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AARE 2008 International Education Research Conference - Brisbane | |
| Dates: Theme Venue: | Sunday 30 November 2008 to Thursday 4 December 2008. Changing Climates: Education for Sustainable Futures. Queensland University of Technology, Kelvin Grove Campus. |
| AARE 2008 Conference Papers Collection [Proceedings]
Compiler - Editor: Peter L. Jeffery, AARE Life Member, This collection contains all papers that were presented at the conference by registrants who deposited a hard copy and digital file with the Association at the event. Refereed papers [only] for the conference are also listed [with identical paper code identifiers] on AARE 2008 on Open Conference System [OCS] http://ocs.sfu.ca/aare/index.php/AARE_2008/AARE Hard copies of the papers are in the ACER Cunningham Library and indexed in the Australian Education Index "http://www.acer.edu.au/library/aei/" ABSTRACTS OF PAPERS PRESENTED AT CONFERENCE | |
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CAL08481 ® PDF Paper
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| Entry | Exit | t | Entry | Exit | t | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1. Facilitation | 3.21 | 3.70 | -9.71** | 3.31 | 3.56 | -4.45** |
| 2. Assessment | 3.29 | 3.59 | -5.51** | 3.35 | 3.48 | -2.74* |
| 3. Management | 3.17 | 3.60 | -7.83** | 3.28 | 3.47 | -3.94** |
| 4. Preparation | 3.19 | 3.76 | -11.63** | 3.33 | 3.65 | -7.92** |
| 5. Care & concern | 3.63 | 3.85 | -5.16** | 3.67 | 3.75 | -1.79 |
Table 1: Preservice teachers' perceptions of pedagogical knowledge and skills at entry and exit points of the programme (** p < 0.01, *p < 0.05)
Conclusion
Findings show that at the entry point, preservice teachers already perceived that they have some pre-requisite pedagogical knowledge and skills. This perception could have arisen from personal experience as pupils in schools, causing them to feel that they know what teaching is about. Lortie (1975) refers to this as "apprentice of observation."
At the exit point, preservice teachers perceived a significantly higher level of pedagogical knowledge and skills. For pedagogical knowledge, the perception was significantly higher for all five factors. However for perceptions of pedagogical skills, there were significant differences in all factors except Factor five: Care and concern .
The significant differences found in most factors between the entry and exit points in both pedagogical knowledge and skills could be due to the fact that all the presevice teachers have already completed their course work as well as a 9-week block practicum in school by the exit data collection. Therefore, the initial teacher preparation programme could have had a positive effect on their perceptions. With regards to the non significant difference in perception of pedagogical skills found for Factor five: Care and concern, it could be because the preservice teachers were more concerned with the more "technical" pedagogical skills like planning, instructing, classrooms management and assessment of pupils' learning, and hence did not pay as much attention to their affective pedagogical skills of showing care and concern to their pupils. This finding is supported by a study by Hansen (2001) which reported that preservice teachers and beginning teachers are preoccupied with planning, effective instructing, managing classrooms and assessing pupils' learning. He referred to the traditional competencies of a teacher education programme that built on the "technical" aspects of teaching and described the actions that distinguished the flat and technical teacher from the dynamic and inspirational teacher. As this paper is part of a longitudinal study, future research will continue to follow these Primary PGDE beginning teachers into their first year of teaching. Data from questionnaires, in-depth information from interviews and focus group discussions could be used to examine further changes of the self-perceived level of pedagogical knowledge and skills.
Teacher preparation and development is a continuum (Feiman-Nemser, 2001). Preservice programmes provide foundational knowledge and skills. In the long term, professional development plays an integral part in the growth of teachers and their teaching skills. This is a shift away from a fragmented view of discrete "preservice preparation" and "in-service development" to one continuous teacher development over time.
Keywords: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
The purpose of the study is to investigate Singapore's preservice teachers' perspectives in technology integration. The preservice teachers participated in the pre-ICT course, post-ICT course and post-practicum questionnaires. The first two questionnaires collected data related to their thoughts of using technology. The final questionnaire asked about their actual integration of technology during their ten-week practicum experience. Qualitative data was also collected from ten purposefully selected participants. The results of the study helped to better understand their thoughts and actual practices in integrating technology into their teaching.
Introduction
Preservice teachers' attitudes and beliefs towards technology integration have been widely researched and published (Abbott & Farris, 2000; Ertmer, 1999; Swain, 2006). While many suggested what could be included in preservice teachers' practicum to promote the integration of technology, limited research had tried to follow the change of preservice teachers' perspectives in technology integration from the beginning of teacher preparation courses till the end of practicum.
Rather than just looking at attitudes or beliefs, this study focused on the preservice teachers' perspectives. Perspectives are defined as the way in which people interpret their environments and use such interpretation to guide their action (Calderhead, 1989; Zeichner & Tabachnick, 1987). In this study, preservice teachers' perspectives are defined as their thoughts about integrating technology in their future teaching before and after their ICT course and their actual practice of integrating technology during practicum.
