At the recent ASERA conference in Perth and during both the ECR Day and Fireside Chat, early career folks expressed interest in learning to become peer reviewers and so, as part of an effort to support ECR and junior colleagues, please consider this an invitation to nominate as a mentor or mentee for this initiative. The initiative is not an official activity of the Co-Editors in Chief (Kim Nichols/Wendy Nielsen) of Research in Science Education, but we hope and would warmly welcome those who are mentored will be guided to develop skills and confidence to subsequently become reviewers for RISE.
What’s involved in this initiative?
Mentors are asked to pull out one of their own, now-published papers in RISE (or another journal in science education) for which you have all submitted and revised versions, as well as reviewer comments and your responses. The aim here is to demonstrate the process of working with reviewer comments through presenting an authentic example. We ask that you share this material with your mentee and set up a zoom (or other) meeting (lasting up to one hour) to discuss key issues from the review process for this paper. This could include, for example, how reviewers commented on aspects of the journal’s reviewer guidelines, the kinds and depth of details that the reviewers questioned, how methodology or theory were questioned, etc., but then, how you addressed the comments or questions. As experienced researchers, mentors have first-hand knowledge of the review processes, upon which they draw in their own reviewing work. We invite mentors to make this knowledge explicit as they work with a junior colleague as part of this initiative.
How will ECRs benefit from participating?
We hope this experience will provide mentees a working knowledge of the review/response process and insight into: 1) how reviewers notice things and make comments, including how they are framed and/or phrased, and, 2) how authors address a range of reviewer feedback when revising the manuscript.
To nominate:
Please complete this Google Form by 8 August, 2022 noting:
- Whether you would like to be a mentor or mentee
- Identify 2-3 of the following key words (used by RISE Editors to select reviewers): Qualitative or Quantitative research, Pedagogy, Curriculum, Conceptual change, Statistical analyses, General science, Discipline specialty, Cultural studies in science, Classroom learning, STEM, Inquiry and practical work, Teacher education
We will use these to pair up mentors and mentees.
Kind regards and we look forward to working with you in this initiative,
Wendy Nielsen and Kim Nichols