PONE-D-19-32116

Cognitive-behavioural correlates of pupil control ideology

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Florin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

The reviewers have raised concerns about the methodology and design of the study, including issues with sample size. The reviewers' comments can be viewed in full below.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Sep 10 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

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We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Natasha McDonald, PhD

Associate Editor

PLOS ONE

Journal Requirements:

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Partly

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Partly

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2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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3. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: No

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4. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

Reviewer #3: Yes

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5. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: Based on a sample with N = 155 teachers, this study investigated correlations between teachers’ pupil-control ideology and different types of beliefs that are suggested to be relevant in cognitive-behavioral therapy. Results of correlation analyses revealed that teachers with control ideology had more dysfunctional beliefs than the ones with a humanistic ideology.

I appreciate the general idea guiding this paper and find merit in investigating how teachers’ beliefs shape their relationships with students. However, I was missing a compelling theoretical rationale and empirical evidence supporting your idea to focus on pupil-control ideology. Because no data on how teacher beliefs play out in the classroom (or perhaps for teacher well-being) is presented, I am concerned that this contribution does little to answer the question of how we can help teachers improve the quality of their relationships with students. In addition, this cross-sectional study only relies on teacher self-reports of various types of profession-specific (i.e., pupil-control ideology) and general beliefs (i.e., dysfunctional beliefs derived from cognitive-behavioral therapy) and merely investigates correlations. The pending question here is: Why does it matter? Why do we need to know how pupil-control ideology correlates with the many beliefs that seem to measure conceptually overlapping constructs? In addition to these general concerns, I will provide some more detailed suggestions below.

Abstract

I am not sure that pupil control ideology is a well-known term so you may have to clarify its meaning in the abstract already. Likewise, I imagine it will be difficult to know for readers with a background in education what “personal beliefs originated from cognitive-behavioral therapy” are.

Introduction

In general, I think the manuscript would profit from more precise definitions of key terms.

You claim that teachers’ pupil control ideology is a “core construct for the quality of teacher-pupil relationship”, but where is the evidence supporting this strong claim? In my view, you need to be much more specific in terms of the (empirical) relevance of pupil control ideology for teacher-student relationships, teacher well-being or other key outcomes in the teaching profession. If you cannot support the relevance of pupil control ideology, I am quite skeptical that educational research and practice could profit from the insights your study provides. You also may want to provide more detail in this regard.

Given the central role of teacher-student relationships in your manuscript, I would like to see a clear definition. On p. 4 you cite a few studies which are supposed to underpin the relevance of pupil control ideology for the teacher-student relationship, but I am not convinced that things like corporal punishment, teaching efficacy, and academic optimism are the same as a high-quality teacher-student relationship.

A more detailed definition of automatic thoughts, schemas, and irrational beliefs would be helpful. Moreover, I was wondering how pupil control ideology and the beliefs from cognitive-behavioral therapy are actually distinct from one another. That is, could you also view pupil control ideology as a profession-specific type of these beliefs? Due to the strong theoretical overlap between all of the constructs you are measuring, I imagine that factor analyses are necessary to get a clearer impression of how the things you measure are distinct from one another or rather very similar.

Overall, I found the presentation of hypotheses not easy to follow. For instance, I did not understand whether “unconditional self-acceptance” is a superordinate concept for demandingness beliefs, frustration tolerance beliefs, etc. or whether these terms are independent of each other. Furthermore, I found it confusing that perfectionisms was mentioned in the first few hypotheses and then again at the very end of the introduction.

Method and Results

Because you analyze the multiple dimensions of the perfectionism scale separately, you should mention each subscale in the description of the instruments and report Cronbach’s alpha for each of them.

Why were different scales used for measuring the same construct (e.g., ABS, SPB, and YSQ, two perfectionism scales)?

As mentioned earlier, I think factor analyses would be necessary to investigate whether the various different scales you included are empirically distinct. A correlation table for all included measures would add to this.

There is a large number of statistical tests. Thus, the authors may want to consider adjusting alpha to avoid false positive findings.

In Table 1 it is difficult to evaluate whether the mean values are in a high or low range. Moreover, it is difficult to see at first glance which of the correlations are statistically significant and which are not.

Minor points

A reference is missing in line 83/84

All statistical symbols should be printed in italics

The reference list should be checked for consistent spelling (e.g., capitalization of first letters)

Reviewer #2: The topic selection of this paper has certain practical significance. The paper provides some innovative results. The literature review is sufficient. The method is reasonable. The discussion was in-depth.

