Peer Review History
Original SubmissionNovember 5, 2020 |
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PONE-D-20-34867 A multi-year science research or engineering experience in high school gives women the confidence for future S&E occupations and advancement: A 20-year longitudinal study PLOS ONE Dear Dr. Miller, 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. You need to address the issues regarding the statistical analysis of the data and the presentation of the results. It is important that you make sure that there is clarity in how they are presented and that this fits with your hypothesis. Please submit your revised manuscript by Jan 28 2021 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:
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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: No ********** 2. Has the statistical analysis been performed appropriately and rigorously? Reviewer #1: N/A Reviewer #2: No ********** 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. 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(Please upload your review as an attachment if it exceeds 20,000 characters) Reviewer #1: It is impressive result the SREP graduates are awarded more S&E degree than the national female average. The result looks clear and teachers’ long-term efforts is wonderful, but there are several lack of description and analysis. 1.First, more data of SREP at the school is needed. There are 619 SREP projects, at least, the author should classify and add projects’ field % like Table 2. The SREP graduates ration in the “Biological/agricultural sciences” and “Engineering” are awarded more than the average, it should be discussed the relation between the project fields. 2.Not only the projects’ field, but also the more detail about the SREP program should be discussed. The actual situation cannot be seen, such as how the teachers prepared the project, negotiated, and how much they were involved in the operation. 3. The discussion is needed how the options in Fig 5 were selected. These items should be discussed in combination with the SREP design concept. 4.Overall results and discussions are not clearly separated. Especially since it is a treatise and not an article, it is not suitable to write a conclusion in the subsection title. Reviewer #2: Lines 44-45: should say: while men and women students… equal numbers… Line 56: is it a private school or charter school? I am not sure what an “independent school” is? Line 80-81: If they have comparable aspirations, why would girls reference careers requiring college and boys would not? This is not clear. Line 82: This also seems contradictory: if scores are equal, how could they favor boys? There is obviously a lot of nuance in this literature and I think the precision of the writing needs to be improved in this section of the paper. Lines 190-200: SREP sounds amazing. I think we need more details about how the program fit within their high school coursework (during the week, did they go to the lab during school day?) In the summer, were they paid or just volunteers? More importantly (in terms of a selection bias issue): How were students selected for it? What are the sociodemographics of the student body at this school and in SREP? (Line 274 is too late for this info to appear. The info is also vague there—report actual percentages). I think the authors should pose research questions at the end of the introduction. Without doing that, it is hard to see how the different data sources and variables are going to be used (on pages 9-11). For example, I don’t know how supplemental survey which 25% of the cases responded too will be used. In the data section, the authors also do not introduce how they will determine the control group or control population. Line 263 mentions some sources, but not specifically what they are and how they are used. Line 261: The statistics section does not discuss any actual statistical approaches. What tests are used? Line 268: The authors report that their alumni are not nationally representative, but they need to actually show the reader how they diverge from national stats so that we can use that information to evaluate the comparisons. So compare actual percentages between groups. Line 271: says that the purpose is to assess SREP as a model. It seems very late in the paper to be stating that as the goal. Also, is that what the analyses really achieve? In lines 278-9: another goal is stated. The paper should have one goal (or a set of related goals) and it should be introduced early in the paper and then the analyses should support that goal). Section at Line 282: This does not seem to be results, it seems like background on the program, I would move it back to the section on SREP, unless you create new research questions that include this as one of the questions. Line 305: This heading seems to be one of the key research questions. Pose it earlier.! Line 316: Is there a way to get these national stats for white and Asian women alone? Since we know that minority students are less likely to go into STEM careers, the national averages are lower than they would be for the group of students from this school. There might be better comparison stats than national averages when your students are not nationally representative. Line 361: What does being “more firmly committed” mean? I would recommend just using language about switching majors in the headings for clarity. Line 377-378: I am not convinced that that gap could not be explained by the SES and race/ethnicity differences between the students in your sample and the national averages. I would recommend posing a series of research questions (at the end of the intro) that lead the reader through the results. Line 568: The issues of selection bias in this paper are HUGE and since those who do STREP are not representative in any way, I am just convinced that the national stats are the right comparison group. I think they could be utilized in the paper, but I don’t think they should be the featured story since the HB alumnae are not even close to representative (this was not reported directly, but I assume this, based on what the authors reported in the paper). One better comparison group would be HB students who did not do STREP. I don’t see why (line 582) this group could not have been made available. That does not make sense to me, given that the study is already using alumni records. (If indeed that is the case, this should be better explained.) The paper has a really cool set of data and I like it in many ways, but it is fundamentally flawed. Research looking at this question about the impact of program participation on STEM trajectories would use propensity score matching to match each SREP student with controls, conduct multivariate stats, and then that would isolate the effect of SREP on their trajectory and you could really say that it helped and by how much it helped. In the absence of that, it seems like making multiple comparisons is probably best. Comparing local stats for the community/city in which HB is located, comparing by race/ethnicity nationally, comparing to national averages, etc. Comparing to national statistics only is not very meaningful, given that it appears this group is quite a bit more affluent and advantaged than the average American woman. One possibility is to look at all the stats by race, so find national stats for white woman and Asian women and compare to them. However, since those stats for the HB alumni were not reported, I cannot provide definitive advice here on how to move forward. The current approach is problematic. The tables and figures are missing captions and notes. The reader needs to know the N of the groups and the source of the data in all of them. I also think basic tables are missing, such as descriptive stats on the HB alumni group (and how they compare to national stats, if those stats are used). ********** 6. 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. 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Revision 1 |
A multi-year science research or engineering experience in high school gives women confidence to continue in the STEM pipeline or seek advancement in other fields: A 20-year longitudinal study PONE-D-20-34867R1 Dear Dr. Miller, 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. An invoice for payment will follow shortly after the formal acceptance. To ensure an efficient process, please log into Editorial Manager at http://www.editorialmanager.com/pone/, click the 'Update My Information' link at the top of the page, and double check that your user information is up-to-date. If you have any billing related questions, please contact our Author Billing department directly at authorbilling@plos.org. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please notify them about your upcoming paper to help maximize its impact. If they’ll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team as soon as possible -- no later than 48 hours after receiving the formal acceptance. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information, please contact onepress@plos.org. Kind regards, Andrew R. Dalby, PhD Academic Editor PLOS ONE Additional Editor Comments (optional): Reviewers' comments: |
Formally Accepted |
PONE-D-20-34867R1 A multi-year science research or engineering experience in high school gives women confidence to continue in the STEM pipeline or seek advancement in other fields: A 20-year longitudinal study Dear Dr. Miller: I'm pleased to inform you that your manuscript has been deemed suitable for publication in PLOS ONE. Congratulations! Your manuscript is now with our production department. If your institution or institutions have a press office, please let them know about your upcoming paper now to help maximize its impact. If they'll be preparing press materials, please inform our press team within the next 48 hours. Your manuscript will remain under strict press embargo until 2 pm Eastern Time on the date of publication. For more information please contact onepress@plos.org. If we can help with anything else, please email us at plosone@plos.org. Thank you for submitting your work to PLOS ONE and supporting open access. Kind regards, PLOS ONE Editorial Office Staff on behalf of Dr. Andrew R. Dalby Academic Editor PLOS ONE |
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