Pubblicare in Riviste Internazionali Lucia Mason Convegno AIP - Psicologia dello Sviluppo e dell’Educazione Bressanone, 26-9-2010

Pubblicare in Riviste Internazionali Editor-in-chief: Lucia Mason Associate Editors: Sanna Jarvela (Finlandia) Karen P. Murphy (USA) Alexander Renkl (Germania) Jean-Francois Rouet (Francia) http://www.elsevier.com/jli

E’ la rivista principale dell’European Association for Research on Learning and Instruction (EARLI). Editor-in-chief- ed editors condividono le responsabilità Pubblica solo ricerche empiriche Applica un procedura di referaggio “double blind” (tre reviews sono lo standard) Ha un rejection rate dell’81%

Impact Factor E’ la quinta rivista nel settore di psicologia dell’educazione e la quarta nel settore educativo

Come riuscirci?

Chi sa di più, dovrebbe anche scrivere meglio Leggere ! Essere aggiornati sulla tematica Imparare dai migliori Chi sa di più, dovrebbe anche scrivere meglio

APA! Conoscere bene il “format” APA: cosa si deve scrivere nella lettera di accompagnamento come si deve strutturare un articolo come si presentano i dati in tabelle e figure come si fanno le citazioni nel testo come si prepara la lista dei riferimenti bibliografici

Avere qualcosa da dire! Scrivere per condividere con la comunità dei ricercatori qualcosa che vale, non perché è stato detto che bisogna farlo o perché qualcuno se lo aspetta in un dato momento

Opportunità! Sfruttare le opportunità di scrittura (es: presentazioni ai convegni!) Collaborare e contribuire alla scrittura di lavori a più mani

Scrivere avendo bene in mente una o due riviste il comitato editoriale Controllare gli articoli pubblicati negli ultimi due anni Prestare attenzione alle convenzioni della rivista: anche le piccole cose possono fare la differenza

Quadro Teorico (fondamento del proprio studio) Ogni variabile esaminata nello studio empirico deve essere trattata nella parte teorica alla luce della letteratura La letteratura citata deve essere aggiornata I paragrafi vanno strettamente legati tra loro Bisogna dimostrare di conoscere le questioni aperte dell’area di ricerca

Il quadro teorico deve concludersi con la formulazione di chiare questioni di ricerca e ipotesi

Metodo (suddiviso in varie sotto-sezioni) Deve fornire informazioni chiare e precise su: partecipanti disegno di ricerca strumenti e materiali utilizzati in relazione alle variabili e alle condizioni procedura codifica e scoring (attribuzione di punteggio) analisi statistiche dei dati

Risultati Presentarli, in modo chiaro e organizzato, in relazione alle questioni di ricerca, specialmente se sono molteplici Fornire dettagli sufficienti a giustificare le proprie conclusioni, senza tralasciare quelli che vanno contro le proprie aspettative dimensioni dell’effetto (effect sizes) intervalli di confidenza (confidence intervals) Conoscere qual è il set di dati statistici sufficiente per ogni tipo di analisi riportata

Discussione E’ il momento di valutare i dati interpretare i dati trarre implicazioni dai dati presentati alla luce delle ipotesi formulate Fornire interpretazioni alternative post-hoc dei dati inattesi Esplicitare le similarità e le differenze dei propri risultati con quelli delle ricerche precedenti per confermare e chiarire ulteriormente le conclusioni che si traggono

Discussione Esplicitare limiti e debolezze del proprio lavoro: imprecisione nella misurazione variabili trascurate indici di attendibilità modesti / bassi dimensione dell’effetto osservato bassa difficoltà nella realizzazione di un intervento tempi poco appropriati ecc. Accennare alle questioni che rimangono aperte o a quelle nuove che emergono Comunque….. concludere sottolineando la rilevanza dei propri risultati!!

Processo di Revisione Brindare alla valutazione: “Major revisions” o “Revise and resubmit”!!! Non scoraggiarsi per “Reject”: succede a tutti, anche ai migliori, almeno una volta. Comunque, approfittare di tutti i commenti e le osservazioni per migliorare il lavoro in vista di una re-submission

Dear … Preliminary Rejection According to the Peer Review Policy of this journal, as editor I have done the first evaluation of your manuscript JLI… I am sorry to inform you that I cannot pass it on to reviewers for the main reason that it is not suitable for our journal. I would like very much to publish good empirical research based on new methodologies that can provide objective data, even at a physiological level, to be combined with more traditional data. However, these methodologies, such as the measurement of blood-glucose levels, must be applied in school/educational contexts in which participants are involved in academic tasks. Your paper refers to learning self-control but the meaning ascribed to this term is not relevant to our journal. Noticeably, in your reference list there are no citations regarding educational research. For this reason my decision is a preliminary rejection. I know that this decision is disappointing. However, I hope that you will be able to find a more suitable “home” for your work. Thank you for considering Learning and Instruction, a journal of the European Association for research on learning and instruction (EARLI), as a potential outlet for your research. We will happy to reconsider your work in the future if you measure blood-glucose levels in educational contexts and focus on the execution of learning tasks that are pertinent to school/academic achievement.

Dear …. Preliminary Rejection Dear … Preliminary Rejection According to the Peer Review Policy for this journal, as editor I have done the first evaluation of your manuscript JLI….. I am sorry to inform you that I cannot pass it on to reviewers for two main reasons. First, the theoretical framework of you research work is too limited as it refers only to the work of one scholar,… The very few references you listed clearly document this major limitation. In addition, research questions and hypotheses are missing. Moreover, you did not provide essential information about the validity and reliability of the instrument you used. Results are not clear and sound. Overall, the scientific quality of your paper is too low. Second, you did not comply with the APA style for structure, reporting of statistical data and inclusion of figures and tables. One of the guidelines you find in the Guide for authors recommends that “All manuscripts should be prepared according to the Publication Manual of the American Psychological Association (2009, 6th edition; for more details, please see http://www.apastyle.org)”. For these main reasons my decision is a preliminary rejection. I understand that this decision is disappointing but there is a limit to the number of manuscripts the journal can publish and, therefore, we are obliged to accept only papers that meet the highest scientific standards. Thank you for considering Learning and Instruction as a potential outlet for your research.

Dear … Rejection First of all let me apologize for the long delay that has elapsed before I could give you feedback on your manuscript JLI… I have now received two independent reviews and I have read and reviewed the manuscript carefully myself. I am sorry to inform you that I cannot consider it for publication in Learning and Instruction. Both reviewers had serious and consistent reservations and I agreed with most of them. I have appended the copies of the two reviews and my own notes for your information. To summarize the main reasons for rejecting your manuscript, your study fails to provide a strong enough contribution to warrant publication in a high standards journal like Learning and Instruction. The introduction tends to mix up various factors involved in text-based learning; the procedure and measurements are questionable on several counts; and the lack of difference between the explanation and listening conditions (which, by the way, does not deserve an extended discussion being a null result) strongly decreases the contribution of this experiment to the state of knowledge on this topic. Your area of research, however, is highly relevant to the scope and readership of the journal and I would encourage you to pursue and to choose again Learning and Instruction should you want to submit a better study with a stronger rationale and more conclusive results. I understand that our decision may disappoint you but there is a limit to the number of manuscripts the journal can publish and, therefore, we are obliged to accept only papers that have the unconditional consent of the reviewers.

Dear … Major Revisions We now have three reviews of  your manuscript JLI…, submitted for publication in Learning and Instruction. As you will read in the thoughtful and detailed reviews yourself (please see below), the referees found the topic of your study interesting, timely, and important. However, in a very consistent way, they also expressed a number of concerns as regards the theoretical framework of the study and the methodology used. Therefore, your manuscript, as it currently stands, cannot be publishable. There are many points in the text that need to be clarified, explained, elaborated, or changed. There is no need to reiterate all the major and minor issues detailed by the reviewers. I highlight only those that need to be more carefully addressed to strengthen your manuscript. Please take into account that all the three experts share the major concerns.   Theoretical framework 1. The key concept of "critical integration" needs to be clearly defined and operationalized. This is very essential not only for the rationale of your study but also for the methodological implications regarding the coding of the essays. Just opting for one of two positions cannot be considered as critical integration. 2. The rationale of your study should clearly present and discuss a pertinent theoretical framework, which is now missing in your manuscript. In addition, it should be clear to the readers how your data contribute to this framework.   3. You review of the literature should also be enriched by including recent studies about sourcing or judging conflict information. You can find them in a special issue of "Computers in Human Behavior" (2008). Moreover, you are recommended to refer and cite the various articles on the same topic that are in press in "Learning and Instruction" (eight titles), most of which are part of a special issue on solving information-based problems through search, selection, and evaluation. 4. Prior attitude and personal relevance, which are variables examined in your study, should be included in the introduction as part of your rationale. 5. Clear research questions and hypotheses should be stated. They will be helpful to structure the  presentation of the results as well as their interpretation in the discussion section. Method 6. The robustness of your study seems limited by the type of texts given to the participants. Is one of the two texts really more trustworthy than the other? In addition, is the merging of author (expertise) and medium (source feature) psychologically valid? Why was the author fictitious? 7. Ordinal logistic regression analysis does seem very appropriate to examine what factors influence critical integration. Reviewer 3 suggests path modelling to test direct and indirect relations between the variables.   8. Given the data you provide, you cannot draw any conclusion about whether the students' consideration of source information affected critical integration. Based on my own reading of your paper, I find that my concerns are quite in line with those raised by the reviewers. Therefore, I think that you should revise the manuscript substantially. You are asked to incorporate all the major and minor required changes to increase its strength. Should you decide to resubmit a revised version, please include a letter detailing a list of the changes you have made to address each question, comment, and recommendation expressed by the reviewers, separately for each reviewer. If possible please return your revised paper by December 3, 2010. If you decide not to resubmit to Learning and Instruction, please inform me of your decision within two-three weeks.

