Advice on writing for JCAL
JCAL may be best known for publishing single empirical reports. These remain very welcome and it is prefered that they are no longer than 4K-7K worlds. However, the journal also warmly welcomes critical reviews, papers that develop new theory, and papers that report a series of empirical studies. it is understood that such submissions may need to be longer.
Where a paper is an empirical report, it should normally include explicitly at least two of the following:
- an appropriate theory of learning with technology;
- the design of a learning technology system;
- an evaluation of learning with technology
All submissions should have learning as their central concern. Those concerns should be properly contextualised and should lead to conclusions or findings that are thought provoking and suggestive of further study.
Reviewing policy is described elsewhere on this site, but the following sorts of manuscript are unlikely to be sent for review:
- Reports that do not have learning as their central concern
- Reports that describe new technology designs or practices but contain no evaluation of the novelty described.
- Reports of research interventions relating to particular subject matter teaching where the findings are not likely to generalise easily outside of that domain.
- Reports of research where the institutional or cultural context may seem to constrain the generality of the findings such that the constraint limits their value to the wider research and practitioner community
- Evaluations of interventions that fail to reveal the nature of those processes of design or practice that mediate the reported outcomes
- Reports of research that do not conform to a clear presentational format of Aims - Method - Results - Interpretation
- Reports that are not written in standard and clear English
On writing empirical reports
Another editor reflecting on long experience of editing material in a related field (cognitive development) urges a general approach to writing that JCAL would endorse. That editor suggests two broad principles:
"The first is to write a short introduction, which says why you decided to do the study that you are about to describe and nothing much more than that. Few of the manuscripts sent to me were so economical.
The second is to aim this introduction and the rest of the manuscript at a wide readership—at everyone, in fact, with any kind of interest in cognitive development. My advice is to think of someone who knows very little of the subject matter of your article and write the paper as if for that person: I personally write all my own papers for my favourite cousin." (Bryant, P. (2007) Farewell editorial. Cognitive development 22(1) 3-4)
If English is not your first language then a more specific item of advice is to get the text read by a native English speaker. Or a professional agency (our publishers offer advice on this). However, it is a good general principle to have your text read by colleagues, in relation to clarity of exposition as well as scientific content.
Below, various advice is given based on a long period of reading referee's reports. This advice is slanted towards empirical papers. This should not imply tha the journal doesn not welcome review or theoretical papers (it does welcome them!) but those are more difficult to guide with general advice.
Title and Abstract
These days , many readers encounter papers as lists of titles in email alerts or, at best, browse abstracts on publishers' web pages. If a paper is actually to be read, its author has to work hard at making the Title and Abstract informative and direct. Referees have to keep reading, but casual browsers needn't, they can easily move on. So it is in an author's interest to do what they can to make sure that the browsers become readers.
Whimsical titles sometimes work. But only if the browsing reader is intrigued enough to want the teasing or ambiguous title clarified. More usually I suspect, eccentric titles conceal what a paper is really about and don't always seduce the browsing reader to try and find out. JCAL hopes for titles that are economical but give clear indications of the specific topic of the paper and, if possible, some flavour of the outcome. Of course, an Abstract will do exactly this but more completely.
In the case of an empirical paper, an Abstract would normally be less concerned with the background to the investigation and more concerned with what the authors did and what they believe their investigations have revealed - how the research has moved us forward. The reader should then start out into the paper with a clear idea about where they are being taken. Hopefully the research itself has converged on some outcome that positions the authors to claim a useful elaboration on what is already known about some topic. This "discovery" should be made apparent in the Abstract in quite specific terms. It is not helpful to merely say "these findings are shown to have implications for practice" or "the findings cast useful light on this form of intervention". What are the implications and what is the illumination? Of course referees will be vigilant in judging whether the claims in an Abstract map convincingly onto research outcomes. But it is important that those claims are made.
Introduction
Peter Bryant's advice to authors quoted at the top of this page asserts that Introductions should always be "economical" ("why you decided to do the study...and nothing much more than than"). However, this need not mean the same as "short". It is certainly important not to write bloated Introductions in which the author reviews - for example - the history of eLearning, or catalogues yet again carefully selected examples of its triumphs. In particular, recently qualified graduate students may feel compelled to reproduce large sections of their thesis' background chapters. This kind of extended writing may be reassuring to examiners but it is rarely useful to journal readers. Such readers are unlikely to need a further journey through disciplinary history or celebratory rhetoric. Often literature reviews - which might be substantive and fairly complete - can be offered more in a spirit of due diligence than as methodical lead-in to the particular research question of this study.
Yet, as stressed above, it is not a matter of "economy at any price". Often explaining why you decided to do a study - why it seemed necessary - will entail unravelling a history of prior research in a way that allows the reader to see that there is a problem or a challenge to be confronted (by the research that follows). This form of justification should certainly be exercised where it is needed. Readers deserve to understand the background of findings that give logic to the investigation that is about to be described. Reviewers need to be assured that the author is fully aware of the precedents to a study. However, revewers will also be easily irritated where an extended Introduction is more self-indlugent than self-explanatory.
Once the work of contextualising an investigation has been achieved, an Introduction should usually converge on a clear statement of what the author believes now needs to be done and what, in summary form, the report that follows will attempt to achieve in relation to this goal. Where possible, authors should make visible the "logic" of their investigation - summarising its structure and asserting how particular outcomes from this structure will illuminate the issues that have been identified and reviewed earlier in the Introduction.
Method
The main principle behind a well-written Method section is well known and not particular to JCAL. What was done needs to be described to the level of detail that allows replication. Where submitted papers often fall short is in describing the context of a study. In particular, where learners are confronting some novel ICT intervention, it will be important to characterise the practices of teaching and learning with which they are familiar. It will be important to understand the depth of this "novelty" of experience. Learners are usually embedded within institutional practices and the interpretation of some intervention may be strongly coloured by an understanding of this context. It is therefore usually important that careful attention is paid to it in a Method section.
Results
This may be the most difficult section in which to manage that challenging balance between being economical and comprehensive. In other words, telling a story thats accessible but also complete. One formula for likely inaccessibility is a dense catalogue of statistical tests. It will be important to exercise appropriate quantitative techniques and to report the outcome of such testing fully. However, there are well-established notational conventions for summarising these outcomes and authors need to consider carefully how to integrate these with their texts - in order that readers can assimilate them quickly and comfortably.
Reports of qualitative analyses is often still more demanding. Such analysis is often applied to transcripts of talk. In which cases, just drawing attention to certain themes and pointing to some things that the participants said (or wrote), is not discourse analysis in any conventional or deep sense. It might set the scene for analysis, but it does not provide it. Authors must be quite clear that they have adopted a principled and thorough method of analysis when dealing with material that requires qualitative treatment. This method should be fully described.
Discussion
A good Discussion should return to the concerns raised in a good Introduction. It should probably start with a crisp statement of what the reported results reveal and it should move to clarifying how they do illuminate concerns that were placed in the reader's mind earlier in the paper. Where appropriate, an attitude of self-evaluation should be adopted and shortcomings of the study design or conduct should be identified. Of course these should not be so serious as to prejudice the value of the paper to a larger community. Every effort should be made to interpret these relationships against relevant theory. Suggestions should be made for future research.