Editor Interview: Journal of College Academic Support Programs

Student Support Research

I really loved the work of the Journal of Developmental Education. Barbara Calderwood is a dear friend and was just the most incredible editor. The College Reading and Learning Association puts out the Journal of College Reading and Learning, which includes lots of wonderful and well researched contributions to the field of developmental education. The Learning Assistance Review is another great journal, which is put out by the National College Learning Center Association. The New Directions Series from Jossey-Bass also tends to have a lot of high quality articles related to student support.

I really love Claire Ellen Weinstein's work. Her research and chapters on student motivation have been just so formative for how I teach my coursework. bell hooks has also been a tremendous influence for me and I love her writing. I can't overstate how frustrated my colleagues must be with me because almost every answer I give is "well bell hooks says..."

One of our favorite things to hear from authors is how unique of an experience it is publishing with us. For our section of non-peer reviewed articles we accept submissions that highlight promising practices in the classroom or at an institution, as well as more theoretical pieces. Our editorial board works extremely closely with those authors to make sure that their vision and their ideas are printed in the best possible form. We hold many zoom meetings with authors, guide them through edits and concerns we have, help them with their APA (which usually includes showing them what pages information can be found on), and just generally spend dozens of hours on each article, a lot of which is done side by side with the authors in a meeting. Our non-peer reviewed work usually comes from graduate students, those in the dissertation process, and faculty without a research background who just want to share their ideas, so they tend to need a lot more guidance than experienced researchers submitting potential peer reviewed feature articles to us. We really do pride ourselves on pulling back the curtain on the publishing process for authors once they are accepted as a means to ensure they are as proud of their article as we are when it comes out, but also to help them when they attempt to publish with other journals in the future.

Don't be afraid. Our review board is made up of experienced developmental educators—as is our editorial board—and all any of us want is to watch you grow and succeed as an author. If a peer review submission is rejected by our board, it always comes with in depth edits and explanations of areas where the article can be improved. We don't typically have those horrible "Reviewer 2" type moments that are so popular to talk about, and that's because of how carefully we cultivated our experts.
And for those wanting to submit non-peer reviewed work, it's really the same advice. If a practice is good enough for your classroom, you likely think it would be good enough for other classrooms, right? That makes it worth sharing. We really enjoy including practitioner and graduate student voices in our journal because your input is valuable.

The ideal peer review submission would be a strong, research based article. It needs to have a clear introduction and thesis, a purposeful and critical review of literature, a solid theoretical framework that enhances your methodological choices, and transparent data collection and results. By that I mean we love to see your interview questions, your surveys, anything you feel like contributing. We are a fully online journal so space isn't typically an issue. It is so rare to see research that is allowed to have an appendix with their interview or survey questions, which can be so helpful for other researchers to see and adapt for their own studies. Additionally, our reviewers love to see submissions that have strong APA 7th edition foundations.
An ideal non-peer reviewed submission would be from a practitioner or team of practitioners sharing their theory based practices that are used in their classroom or institution. This means that they give a brief introduction about what they are going to present, then give a very strong theoretical background on the practice they are implementing. Is it based in motivation theory? Then give us the motivation theory! We really want to see the link between the theory and the practice. And then of course an in depth look at the practice in question and guidance for how to adapt it in other classrooms.

Many get confused about how to submit in general. The website we use through our institution is not always the most user friendly. You have to make an account, log in, and submit that way, and then there's a series of hoops to get things up. We also allow submissions that go straight to our email ([email protected]). However you can get it to us is perfectly fine. Just don't forget to use APA 7th!