Rispondere ai Referee Le risposte esplicitate nella lettera a ciascun reviewer, separatamente, sono importantissime!!! Rispondere ad ogni considerazione, commento e suggerimento, indicando in modo chiaro e completo cosa è stato fatto in merito (indicare il numero della pagina attuale). Si può contro-argomentare, tenendo presente che bisogna risultare molto convincenti Rispondere anche all’Editor!

Esempio di lettere di risposta (si tratta di lettere preparate da me come autrice di un lavoro per un’altra rivista) For the Editor In the following, we have italicized all your comments and inserted our responses in regular font. The inclusion of a WM measure should be theoretically justified in the Introduction and also taken up systematically in the Results and the Discussion. As we have explained on page 12 (see also response about point 11 to Reviewer 3), working memory was only a control variable. We measured it only to ensure that all participants had enough working memory capacity to keep the information during Web navigation. It was not considered in the data analysis, so we did not justify it theoretically in the Introduction. If we could rely on teachers’ evaluation (see information in the “participants” section) for the participants’ experience with online information searching and reading ability, then their working memory was measured for this study as no information was already available. More details have been included on page 12. There is also some concern on the selection of the various examples from thinking aloud protocols, which are taken as indicative of a certain category of response. We have changed one example regarding the coding of prior knowledge on page 14. This is probably a limitation of the thinking aloud method because one might use language that has a different meaning in his/her mind than the one the interpreter assumes. Yes, it is. All limitations of thinking-aloud methodology have been underlined in the Discussion section on pages 30-31. Moreover, an analysis plan at the end of the Method section can help the reader follow the analyses in the Results and their rationale. We have added it at the end of the Method section according to your suggestion. The relatively low reliability of some of the measures has to be discussed and the analyses revisited in light of a more stringent alpha level, so as to ensure that no type I error is committed. This treatment might have implications for some of the findings and the discussion. We have discussed the low reliability on page 31. As explained to Reviewer 1, we erroneously assumed it was implicit that the analyses had been adjusted by Bonferroni correction. We apologize for the lack of this very important information. On page 20, we have added a sentence explicitly specifying that the contrasts were carried out while protecting them for type I error. Thank you very much for your synthesis of the major limitations of our work and for your support.

For Reviewer 1 We have tried our best to combine as far as possible the comments, concerns, and recommendations of all three reviewers. We hope that the changes meet with your approval. Please take into consideration that several other changes have been required by the other reviewers, so we have also modified the text at points which you did not mention. In the following, we have italicized all your comments and inserted our responses in regular font. A minor complaint is that some important measures in the research have reliability values that are relatively low, despite Nunnally's authoritative but not evidenced-based claim. We have added sentences in the Discussion section on pages 29 and 31, as well as a citation on pages 11 and 12 (Kerlinger & Lee, 2000). A moderate concern is that the authoritativeness of web sites' information should have been but was not confirmed amongst another sample of participants - it is their view, not the experimenter's, that matters as to whether a source is authoritative. Actually the authoritativeness had emerged in the pilot study and was also confirmed in a study with university students. We have added the information on pages 13 and 21. I don't understand what the null hypothesis is for the chi-square test first reported on p. 17, concerning the number of dimensions reported. You are absolutely right, thank you. We have removed the (inappropriate) information about the number of dimensions, as it was not essential to this study. Overall, the authors should apply a protection for type I error (e.g., Bonferonni) because all the inferential statistical tests are based on data from the same participants. The likelihood of falsely rejecting null hypotheses is very much inflated as a result. On applying such a protection (correction to critical alpha levels), I suspect some findings that are now identified as statistically detectable will not result in rejecting the null hypothesis. We are sorry for not being clear and complete about this crucial methodological issue. The contrast analyses reported on page 20 (Wilcoxon tests) were performed controlling for type I error by Bonferroni adjustment (adj. = .05/number of comparisons). We did not specify it in the text, but we reported the p-values for each contrast that were all lower than the new critical value (.008). So, we erroneously assumed it was implicit that the analyses had been adjusted by Bonferroni correction. On page 20, we have now added a sentence explicitly specifying that the contrasts were carried out protecting them for type I error. The SPSS file and the verbatim of thinking-aloud are available, of course (in Italian). We have also added the information on pages 26-27 in the Discussion section. Because the discussion is based on statistical tests that do not protect for inflated type I errors, it is difficult to assess whether valid inferences are drawn and the extent to which this report contributes to the literature. We hope that you now consider the inferences valid.

For Reviewer 1 Irrespective of the foregoing issue, some conclusions may not be well grounded as they are phrased. The method used in this study elicited typical behavior regarding expression of epistemological beliefs. In contrast, phrasing in the discussion section does not always ensure readers are cautioned that findings do not describe capability (maximum behavior). People capable of particular behavior do not inherently express it in typical situations. This fact places important qualifications on interpretations; one example is that offered at the bottom of p. 24 regarding students who move from less to more sophisticated representations about knowledge and knowing, the interpretation concerning the second research question, and more. We have added a comment about your point on pages 27, 28, and 30. Thank you very much for helping us improve (we hope) the quality of this article. If further modifications are necessary, we will be willing to make them.

IN BOCCA AL LUPO!