Reviewer #3: Thank you for the opportunity to review, “Cognitive Behavioral Correlates of Pupil Control Ideology” for PLOS ONE. This study examined the relations between pupil control, defined on a spectrum from humanistic to custodial, and teachers’ perceptions of perfectionism and hostile automatic thoughts. The authors found that teachers with more custodial perceptions of control had higher ratings of perfectionism and hostile thoughts, but no relation was found for punitiveness schema. Overall, the manuscript is generally clear and the study provides some interesting insights into the relations of the constructs. That being said, there are few concerns. First, it is unclear if the hostile thoughts measure was adapted to refer to hostile thoughts towards students. Although general thoughts of hostility towards others are potentially correlated with thoughts about students, there is a difference and that should be made explicit.

Second, a brief data analysis section in the method section should be added. In particular, the authors should discuss using one-tailed tests and, per Table 1, two-tailed test and justify each. Relatedly, the author should consider the likelihood of family-wise error rates given the series of correlations of related constructs. The author also needs to provide information about how they scaled the measure scores and the min/max values. Lastly, the reliance on correlations does not necessarily address the researchers’ primary interests and do not control for potentially relevant covariates, including years teaching. The data provide opportunities for some mediation analyses (e.g., do irrational beliefs mediate the relation between PCI and Hostility) and, more importantly, comparison of groups. The authors could create groups of humanistic and custodial teachers and then use t-tests, or ideally, a regression or ancova model controlling for teacher characteristics.

Page 6- line 101- there should be “ before My Work

Page 8- name the author for reference 28 as the sentence says, “proposed by…”

Page 9, line 175- consider “incentive” instead of “reward”

Page 10- reliability coefficients should be reported for the Survey of Personal Beliefs.

Page 11- reliability coefficients should be reported for the Youth Schema Questionnaire.

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Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: Yes: Hai Zhang

Reviewer #3: No

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PONE-D-19-32116R1

Cognitive-behavioural correlates of pupil control ideology

PLOS ONE

Dear Dr. Florin,

Thank you for submitting your manuscript to PLOS ONE. After careful consideration, we feel that it has merit but does not fully meet PLOS ONE’s publication criteria as it currently stands. Therefore, we invite you to submit a revised version of the manuscript that addresses the points raised during the review process.

Please submit your revised manuscript by Dec 27 2020 11:59PM. If you will need more time than this to complete your revisions, please reply to this message or contact the journal office at plosone@plos.org. When you're ready to submit your revision, log on to https://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/ and select the 'Submissions Needing Revision' folder to locate your manuscript file.

Please include the following items when submitting your revised manuscript:

• A rebuttal letter that responds to each point raised by the academic editor and reviewer(s). You should upload this letter as a separate file labeled 'Response to Reviewers'.
• A marked-up copy of your manuscript that highlights changes made to the original version. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Revised Manuscript with Track Changes'.
• An unmarked version of your revised paper without tracked changes. You should upload this as a separate file labeled 'Manuscript'.

If you would like to make changes to your financial disclosure, please include your updated statement in your cover letter. Guidelines for resubmitting your figure files are available below the reviewer comments at the end of this letter.

If applicable, we recommend that you deposit your laboratory protocols in protocols.io to enhance the reproducibility of your results. Protocols.io assigns your protocol its own identifier (DOI) so that it can be cited independently in the future. For instructions see: http://journals.plos.org/plosone/s/submission-guidelines#loc-laboratory-protocols

We look forward to receiving your revised manuscript.

Kind regards,

Nicholas Gage

Academic Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (if provided):

Thanks for the opportunity to serve as guest editor for this manuscript. Overall, the authors have done an excellent job revising their manuscript. That being said, I would like the authors to address the first two concerns noted by Reviewer #1, namely a little more justification for the research question and, importantly, noting the reliability concerns in the limitations section.

[Note: HTML markup is below. Please do not edit.]

Reviewers' comments:

Reviewer's Responses to Questions

Comments to the Author

1. If the authors have adequately addressed your comments raised in a previous round of review and you feel that this manuscript is now acceptable for publication, you may indicate that here to bypass the “Comments to the Author” section, enter your conflict of interest statement in the “Confidential to Editor” section, and submit your "Accept" recommendation.

Reviewer #1: (No Response)

Reviewer #2: All comments have been addressed

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2. Is the manuscript technically sound, and do the data support the conclusions?

The manuscript must describe a technically sound piece of scientific research with data that supports the conclusions. Experiments must have been conducted rigorously, with appropriate controls, replication, and sample sizes. The conclusions must be drawn appropriately based on the data presented.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

3. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously?

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

4. Have the authors made all data underlying the findings in their manuscript fully available?

The PLOS Data policy requires authors to make all data underlying the findings described in their manuscript fully available without restriction, with rare exception (please refer to the Data Availability Statement in the manuscript PDF file). The data should be provided as part of the manuscript or its supporting information, or deposited to a public repository. For example, in addition to summary statistics, the data points behind means, medians and variance measures should be available. If there are restrictions on publicly sharing data—e.g. participant privacy or use of data from a third party—those must be specified.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

5. Is the manuscript presented in an intelligible fashion and written in standard English?

PLOS ONE does not copyedit accepted manuscripts, so the language in submitted articles must be clear, correct, and unambiguous. Any typographical or grammatical errors should be corrected at revision, so please note any specific errors here.

Reviewer #1: Yes

Reviewer #2: Yes

**********

6. Review Comments to the Author

Please use the space provided to explain your answers to the questions above. You may also include additional comments for the author, including concerns about dual publication, research ethics, or publication ethics. (Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters)

Reviewer #1: First, I would like to thank the authors for the thorough revision of their manuscript. In particular, I value the added detail on dysfunctional beliefs and inclusion of clearer definitions. Nonetheless, I still find myself unconvinced of the theoretical and practical relevance of the research questions. To make the paper more convincing for the readers, I suggest you explain why these insights are of interest. Simply saying that the correlation between custodial views and irrational beliefs has not been investigated is not really an argument from my perspective.

Furthermore, I noticed that there were some scales with reliabilities with α < .70 (i.e., some subscales of ABS 2, SPB, Young Schema Questionnaire, and Perfectionism Inventory). This is an issue you may want to address in the discussion.

Finally, I still think that factor analyses are necessary and the authors’ argument that an overlap between different dysfunctional cognitions layers is expected underpins this thought rather than dispelling it. Imagine that, for example, ten of the dysfunctional beliefs are correlated by r = .70 and load on the same factor. Then, one would argue that they measure the same underlying construct. Hence, finding ten statistically significant correlations between the ten dysfunctional beliefs and custodial orientations would seem impressive, when in fact you simply investigated ten “variations” of one and the same construct making it little surprising that all of them are associated with custodial orientations in similar ways.

Reviewer #2: (No Response)

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7. PLOS authors have the option to publish the peer review history of their article (what does this mean?). If published, this will include your full peer review and any attached files.

If you choose “no”, your identity will remain anonymous but your review may still be made public.

Do you want your identity to be public for this peer review? For information about this choice, including consent withdrawal, please see our Privacy Policy.

Reviewer #1: No

Reviewer #2: No

[NOTE: If reviewer comments were submitted as an attachment file, they will be attached to this email and accessible via the submission site. Please log into your account, locate the manuscript record, and check for the action link "View Attachments". If this link does not appear, there are no attachment files.]

While revising your submission, please upload your figure files to the Preflight Analysis and Conversion Engine (PACE) digital diagnostic tool, https://pacev2.apexcovantage.com/. PACE helps ensure that figures meet PLOS requirements. To use PACE, you must first register as a user. Registration is free. Then, login and navigate to the UPLOAD tab, where you will find detailed instructions on how to use the tool. If you encounter any issues or have any questions when using PACE, please email PLOS at figures@plos.org. Please note that Supporting Information files do not need this step.

Cognitive-behavioural correlates of pupil control ideology

PONE-D-19-32116R2

Dear Dr. Florin,

We’re pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been judged scientifically suitable for publication and will be formally accepted for publication once it meets all outstanding technical requirements.

Within one week, you’ll receive an e-mail detailing the required amendments. When these have been addressed, you’ll receive a formal acceptance letter and your manuscript will be scheduled for publication.

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Kind regards,

Nicholas Gage

Guest Editor

PLOS ONE

Additional Editor Comments (optional):

The authors have addressed all of the reviewers concerns and I am recommending publication at this time. Well done.

Reviewers' comments: