Characterising Communication of Scientific Concepts in Student-Generated Digital Products

Define elements such as "tertiary science course

‘course’ was changed to ‘subject’ and ‘tertiary’ to ‘university’. References 1,2,10 and 11 include specifics examples of the range of subjects

Consider including references to discourse analysis

Discussion of SFL and analysis of discourse added to the final paragraph of the introduction

Clarify that the study centers on college-level material

Clarified in ‘materials and methods’

The mention of high school on page 2 was slightly confusing

Added a qualifying clause justifying the discussion of research from primary/secondary contexts: ‘at all levels of education’, which is relevant in order to demonstrate the consistency of the research findings

Eliminate words such as "hope" (e.g., pg. 2).

These were removed throughout the paper

Explain the five dimensions from pg. 3

This section has been reworked to discuss the dimensions that have currently been developed/developing and used to address issues in education research. Other feedback on this paper indicates that explanation of theoretical concepts not utilized in the paper might be extraneous, however, because this paper is so centrally about LCT, I have included a discussion of the two most used dimensions, Specialization and Semantics.  

Make clear statements at the beginning of each section to explain what is contained in that section (esp in results).

Added

Explain being "drawn from a variety of university courses and included a range of different types of assessments" (pg. 3).

Two examples are included to clarify

Move the participant pool up in the explanation (pg. 3) "...third year pharmacology assessment..."

Added

Check to make sure that all citations outside of the literature review are contained within the literature review.

Done. Some of the sections in the results were moved up to the introduction (including a section on SFL/linguistics)

Clarify if this is a theoretical or empirical work (also, could another case be added?)

It is theoretical work that draws on empirical data but that nonetheless has implications for practice. This has been clarified in the manuscript (e.g., abstract, final paragraph in introduction, conclusion) and limitations with respect to sample size have been acknowledged.

It seems as if clear research questions are needed to lead to the study

Because this work is concerned with developing a theoretical basis for understanding these products, it doesn’t seem that research questions are a good fit. However, additional clarification has been added (see above)

Can Figure 3 be reworked so that the material presented is accessible?

I’m happy to amend this diagram but am unsure of which aspects are not accessible.

Consider giving a clearly laid out example in a table to showcase some findings and the overall results.

I attempted this but it seemed to add to the ‘dense-ness’ of the results and discussions section, which was identified as problematics by another reviewer. Thus, I ultimately made the judgement call that it wasn’t appropriate.

Clarify the impact of this work. How does it potentially move the field forward? What gap in the literature does it fill? Clarify the limitations of the work.

Clarification/elaboration has been added to a new limitations sections.

Is there an additional reference to back up the statement in line 61 with reference 24?

(Kumar et al., 2002) has been added

Lines 75-81: This is kind of link the difference between content knowledge, pedagogical knowledge, and pedagogical content knowledge. If these terms aren’t US-specific, they may be useful as an analogy.

Whilst PCK is a framework that does have some overlapping considerations with LCT, It would be best to avoid introducing other theoretical frameworks that don’t explicitly relate to the analysis presented, in an effort to address the ‘complexity’ issues identified by the other reviewers, particularly as PCK literature relates more to school teaching and preservice teacher education, rather than the communication of complex ideas to a non-specialised audience.

Lines 98-102: Can you provide an example of “abstract, but not too abstract”?

Included

Lines 110-115: Good. The rest of the paper focuses on semantic density. On the first read, I wanted an example of semantic gravity. But on a second read, I think you’d be OK without it. But if another reviewer would like it, go for it.

Another reviewer did make this comment, so I reframed this section to include more detail on LCT and Semantics, including semantic gravity.

Section 2/Lines 125-141: Can you please clarify that these are undergraduate/graduate/both? Without seeing the previous paper, it is useful to know a bit about the demographics of the students providing these products.

Clarified.

Around Table 2: I wondered how you defined a “clause”. Is this just the standard language definition of a clause? Or did you use a different definition? Clarification on this would help the reader.

This is the standard definition of the clause. Additional information on the role linguistics played in the analysis has been added to the final paragraph of the introduction.

Lines 237-238: Please clarify if it is LCT & physics, or physics & science

clarified

Figure 3: so this means there was no simple text image? Please clarify that I am reading this right.

