Teaching Science Outdoors: Supporting Pre-Service Teachers’ Skill Development with the Help of Available Mobile Applications

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

This is an interesting topic with relevance for outdoor learning today.  There are, however, some aspects which could be further elaborated and clarified which would improve the paper.

Some information is provided about the the survey that was used with the students but there is no information about how this was developed and tested (other than reference to the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory). It would be helpful to have this questionnaire included in an appendix, as well as some examples of the responses given in the open-ended questions.  Mention is made of nature experience but there is little background information or literature provided to contextualise this. Some additional literature relating to nature experience/nature connectedness/nature relatedness would be beneficial

Some further exemplification and elaboration of the types of activities undertaken, and the experiences encountered would be helpful. For example, emphasis is placed on multisensory observations but there is not much elaboration of the types of experiences encountered and how these were shared.  

While the article is about teaching science outdoors there is little, if any, information provided about the types of science activities the students undertook. This should be added.

Finally, the authors use the term teacher training. I think that it is generally accepted that teacher education is the preferred term to use and it would be better if this was used throughout.

Author Response

Thank you for the most valuable feedback and comments. We collected our responses into document attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf

Reviewer 2 Report

Comments and Suggestions for Authors

The paper reports on a study carried out with teacher students in which outdoor teaching was supported with the use of a mobile app (specifically Whatsapp).  It was initially confusing to find that the mobile app had not been custom-made for the study, but that an existing group chat app was used. This could be made clearer in the title and abstract  

The first research question asks for the students' opinion on the significance of outdoor science teaching -- it is not clear how this is informed by the study and activity as no before and after picture is available. 

The answer to the first question is provided throughout the document but not clearly flagged in the text. Please address your research questions explicitly at the end of the document.  

The second question asks for the perceived mobile communication -- the question is quite high level and open. Only figure 4 seems to address this question directly (with 5 items in the questionnaire). 

Again, the answer to the research question is not explicitly provided at the end of the document. 

Your text mentions "items" on page 5 -- it is unclear what this term refers to. No questionnaire is provided. 

How do you distinguish between students opinion of WhatsApp as a general tool vs their use for this research? Fig 5 says that "WhatsApp was perceived as easy to use". Did it contribute to the teaching / learning though? There was no comparison to a group that did not use an App.  

There is no critical discussion of the outcome, e.g. participants mentioned peer learning, but their feedback on questions by peers are sending questions was low. 

The claim that "many students expressed scepticism about the app's functionality" and "after the course, they recognized that they were wrong" seems very strong. Did the students say that they had been wrong? 

No quotes have been provided from open-ended answers. 

An additional relevant paper you may wish to cite is the following: 

Norowi NM, Zainudin AA, Wirza R, Kamaruddin A, Ahmad NR. Connecting with the Unconnected: Collaborative Design for a Mobile Learning App in Rural Malaysian Secondary Schools Amidst the Covid-19 Pandemic. InProceedings of the Participatory Design Conference 2024: Exploratory Papers and Workshops-Volume 2 2024 Aug 11 (pp. 175-182).

Author Response

Thank you for the most valuable feedback and comments. We collected our responses into document attached.

Author Response File: Author Response.pdf