follow a scientific structure and this is based on a correct presentation of the hypotheses or research questions, which the authors present are too general and therefore difficult to test. Therefore, they should be reformulated.
If the questions are not well formulated, the whole development of the work should be reconsidered. A scientific article must have the following sections in the method subsection: participants (description of the sample disaggregated by gender), instruments (clearly describe the instruments used to carry out the study, as well as their reliability and validity, and the instruments themselves so that the study can be replicated), procedure (clearly describe the development of the research), data analysis (this section should describe the statistical or other tests that will contrast the hypotheses or research questions posed). Then, in the results section, the findings should be clearly described with respect to the questions or hypotheses posed in terms of the contrast tests. Subsequently, the conclusions section should relate the studies presented in the introduction with the results found and see whether they are in line or not, if not, possible explanations should be given. And finally, the discussion section should include the study's observations and future lines of research.
Author Response
As per attached document. The authors thank the reviewer for insightful feedback.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
- In the section of the introduction, I suggest the author could provide some information about why to select this issue to study and refer to the importance of this research.
- In the section on the theoretical perspectives, I cannot find some useful information to approve the author’s reasonable statements. I suggest the author could provide some learning theory or social theory to support STEM education for girls.
- In the section of the research methodology, I suggest the author could provide some information to explain the theoretical or practical foundations of the GALS project and the critical evaluations of studying data.
- In the section of the results, I suggest the author could follow the theoretical logic or arguments to reorganize the results to support research analysis.
- Finally, I suggest the author should distinguish the relationships among STEM, SDG 4, and industry-education partnerships, and focus on one issue to be the core of this study and related arguments.
Author Response
As per attached document. The authors want to thank the reviewer for insightful comments.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
The article has been corrected based on the provided comments. It is not clear to me how the data were analyzed. What data analysis methods were used. I suggest presenting only those methods whose results are presented in the article.
Author Response
Many thanks for the reviewer's efforts - much appreciated.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
First of all, I would like to appreciate the effort made by the authors to improve the introduction to the project and increase the number of bibliographic references. However, there is still room for improvement in the method section. From a scientific perspective, this section should be divided into participants, instruments, procedure, design and data analysis. This aspect was already pointed out in the previous review and is still not addressed. On the other hand, the objectives are too general and therefore not measurable. I recommend restructuring them into hypotheses or research questions that can be contrasted. On the other hand, as I recommended in the first review, the authors should follow the norms of the journal https://www.mdpi.com/journal/sustainability/instructions for Tables and Figures, these are not adequately elaborated according to these norms and neither are the legends. Likewise, I recommended in the first review that the journal's template should be followed with respect to the following sections: Supplementary Materials, Author Contributions, Funding, Institutional Review Board Statement, Informed Consent Statement, Data Availability Statement, Conflicts of Interest. It is especially important to address the issue of informed consent and the positive report of the Ethics Committee of the institution for the elaboration of the research. On the other hand, the references have not been corrected either, they are not cited according to the standards of the journal neither in the references section nor in the body of the text.
Author Response
Thank you to the reviewer for comments and the secondary review.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 3 Report
This manuscript has been revised well in response to my suggestions, so I recommend publishing it in the present form.
Author Response
Many thanks to the reviewer.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 3
Reviewer 2 Report
The authors have considered all the suggestions made in the first revision. Although there are some aspects that still need to be improved, such as the tables, for example, Table 3. Also, they should review the way the table legends are placed, as they are still not correct.
Author Response
Reviewer Comment:
The authors have considered all the suggestions made in the first revision. Although there are some aspects that still need to be improved, such as the tables, for example, Table 3. Also, they should review the way the table legends are placed, as they are still not correct.
Response - All tables in the paper have now been configured in a similar manner to an example paper. Table 3 - I have included the full table which includes the Likert scale items. I think this is what the reviewer was requesting but if not, further detail is required.