Clarified in the text (I excluded this in the Figure but did not justify this in the paper- this has now been added)

Figure 1 is initially described as the semantic density per clause: the textual analysis. Then in line 288 it suggests that Figure 1 is for the blended media (text and image). Do you need two figures?

Figure 1 represents the semantic density of the narration only. Points A1, A2, B1 and A3 on Figure 1 were then identified as ‘points of interest’, and detailed analysis including both image and text were conducted at these points. Changes in the results section have been made to clarify this.

In section 4.2, lines 499-517 feels too detailed. Maybe put some of this in the introduction, or simplify it for the reader who is a novice to LCT?

Some of the text on the ‘translation device’ has been moved to the Introduction to clarify this.

The discussion could use a little more discussion of how teachers could use this. It currently has some, but at the more theoretical level. It would be nice to see a clear “we plan to make a tool for marking digital products” or some other statement to give teachers a reason to keep up with this research.

Clarification/elaboration has been added to Implications and limitations sections.

Please define constructs like ICT, tertiary level education and assessment for the reader from the relevant literature (rather than just providing an in-text reference)

ICTs is an acronym for Information and Communications Technologies. Examples are provided. Tertiary level has also been clarified.

The sentence in lines 31-33 need to be split up and clarified as these are 2 separate thoughts. "There is sufficient evidence to suggest using DSPs as assessment tasks may be advantageous for learners in terms of developing disciplinary knowledge, increasing engagement, facilitating collaborative skills" -assessments as in tests?  How are students developing knowledge during tests (assessments)? 

I have removed ‘assessments’ in order to improve clarity here. Students learn the content and a range of other skills as part of engagement in the construction process of a DSP. Relevant literature has been included.  

Please give examples from 12, 13, and 14 in text rather than having the reader to look it up.

Examples provided.

The Dynamic Standalone Product (DSP) needs a bit more defining and detail given it is a central part of the manuscript.  Just 2-3 sentences would suffice.

Added. The products themselves will also be provided as supplementary materials

Line 45 that starts with "There, a robust corpus establishes..." is a summary statement, linking together literature and should be the last sentence of the paragraph.

This has been amended

The literature in this 3rd paragraph should reflect tertiary level education, not primary and 9th grade.  Literature from tertiary level should be referenced and discussed instead.

This has been added to paragraph 2 and paragraph 3 has been reworded in order to justify this discussion.

Cognitive Load Theory should emphasize design elements made for the end user, that will make the transition towards discussing content made by the user stronger.

Noted.

What is meant by novices in line 78?  Clarification is needed to understand the user generated content here.

Amended

108 should be and instead of & LCT consists of five dimensions, each focused on a different element of practices known as its organising principles - briefly list them ending with semantic density (the subconstruct of interest).

Amended.

The last paragraph should conclude with a statement pivoting back to user made content to better set up the reader for the materials and methods section.

Added

Is the non-specialist audience the same as tertiary students, like by students and for students?   Discussion of why these 2 sample texts were selected is warranted. Sample size limitation should be acknowledged, as contributing to a preliminary conceptual framework. Move the IRB statement to the end of the manuscript per the author guidelines. 

Audience clarified. The two texts were selected as they represented lower/lowest and highest marks (4, and 5). Sample size limitation further discussed in the relevant section.

Trustworthiness is an important element of content analysis research and should be discussed in detail to ensure good faith of results.

Reliability discussed further in methods section.

Line 399-400 states that "In this paper, we aimed to understand how to assess student understanding of science and communication..."  Is it really student understanding or rather, how analyze the level of understanding (of science and communication...) presented in digital content created by students?  The latter seems within the purview of the paper (particularly the purpose (need/gap) and analysis) and then it could be stated that through this analysis is one means of (by proxy) to gain insight to student understanding of the rules of game in relation to understanding science. Meaning, that pays better homage/aligns to the nature of the theory as stated in lines 82

Thanks for this suggestion!

Line 412, there should be an and instead of & Line 518, interrater or intercoder reliability should be discussed in detail and placed in the trustworthiness section of the analysis.

All ampersands changed to ‘and’

Lines 522 and 523, many scholarly traditions eschew use of rhetorical questions.  These should be changed to align to best practices.

Rhetorical questions removed.

Overall, the conclusion seems weak despite the good level of content presented in the manuscript.  Therefore, in a paragraph, summarize both salient results and best practice recommendations of the study. Describe some avenues for future research.

Done. Thank you.