What Keeps Teachers Engaged during Professional Development? The Role of Interest Development

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

The presented article entitled “What Keeps Teachers Engaged During Professional Development? The Role of Interest Development” is interesting. The study, using both traditional qualitative analysis and computational text analysis, explored teachers’ interest development in professional development (PD) activities. The topic, in my opinion, is in the scope of interest of Education Sciences readers. The findings of the study may contribute to a better understanding of teachers’ interest development in PD and the design and implementation of engaging and meaningful PD activities.

There are some places that the authors could clarify to improve the manuscript for possible publication.

First, in the section of Background, I appreciate that the authors defined the term – interest and reviewed the key factors that may influence interest development. However, the significance of the topic was not clear. Simply stating that “despite its established importance in learning, interest theory as a theoretical framework and an independent variable has not been a focus of teacher-focused research” is not enough. The authors need to review the related studies and make it explicit on why it is important to examine the interest development in teacher PD and show the significance to the field.

Second, in section 2.3, the authors shared their experience of implementing teacher PD. Here I would suggest the authors highlight the key design features of their PD that aim to promote teachers’ interest development, or what did they do to follow the motivational principles and what the principles were. I believe the readers of this journal will be interested in this information. In addition, I would suggest the authors move this section to the Method since this section is more about describing the context of the study.

Third, the research questions examined the key terms/constructs such as knowledge, self-direction, excitement, and engagement. It is important to clearly define these terms and explain why we need to examine these constructs. The authors identified these key factors by reviewing the literature, but it was not clear what is still missing in the literature about these factors and how this study will address them.

Fourth, more clarity was needed for the process of qualitative analysis. For example, what specific steps did the authors follow for the hypothesis coding and the magnitude coding? How did the authors identify the categories? Did they conduct any inter-rater reliability? What did they do to ensure the reliability of the qualitative analysis? For the Results, more details were needed about how the authors defined the categories of high-, low-, and mid-level of self-relation.

Fifth, for the discussion and implications, the authors discussed how the findings of this study confirmed the previous research. The discussion will be stronger if the authors could discuss more what new things we learn from this study compared with current, significant research.

There were some typos, and the authors will need to proofread the paper. For example, in line 523 “vide”, line 646 “storng”.

Author Response

Thanks for all the comments and the suggestions. Based on this reviewer's and the others, we have added quite a bit of language into the MS to explain some of the underdeveloped sections as identified by the researcher(s). To help see all reviews in context, we are attaching a version of the MS with the track changes.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Dear authors, 

thank you very much for your very interesting article. 

I think it might be a useful contribution for further research. I would, however, emphasize more that this is a small scale research related to a specific topic (CS). Research with more teachers on a larger scale and another context/subject might show the power of the methodological approach you have used.

Please finde some small suggestions which might help to improve your article. 

Kind regards

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thanks for all the comments and the suggestions. Based on this reviewer's and the others, we have added quite a bit of language into the MS to explain some of the underdeveloped sections as identified by the researcher(s). To help see all reviews in context, we are attaching a version of the MS with the track changes.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 3 Report

- provide data collection recruitment and procedures.

- report sex, age, and more sociodemographic and contextual characteristics such as lectured classes.

- also report data using 2 decimal cases in M and SD.

- provide ethical approval number.

- there is some missing information such as: authors' contribution, funding, data availability statement, conflicts of interest, and consent for publication data.

Author Response

Thanks for all the comments and the suggestions. Based on this reviewer's and the others, we have added quite a bit of language into the MS to explain some of the underdeveloped sections as identified by the researcher(s). To help see all reviews in context, we are attaching a version of the MS with the track changes.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Round 2

Reviewer 1 Report

I appreciated that the authors addressed the comments. There are still a few things the authors could work on to improve the paper:

On page 4 (lines 171-172), the authors need to cite relevant studies to support the argument “although interest development and its components have been well-theorized, we are not aware of any research that investigates each component (i.e., self-relation, knowledge, affect) in how they contribute to interest development”. And, this statement seems a little bit self-conflicting. More clarity/details will be needed: if the components of interest development have been well-theorized, why the contribution of each component is still not clear? Why it is important to understand the role of each component?

Page 6 (lines 254 – 255), more clarity is needed for the hypothesis coding. What did the researchers do to identify the keywords? Keywords of what? How the interest theory guided this process?

In discussion and implications, in addition to the novelty of using data, the authors could discuss more what new things we learn from the findings of this study compared with current, significant research.

There was a typo, in line 534 “vide”.

Author Response

Thanks for the suggestions!

We have made the following changes:

For the section on page 4, we revised it to address the comments:

As a key factor that impacts learning, we believe studying interest development in teacher professional development contexts can help us design more effective PD activities. Moreover, although interest development and its components have been well-theorized (e.g., Renninger & Hidi, 2022), we are not aware of any research that investigate each component (i.e., self-relation, knowledge, affect) in how they contribute to interest development in a systematic and quantifiable manner as we developed in this study. In other words, although interest development theory has a strong theoretical basis, as well as studies that provide research evidence (e.g., Renninger & Bachrach, 2015), they are limited in their scope (e.g., short-term observational data) and do not examine the role of specific interest development components. We also believe the data collection and analysis approaches that we use in this study presents a viable way for PD providers and researchers to consider interest (development) as an outcome variable. Therefore, our study can be a model for future interest research as well as teacher professional development researchers due to its reusable methods and targeted data collection and analysis approaches.

For the section on page 6, we made the following revisions: 

). During this process, a researcher first identified the keywords for the hypothesis coding based on the interest theory. We specifically used the indicators highlighted in the most recent interest development article by Renninger and Hidi (2022) as the three components of interest development: knowledge, self-relation, and affect. For example, a sentence that read “I am excited learn more about …” was coded as “affect”, while a sentence that talked about “I learned about ..” was coded as knowledge. Another researcher then checked this coding and together they reached an agreement on the words and concepts that can be counted in each theoretical category. Upon this, the initial researcher completed the identification and counting of the codes both for hypothesis and magnitude coding.

We have also proofread the manuscript one more time. Hopefully, we captured any remaining mistakes.

We are attaching the final copy with the track changes here.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf