Capacity Building for Engineering Training and Technology via STEAM Education

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The current abstract is more suited for administrative reports (mentioning the name of the project and funding agency). Please edit to gear toward a more academic audience (e.g., state what the problem is being solved and what is the expected impact).

 For proofreading later: please recheck inline citation formatting. I think the given name initials are unnecessary, and the numbers should be hyperlinked to the References section.

Capitalization is inconsistent. For instance, on line 27, "creative thinking" was used but on line 37, it is written as "Creative Thinking." Please also check for other instances.

You can use the abbreviations only after it was defined. For example, you can use "MIT" on line 60 for brevity.

The paragraph on MIT (from line 58) does not sound strong. Why is there are need to mention MIT here? Did you take some practices there and applied to your own institution?

In the paragraph from line 70, "As a result" was mentioned twice. Please consider paraphrasing.

It feels that there is a general lack of citation when discussing the situation in Kazakhstan. Please reconsider finding relevant literature.

There is a lot of mention about Kazakhstan not giving ample attention to STEAM, but it was hard to see why that is being claimed. What is your idea of STEAM education? How does it differ from what is currently being done in Kazakhstan?

Other formatting concern: consider using bullets instead of typing out the numbers for the lists [e.g., (i), (ii), etc].

Define abbreviations before use (e.g., line 141).

I suggest section 3 to be formatted into subsections so that the manuscript will be easier to skim.

Adjust the caption for Figure 1 so that the figure is not clipped. Please check other figures as well.

Check bulleting for line 383.

Lines 400 to 403: what does N stand for? Why is Strengths encoded as CN? The labels looked a little bit unintuitive.

The matrix fragments might be better off presented as tables instead of figures. Embedding the tables directly instead of screenshots can also improve the presentation quality.

Instead of repeating over and over that the full matrix can be found in the matrix, I suggest you mention at the start of the section that to demonstrate the matrix creation, fragments of the matrix (particularly using studio learning model) will be used.

Section 6 can benefit from aggregating the points and adding discussion on the aggregation instead of listing them out. For example, you can define what you mean by "academic process." To me, this appears to be curriculum changes. How did you arrive at this recommendation from your analysis?

I have no doubt that you have put a lot of effort into this work, but somehow the academic rigor did not show through. For example, why were the models chosen? How are the matrices exactly created? If it is only one person who constructed it, it may suffer from a lack of validity. Administrators can benefit from this work, but researchers may not benefit as much.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

The article provides an extensive review of literature of STEAM educational approaches and this is the strongest part of the article. In general, the article is well written, clear and relevant for the community. Authors propose a clear review of literature to justify this relevance for higher education around the world.

The analyses is well detailed. As the authors propose an extensive analysis, it results in a lot of propositions that can be seen as a long inventory. It is therefore a little difficult to reach what is the essential founding in the research. The conclusion could be adjusted to highlight even more what are the main findings of the research. The study suggests the creation of a creative industry school in several propositions but the conclusion do not mention this. It would be interesting to integrate the implication of such proposition in the conclusion.

Moreover, the conclusion could open perspectives on how the authors propose to assess how the process of integration of STEAM education in the university after the propositions are implemented.

Another detail, in the first part of the article, the authors mostly focus on STEAM education, but sometime, it is STEM that is mention. Is it always intentional? For example, in line 317, it is not clear why it is STEM that is mentioned and not STEAM. A careful reading throughout the article seams necessary to clarify this.

Author Response

Please see the attachment

Author Response File: Author Response.docx

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

Thanks for addressing my comments! I note that all of them were addressed in one form or another. I do not have further change requests, but I would like to share my thoughts after reading the revision.

Without results, or rather, the results being the search outputs and a framework that is yet to be tested, the paper is quite unorthodox to me. I recognize that the collection of information might be valuable, but these programs can change dramatically as it is not evident that these are already mature. It might be important for you to present the manuscript as it is currently presented to satisfy some project requirements, but it may be more compelling if less spotlight is given to the project. That way, the paper is indeed about a theoretical framework building and will not appear to be an intermediate step in a bigger project.

Author Response

Dear reviewer, we do appreciate your comments, thank you a lot for sharing your thoughts with us. Your recomendations are valuable for us in our research and we will definitely consider them in future.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf