Review Reports

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Manuscript title: The Impact of Multisensory Instruction on Geosciences Learning and Students’ Motivation.

 

Assessment

 

Minor revisions needed.

 

Comments

 

The authors describe the use of a multisensory approach to teaching geoscience. The approach is implemented and tested for Grade 9 students in Portugal during the COVID-19 pandemic. The test followed a quasi-experimental procedure with a control group and questionnaires submitted ex-ante and ex-post, before the regular assessment.

The paper is extremely interesting and the approach to the testing of the methodology adequate. My suggestions are only to improve the reading of the paper to make sure that the approach will be applied further on.

 

I suggest to include a synopsis of the whole intervention in order to help the reader to move around the different phases and tests.

I suggest to include the questions in the questionnaire. It is interesting to see what kind of questions did you apply in order to verify that the multisensory approach effectively improved the learning. This is a key point also if you take into account that distance learning is judged to be ineffective by teachers in other countries. Your work could be much more appreciated.

 

Line 123. What do you mean by the activity of dissection concerning mineral studies?  

Line 126-127. A synopsis would help the reading

Line 226-232. You first state that worksheets are not preferred by the students and then that they are rated important to understand or memorize the subject. Please clarify

Line 233-234. This is extremely important because distance learning is negatively rated by teachers and parents in many countries. Please, expand this finding

Line 268. How did you verify that these experiences are long-lasting memories?

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we gladly received you revisions, comments and suggestions. We apologize for all the work with the revision and mistakes. He hope we will be able to answer accordingly.

1. (Line 123) We rephrased to clarify. But we meant dissection and analyses of rock/minerals. As the theme of these sessions was based on mineral salts, the inclusion of dissection was related to the kidney, as the organ where mineral salts are reabsorbed and excreted. We also added this information to clarify. (Lines 131-161)

2. (Lines 126-127) We added an additional Figure 1 to better illustrate the workflow.

3. (Lines 226-232) In fact, most students did not selected work sheets as one of their preferable options, but then many students selected this strategy as important for their understanding and memorisation. We clarified the sentence as it was in fact confusing (Lines 383-396)

4. (Line 233-234) We do agree and also understood we should expand. Initially it was also included on the title of the article, but we reconsidered, as we were basing all the discussion in one question of the questionnaire. However, we decided to expand the finding by adding additional information and interpretation to the paragraph in the discussion. (Lines 406-426)

5. (Line 268) Reference was missing for some reason. We rectified the error. (Lines 349-350)

Also, as suggested, we included the questions presented on the questionnaire (Table 3) and further completed the procedure with a brief description of strategies and activities used (Lines 131-161).

Reviewer 2 Report

The analysis represents a nice piece of work, well designed and conducted.

The authors also correctly declare the limits of the quasi-experimental analysis.

In my opinion, the paper would benefit from some revision, in particular better describing the educational activities and the analysis. Moreover, several points are not very clear and I think they need to be better specified. For these reasons, I would recommend the acceptance of the article for publication on Geosciences after minor revision.

 

In the following I list my comments in detail.

 

1. There is a lot of work done, with many successive checks and tests. The workflow is not always clear. Enclosing a schematic table with the timing of the whole procedure, for the two groups, maybe also indicating the analyses done at each step, would give a panoramic view of the whole study and greatly help in following the description.

 

2. The authors state (lines 103-105): “During the first term a quasi-experimental study was conducted, with students non-randomly assigned to groups, since the classes were formed at the beginning of the academic year by school's administration”. Thus, I understand that the two groups were formed without any mixing among classes. But then they say (lines 133-135): “Students were assigned to each of the two groups according to total number of students and general achievement in previous years, to pursue equality between groups (control group, n= 38; experimental group, n=42)”.

They should specify that is only "numerical equality” and that this is obtained approximately. In fact, also considering that generally girls outperform boys at school, the two groups were not homogeneous, with the control group composed by 45% repeaters and 31% females, while in the experimental 24% were repeaters and 64% females. Thus, as for the general achievements in previous years, the statements at lines 133-135 does not appear to be true.

If they assigned the students to each one of the two groups, why did they not consider to pursue equality also for gender and general achievements?

Anyway, even though they demonstrate that these factors did not have a significant impact on the cognitive performance, I think the authors should say why they chose the "most promising" one to work with for the experimental activities.

 

3. In general, the words "group" and "class" are sometimes used alternately or, anyway, it is not clear their relation. This can be confusing.

 

4. Lines 115-117: I am not sure to understand the sentence: “As for the second phase, the experimental group further participated on (SHOULD BE in) two other sessions”. This seems to say that only the experimental group continued to the second phase. But right after the authors also write: “At the end of the second phase each of the two classes completed simoultaneously an anonymous questionnaire …”, which appears to be confusing.

Moreover, later on (lines 135-137) they also write: “Selection of students continuing with the second phase”. As stated above, the experimental group (I guess all the 42 students) continued to the second phase, thus, I wonder why they should have made a selection.

 

5. Lines 120-122: The described activity appears to be interactive rather than multisensory, which are only mentioned as additional, instead, in the following sentence. I would suggest rephrasing.

 

6. Line 124: “analyses”

 

7. Line 138: Given the interdisciplinary nature of the journal, I would specify: “in accordance with the Declaration of Helsinki on the ethical principles for medical researeach, and …”

 

8. Lines 143-on: On which scale the tests were graded? 0-100?

 

9. Line 149: “open-ended”

 

10. I think that this study might help other groups in developing similar activities. Thus, I would suggest either to include possible references to papers describing examples of multisensory activity in Earth science education or to insert a short subsection with brief, but more specific descriptions of the multisensory activities.

 

11. Sub-section 3.1: Speaking about pre- and post-test, the authors say that they made a t-test analysis to check the statistical significance of the difference between the performance of the two groups (I guess this is for the pre-test and should be specified). However, there is an even larger difference in the performance of the control group between the pre- and the post-test. I think they should also show that this difference is not statistically significant (as I guess from the numbers displayed in Table 2). Otherwise something went wrong with this group. A short comment on this should be added.

 

12. Line 219: Was “not sure” a possible response, in addition to the 10-point Likert scale? Btw, Likert should be capitalized.

 

13. This is just a personal curiosity. Obviously, frontal lessons are more boring for the students. However, I wonder if there can be some influence of the novelty nature of the experimental activity; i.e., once stated that multisensory instruction is more appealing, could the results be also affected by the sporadic nature of the experimental activity?

14. Line 39: "tend to interact with THEM"

15. Line 94: "A year"

Author Response

Dear Reviewer, we are very thankful for your review. We fell the need to apologize and regret all the work I caused you with my mistakes. It was with much joy and appreciation that we received your reviews, and we hope we will be able to answer them.

1. We created and added a schematic representation of the workflow (Figure 1).

2. You are correct. Classes were assigned to groups, not students. We have corrected it (Lines 170-178).

Regarding sample distribution, We were quite confused with your comment, because We remembered that girls were a minority in the experimental group. Then we realised the table was not correct, columns were changed, and corrected this. Still, experimental group does have a lower percentage of repeaters. But when we wrote "equality between groups" it was considering previous years' final classifications mean for each of the classes. To clarify the text we added this information and also (as you suggested) "approximately" is also more correct (Lines 170-173).

3. We read the article again and changed terminology when confusing. Groups (control and experimental) were composed by classes.

4. Yes, you are correct again. We have corrected the orthography mistake (Lines 116-117) and replaced "students" by "group". In fact, it was confusing with the incorrect selection of words (Lines 173-175). 

5. We rephrased the whole paragraph and further detailed the activities to ensure these were not interpreted as only interactive. Each strategy is usually more associated some modalities, which warrants their combination (Lines 137-161).

6. (Line 126) Rectified.

7. (Line 176) We also agree and added the proposal.

8. Yes, a 0-100 scale was used to classify all tests. We added the information to Table 4, considering it would be most noticed by the reader. 

9. (Line 207) Rectified.

10. We added a brief paragraph to further describe the activities used in each session, as we also believe this was an important information to help teachers and educators planning their lessons (Lines 134-161). Also we weren't able to find specific descriptions of multisensory approaches in other works on Earth sciences.

11. We couldn't understand why "there is an even larger difference in the performance of the control group between the pre- and the post-test". According to the table and the graphic the difference between pre-test and post-test is greater for the experimental group. Nevertheless, we do agree that t test results in this case should be presented to clarify, and so we added to the description of results (Lines 255-257).

12. "not sure" (in fact strictly was "unsure", which we have already changed) was an option for the question regarding preference between multisensory lessons and other more traditional and common lessons. However, we realised the sentence was confusing, so we rephrased it (Line 289). L capitalised for Likert scale was rectified for all appearances in the text.

13. We agree there is a sense of novelty in all of the methodology and strategies selected. However, besides novelty and interaction, multisensory learning appeals to all senses and that is why it can, more easily, reach many learning preferences. In fact, although all students were very satisfied with the sessions, still many selected other commonly used strategies, such as work sheets, discussion...as preferable. So we considered that, although novelty may have an effect on motivation, it is not solely or even the major reason for student's higher motivation. We added this idea in the discussion (Lines 368-379).

14. (Line 39). Rectified.

15. (Line 95). Rectified.