Portuguese Teachers’ Perceptions of Girl-Friendly Strategies in Physics Education: What Are the Challenges?
Round 1
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for Authors
The paper is interesting but shows a deficit in the clarity and rigor:
Introduction: the information is repeated in several parts and the absence of structure makes difficult to see which is the theoretical framework in which authors settle the research. Order paragraphs in such a way that can lean the reader to the objectives and the variables defined in Method section.
Method and results: the quality is not enough for a journal in Q2. The calculations are reasonable, but the way they are expressed and presented is not for a quality journal.
Discussion and conclusion: not enough quality
Authors must learn how to write a research paper because this one does not reach the minimum requirements to be named like that.
Comments on the Quality of English LanguageThe paper is interesting but shows a deficit in the clarity and rigor:
Introduction: the information is repeated in several parts and the absence of structure makes difficult to see which is the theoretical framework in which authors settle the research. Order paragraphs in such a way that can lean the reader to the objectives and the variables defined in Method section.
Method and results: the quality is not enough for a journal in Q2. The calculations are reasonable, but the way they are expressed and presented is not for a quality journal.
Discussion and conclusion: not enough quality
Authors must learn how to write a research paper because this one does not reach the minimum requirements to be named like that.
Author Response
Please see attached document.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.pdf
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThis manuscript is an exploratory analysis of Portuguese secondary school physics teachers’ perceptions about gender equality in the classroom. It should not be published without significant revision.
Section 1 Introduction
The context for the research is portrayed nicely. The roles of teachers and pedagogy are appropriately highlighted. As I read it, one topic seemed a bit weaker: the definition of, and motivation for, girl-friendly strategies (lines 86ff). Interestingly, the interpretation of girl-friendly strategies was also a point of some ambiguity or confusion among the teachers, although perhaps for different reasons.
Figure 1 was confusing to me and deserves further explanation. How was this choice of topics arrived at? The linguistic element is particularly surprising, with the suggestion that “Girls' tendency to use everyday language for a longer period compared to boys, who more rapidly adopt the technical terminology of Physics, often results in unintended penalties from their teachers.” Is there evidence of this in Portugal? It appears not to have been investigated further in the manuscript. Further, the addition of “competitive learning environment[s]” due to boys is not related to language but rather to gender schemas, which belongs under “relationship with female students” and not “language.”
I was also confused by the meaning of the “STEM approach.” This appears to be based entirely on the work of Dare (2015). There are many other similar but more well-known approaches that weren’t referenced, for example McDermott’s Physics by Inquiry, Etkina’s Investigative Science Learning Environment (ISLE), Hestenes’ Modeling Instruction, and others used in many pre-college classrooms (see https://www.physport.org/). All of these, including the STEM approach, are curricular in nature, so I didn’t understand why Curriculum and STEM were separated in Figure 1.
The discussion of teacher attitudes in the introduction was very good. The article by Sáinz et al. provides good motivation for, and potential comparison with, the current manuscript. Another relevant paper that could have been cited is Stephenson et al., 2021, https://doi.org/10.1007/s10643-021-01262-6.
One suggestion I have for improvement is to reference the work of Hazari et al. in creating and assessing the STEP-UP project, whose focus is to increase the persistence of girls studying physics. See Sabouri et al., 2022, https://doi.org/10.1119/5.0056835 and Potvin et al., 2023, https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevPhysEducRes.19.010126.
The research questions should be in a separate paragraph, rather than being at the end of a paragraph about nonbinary gender (lines 196-204).
Section 2 Materials and Methods
This section is generally satisfactory. It was surprising to me that only 6 male physics teachers participated in the survey, or 11%. Among all chemistry/physics teachers at the secondary level, what is the percentage of men? Are they underrepresented in your sample? This begs the question of sample selection bias. The snowball sampling method is appropriate, but the experimental design could have better sought ways to either identify selection bias or choose analyses that are less sensitive to it than the quantitative methods used here. In particular, it’s unrealistic to say anything about gender differences among teachers when there are only 6 men in the sample. Of course this cannot be corrected post hoc, but the limitations of the approach should be acknowledged.
The survey item “I consciously implement classroom strategies to encourage greater participation of girls in Physics classes” is problematic because there is no agreed-upon definition of such strategies, and this appears to have led to confusion by some respondents. Instead of measuring the adoption of research-based methods by teachers (for which, see Sabouri et al., 2022, and Girls in the Physics Classroom: A Teacher’s Guide for Action, IOP Press, 2006, https://www.iop.org/sites/default/files/2019-06/Girls-in-the-physics-classroom-a-teachers-guide-for-action_1.pdf), it more likely measures teacher intentions and attitudes, similarly to the other two Likert-scale items. These are likely strongly correlated, which makes their use as dependent variables suspect.
Section 3 Results
This section has many errors and ambiguities that must be corrected before publication.
Table 3 has an error in Lower Secondary Education; 19 should be 18.
With only 54 respondents, it is inappropriate to use 3 or 4 significant figures in reporting results in Table 3 and Figures 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 and line 417.
Lines 336-339 are exactly the same as lines 343-347. The authors made a cut and paste error and failed to describe Figure 2 in the text.
Figure 2 contains an error in the wording “Boys participate much more than boys.”
The description of Figure 2 should note that, aside from 2 respondents who felt that boys participate much more than girls, respondents are exactly evenly divided on who participates more. This is a significant finding not mentioned in the text.
Lines 343-346 seem to highlight the wrong conclusion (see also lines 413-414). A minority of respondents feel that girls’ participation has remained constant. More respondents (48% vs 44%) feel that girls have been more participative in Physics classes.
Together, these results have a clear implication not sufficiently stressed in the conclusions: on the whole, the teachers believe that boys and girls participate about the same amount and that the participation of girls has remained the same or increased. In other words, the teachers collectively see no participation gender gap in their classrooms.
Figure 4 and its discussion (lines 351-352) beg the questions, “Do the essential learning guidelines reflect the interests of girls? Do they make girls more motivated?” Based on lines 133-136, the answer would seem to be “No”, however the authors do not say what the AE is or how it is related to textbooks. This should be corrected.
The Figure 5 caption is incorrect.
Lines 371-372 should explain in what sense gender and education level predict “interest in the topic.” Do women teachers have more interest in the topic than men? (Table 9 suggests No!) Do upper level teachers have more interest in the topic than lower level teachers?
Given the small sample size, it’s unsurprising that the quantitative results show little statistical significance. In such exploratory research, it is preferable to highlight qualitative results. Although the authors did not interview the teachers (which would be a good idea for a follow-up study, if they have contact information), they do have responses to open-ended questions. To this reviewer, these are the strongest results in the entire manuscript and could be highlighted by having a new section (or subsection) heading before line 389.
Table 6 should have horizontal lines separating each of the categories, as it is difficult to tell which Excerpts are assigned to which Categories without them.
Table 9 is not a correlation matrix, as that term is used in English. It is merely a table of frequencies by gender. Line 400 also uses this faulty terminology. A correlation matrix is a normalized covariance matrix, something the authors do not compute.
Discussion of Tables 8 and 9 seems restricted to two sentences (lines 401-403 and 407-409). This is a lost opportunity. As mentioned above, the authors should at least state the differences arising due to gender and educational level.
Section 4 Discussion
Lines 421-424 offer one possible reason why most teachers never or rarely implement girl-friendly strategies, but they don’t recognize the most obvious one: the teachers use textbooks that make no effort to be girl-friendly. The authors should say something about this.
In lines 433-434, the authors dismiss the significance of gender differences in their sample based on Régner, 2014, which is a completely different setting (stereotype threat). This reader would like to know not what the prior literature says, but what the current results are. Did the authors find that men are more likely to express interest in the topic, as Table 9 suggests? If so, is that conclusion extendable from a sample of 6? See my comments above concerning sample selection bias.
Section 4 should compare the findings of the current study with those reported by Sáinz et al., 2022 and Stephenson et al., 2021 (mentioned above), especially because the current findings appear to be different from these prior studies. Why are they different?
The rest of Section 4 looks good to me, although following line 486 I would recommend referencing Sabouri et al., 2022 and Potvin et al., 2023, mentioned above. Those papers discuss the implementation and assessment of girl-friendly strategies in teaching high school physics.
Section 5 Conclusions
The brief conclusions section does appear to meet the minimal standard of stating whether the authors succeeded in answering their research questions, although they could be more explicit by reminding the reader what those questions were.
There’s a missed opportunity for discussion of future research, as opposed to future policy changes. The manuscript says (lines 501-503): “Future research should focus on providing teacher training programs to raise awareness about gender equity and provide practical strategies for implementation, bridging the gap between interest and effective classroom practices.” That is not research. That’s policy.
Before a country implements curricular changes or mandates teacher training it should have expert advice based on research that justifies the changes. The authors would strengthen their conclusions if they did the following:
- Discuss the limitations of their study, particularly small numbers, potential sample selection bias, and the lack of rich qualitative data coming from interviews.
- Indicate what questions remain unanswered, and what new questions were raised by the research. For example, why do so many women teachers see no need to implement new approaches to reduce the gender gap? Is it because they don’t believe there’s a gender gap? Is there a survivor bias in who becomes a teacher? Is their view based on the STEM cultural myths of objectivity and meritocracy? Answering these and similar questions is important before proposing teacher training programs.
Author Response
Please see attached document.
Author Response File: Author Response.pdf
Round 2
Reviewer 1 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsDear authors, the paper has been greatly improved. I just would require the begining of the Discussion section with a brief summary of the aim of the paper and how has it been aforded, in order to make meaningful the results.
I hope that this recommendation improves the final version of the paper.
Regards
Author Response
Modified according to the second revision by Reviewer 1.
Author Response File: 
Author Response.docx
Reviewer 2 Report
Comments and Suggestions for AuthorsThe authors have revised their article well in response to my comments and recommendations.
Author Response
Modified according to the second revision by Reviewer 1.
Author Response File: Author Response.docx