For our peer-reviewed submissions, we ask that everything be anonymized, even if you are referencing your own work in the reference list or in-text. The editorial board obviously knows who submitted things because it is sent to us by email or submitted on our website with their account; however, our reviewers will have no idea who the authors are or what institution they represent.
For the non-peer reviewed submissions, we tend to get to know a lot about the person submitting, as it is not a blind review process and more informal. They tend to tell us where they work, if they are a graduate student, what they are presenting to us, and give a general preamble for their attached submission. We really love this actually, especially when we get to see that it is a doctoral student or a faculty member who is trying their hand at publishing for the first time, or people who have never typically submitted this kind of work. It is so exciting to try and help those kinds of voices make it into the publishing world and be heard.

Whether it goes to our review board for peer review or it goes straight to the editors for non-peer review, the entire paper gets read without exception. Not every section of any paper is going to be equally as strong as the others, so it is quite unfair to judge a paper based on a few paragraphs. If someone is not very strong as writing a literature review but has extremely well collected data for their study, then you miss out on a potentially wonderful paper just because you stopped reading at the literature review and rejected it. Every submission is read from beginning to finish. We send each peer review article out to two reviewers that best match the subject area of the paper and they give feedback and comments within the paper itself, as well as on our graded rubric sheet. Reviewers grade the submissions based on timeliness of topic, innovation, clarity/organization, writing style/APA use, precise topic focus, and scholarly rigor. Each section is scored 1–5, given comments, and then we have a summary/recommendations section where reviewers give their thoughts and offer a final decision. If there is not a clear consensus between two reviewers, we send the article to a tie breaker reviewer. Authors who submit are given any and all comments made by reviewers within a single document/email that we provide them for ease of access where we explain the final decision to them.

Aside from the review process and the evaluation forms that our reviewers use, sometimes we may need a tie breaker. In that case, the article will go to a third (or sometimes even fourth) reviewer to decide whether or not we want to accept. For submissions that are methodologically complex (usually some of our quantitative submissions) we will send to two content reviewers, and one reviewer that we ask to only look at the methodology section and ensure everything is done correctly there. Some on our review board are extremely well versed in certain content areas, but not so much the research aspects and that is fine. We have a good mix of content experts and methodology experts to rely on.

Despite accepting rolling submissions, we tend to get get most of our submissions two or three months before people know we publish (which is twice a year). So things really heat up around those times. The editorial board meets once or twice a week. In those meetings we will look over submissions and pair them up with reviewers based on content area or methodology and get those all sent out. We then move on to any non-peer review submissions we get. We usually read them all first just to make sure that they fit with our journal content wise. For example, we occasionally get a submission from K12, which is not within the scope of our journal. We only do postsecondary. Then we usually sit on the non-peer reviewed articles for a week or so. We like to read through them a number of times, come up with edits and concerns, and then reach out to have a Zoom meeting with the author(s). We do a lot of author meetings, so it takes a bit of work to schedule those between our busy schedule and the busy schedules of our authors. Of course behind all of this work we are also getting interviews lined up for our J-CASP Conversations section, working on the new layout, contacting advertisers, etc. Once submissions start to come in everything really heats up quickly.

We go through each accepted article line by line dozens of times before publication. This includes before AND after the article gets put into the final layout for the journal. I usually see most of the articles first, do line by line edits, send it to the next person on the editorial board, they add more edits, and so on. And then we get together, consolidate our edits, and then set up a meeting with the authors. We meet with them and go over the edits, see what they find acceptable or not, send them off to complete the edits that were agreed upon, and then start the process all over again with their newest version. Even our most solid submissions go through three or four rounds of edits and changes. Usually it is minor stuff, but sometimes we are meeting with authors and realize that the article could really benefit from an extra paragraph on a particular theory or a few more citations to back up a claim.
The main point though is that the author is meeting with us every step of the way and gets a chance at final approval. They are never caught off guard when the issue finally comes out.

Currently no! But our journal is sponsored by both the Texas chapter of the College Reading and Learning Association and the Texas chapter of the National Organization for Student Success. Every fall those two organizations get together and host a statewide conference called CASP (College Academic Support Programs). It would be very interesting to have members of both organizations vote on what they believe is the best article of the year and give an award for that. Maybe for the future!