An Extensive Questionnaire about Metacognition during Emergency Remote Teaching Involving More Than 3000 Engineering Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The authors surveyed over 3000 engineering students in Italy for their experiences and perceptions with online learning-teaching during the COVID lockdown and after. The survey covered 5 areas, including metacognition and self-efficacy, the two areas where the authors spent the most time and did the most analysis.

Overall, this was an interesting piece of research, and definitely timely given the ongoing impacts of the pandemic and the debates over how the "pivot" to online learning affected students.

The authors laid out a clear set of research questions and a detailed methodology that aligned well with the area of study. The presentation of the findings was clear, and the discussion and conclusions seemed to align with the findings.

There are a few ways in which this paper could be improved. 

First, there is no real literature review. The authors only refer briefly to other research done on online learning. However, there is an abundance of such literature, both directly related to the pandemic pivot and more general. I think it would strengthen the paper and add more context if the authors provided a little more of a literature review and indicated how their study fits into the larger conversation.

In most places in the paper, the authors say the questionnaire was made up of 70 questions, but on page 2, line 95, they state that it was 66 questions. That should be clarified.

When reporting the findings, the authors generally provide an overview of the responses to the questions without offering any specifics about the question wording. I know that the final version of the paper will include the survey as an appendix, but even with that readers will have to constantly scroll back and forth to really understand what the results mean. I think it would help to provide a little more detail about the questions so that the overview of responses make a little more sense. This was done at the end of section 3.1 where the authors explained what the questions asked, but even in that section it could use a little more detail. 

The discussion and conclusion sections is quite short, and doesn't really seem to explore the implications of the findings. The authors do compare the findings briefly to other literature and speculate as to why students might have had positive views of online learning, but I would like to see them delve deeper and think about what it might mean for pedagogy and online teaching and learning that they saw an increase in metacognition, especially since that result was surprising.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Reviewer 2 Report

This study analyses engineering students' perception of several factors, including well-being and metacognition, pre- and post- emergency remote teaching at the Politecnico University in Italy; the main finding of the article is that students report an improved efficacy of their learning strategies, while highlighting the difficulties of remote teaching, especially concerning reduced interaction with peers.

Given the scope of the survey and the numerosity of the sample, the study should include at least some indications concerning:

- possible gender differences. It is well-stated in the literature for ERT that, for examples, males tend to report lower levels of stress, while females are more exposed to developing negative health consequences (see, for instance, Elmer et al., 2020 and Lischer, Safi, and Dixon 2021)

- Consistency of the sample. In the article it is stated that the survey was administered to all students (from first to fifth year); however, it is reasonable to expect differences between these groups, as first-year students were not enrolled during 2019-2020; furthermore, it would be interesting to check differences between bachelor students and master students, especially concerning self-study strategies and perceived effectiveness.

Furthermore, in the conclusion it is stated that the results on improved meta-cognition during the pandemic are in contrast with similar studies; given that this is th most important outcome of the study, the implications and possible explanations should be discussed in more detail (at the current state, the discussion is limited to citing a single reference that does not address the pandemic situation).

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx