Relationships and Gender Differences in Math Anxiety, Math Self-Efficacy, Geoscience Self-Efficacy, and Geoscience Interest in Introductory Geoscience Students

Round 1

Reviewer 1 Report

I enjoyed reading the manuscript, “Relationships and gender differences in math anxiety, math self-efficacy, geoscience self-efficacy, and geoscience interest in introductory geoscience students”. This manuscript is well-written, and addresses important factors related to interest in geoscience. The authors do a very nice job providing a thorough and clear review of relevant literature in the introduction. They also provide a very clear methods section and explain the results very clearly as well. There is one spot in the discussion section where I am concerned the authors may overstate their claims. There are also some spots where minor textual edits are needed.

Overall, I recommend that this manuscript be accepting pending minor revisions.

Revisions that I feel would strengthen the manuscript are provided below:

1.     Typo on pg. 5, in the table note: I believe the phrase should be “…a first-generation student is someone…” rather than “….in someone…”.

2.     Typo on pg. 5, line 211: the word “Participants” is repeated (“…..[96]. Participants. Participants in this study….”).

3.     Discussion section, pg. 8, lines 306-309: The authors state that “The importance of math self-efficacy in women’s geoscience interest can help explain the fewer numbers of women in geoscience because they may lack geoscience identity and have decreased persistence.” Based on my read of the results, the authors do not have data they can use to make claims about women’s persistence in geoscience, or women’s geoscience identities (aside from geoscience interest and self-efficacy, but the point in this section of the manuscript doesn’t appear to be about those factors). Based on that, this sentence seems to overstate the findings of this study. I’d recommend that the authors either remove this sentence or adjust the sentence to better and more fully explain the point being made. If the authors choose to revise this point rather than removing it, I recommend that they provide clearer explanation/connection to the results of their study.

Author Response

Thank you for your positive feedback on our manuscript. We have addressed the typos you pointed out on pg 5. For your final comment, we do agree that we overstated our findings. We have rewritten this sentence to now read "Because of the importance of self-efficacy in science overall, and the findings in the current study regarding the importance of math self-efficacy for women, it is possible that math self-efficacy specifically plays a role in women’s geoscience identity and subsequent persistence. While that was not the focus of the current project, our findings on the role of math self-efficacy create avenues for additional work in this area." [pg 8. ln 302-307]

We hope that this new statement more clearly articulates what we were trying to communicate. 

Reviewer 2 Report

I very much enjoyed reading this paper and look forward to seeing it in publication after minor editing

Comments for author File: Comments.pdf

Author Response

Thank you so much for your feedback on our manuscript. We appreciate your attention to detail, and we hope that you find our revised version improved.

You will find all the edits that you suggested highlighted in the new version. We agree that we included an overstatement in our discussion, and we have revised thusly: Because of the importance of self-efficacy in science overall, and the findings in the current study regarding the importance of math self-efficacy for women, it is possible that math self-efficacy specifically plays a role in women’s geoscience identity and subsequent persistence. While that was not the focus of the current project, our findings on the role of math self-efficacy create avenues for additional work in this area. (lns 302-307)

We hope that this more clearly articulates the point we are trying to make.