Methodology
This study explored the change of Singapore's preservice teachers' perspectives on technology integration during their initial teacher preparation programme. We looked at their change of thoughts in integrating technology before and after their ICT course. Then, we compared their thoughts with their actual practice during practicum. Quantitative data collection was divided into three main stages: pre-ICT course; post-ICT course; and post-practicum. One hundred and eight preservice teachers enrolled in the one-year Post Graduate Diploma in Education (PGDE) teacher preparation programme at the National Institute of Education (NIE), Singapore, participated in the study. The questionnaire consisting of 38 items on a 5-point Likert scale was used to collect the data. The pre-and post-ICT course questionnaires comprised statements like: "I will use ICT to implement problem-based learning in my classroom" and "I will spend less time lecturing to let my students conduct online research in class." All statements in the post-practicum questionnaire were similar with some changes in wording such as from "I will use/spend" to "I used/spent" to collect data about their practices in teaching. In-depth interviews were conducted with ten purposefully selected participants to get qualitative information about why and how the preservice teachers used ICT during practicum. These responses were collected to support the quantitative data obtained from the questionnaire.
Data Analysis and Results
Factor analysis revealed five factors that carried eigenvalues higher than 1.2 from the 38-item questionnaire. These factors were:
Cronbach alpha of the questionnaire was 0.89, which showed that the instrument was fairly reliable.
The one-way ANOVA conducted showed that there were significant differences in the preservice teachers' perspectives towards integration of ICT across the three stages in all five factors (see Table 1). When comparing the means of their thoughts in the pre and post-ICT course, three of the five factors increased significantly. Student teachers perceived that they were more confident in factor two, ICT for student-centred learning (3.89 to 3.96), factor three, being a facilitator (3.65 to 3.85), and factor four, leading integration in ICT after the course (3.56 to 3.84).
When comparing their actual teaching practices in using technology during practicum with their post-ICT thoughts, the means decreased significantly in all five factors. The biggest decrease is shown in factor three, being a facilitator, from 3.85 after the ICT course to 3.04 after practicum (see Table 1). Even though they perceived themselves as confident in integrating ICT in future teaching, many of them were unable to translate their thoughts into practice during the practicum.
>Factors
Pre-ICT course Post-ICT course Post-Practicum F
Table 1. Student teachers' perceptions and practices in integrating technology in their teaching (*p-value < 0.05).
An examination of the in-depth interviews revealed consistency with the quantitative results. Student teachers could elaborate on their ideas about technology integration. However, they felt that they were unable to use technology in their teaching. Some expressed that they chose not to use technology because they were not confident in managing students in computer laboratories. They also shared that it was difficult to integrate technology in teaching because they are strapped for time to complete the curriculum.
Conclusions and Implications
The purpose of this study was to investigate the change in preservice teachers' perspectives in integrating technology in teaching. The significant increase in their thoughts after the ICT course could be because they gained pedagogical knowledge in how to integrate technology. However, they were unable to translate their positive thinking in technology integration into actual application during practicum. This may be because being brand new teachers; they had other essential responsibilities, such as delivering the curriculum, that was viewed as being more important than applying technology in teaching.
The results showed that the ICT course might be sufficient in enhancing preservice teachers' thoughts towards technology integration, but not sufficient in helping them to integrate ICT in teaching. The actual experience of teaching itself can be a powerful influence on a teacher's learning (Zeichner, 1980). Preservice teachers using ICT during practicum become more confident in integrating technology in their teaching (Stuhlmann & Taylor, 1998). Therefore, the results suggested that teacher educators need to provide more support and modeling throughout the teacher preparation programme and practicum to inculcate in preservice teachers the practice of integrating ICT into their teaching.
Keywords: Information and Communication Technology
In Korea, inclusive education will become compulsory from kindergarten to high school after 2010. However, most children have been hurried and put under the pressure of academic achievement and left emotional and socially immature; thus, this educational climate has made children who are not able to accept diverse and independent challenges. Eco-early childhood education (EECE), one of the new emerging movements which comes from the eco-centered world view, can help children grow to be confident and happy. This qualitative research participated and interviewed four teachers in two EECE institutes which focus on the inclusive educational environment in order to support children with special needs. The research investigated and described how and what teachers experience in EECE institutes. The findings of this study revealed: (a) the strengths of the EECE institutes for practicing inclusive education, (b) the challenges and solutions for practicing inclusive education.
Keywords: Early Childhood
The recently funded Success for Boys Professional Development program offered professional development for teachers on issues related to boys' educational outcomes and encouraged teachers to undertake action learning projects within their classrooms and schools. One of the concerns voiced by researchers and commentators in the field of boys' education is the potential impact of specific boys' initiatives on girls' educational outcomes. While there is an oft quoted mantra that 'any boys' education initiatives must not disadvantage girls' educational outcomes', evaluation of such programs generally focuses on easily quantified outcomes such as literacy rates and behavioural indices. Affective responses are less frequently evaluated and yet positive affective responses have been identified as crucial in improving academic outcomes for both genders. Data in this area is not routinely gathered by schools to use as a basis for tailoring programs which will meet the needs of boys and girls, nor has there been significant research into the impact of boys' initiatives on affective outcomes for boys or girls. A current doctoral study is investigating gender differences in quality of school life and the impact on quality of school life of boys' education initiatives. Results from phase one indicated significant gender differences in perceptions of the quality of schooling and main effects for gender, school and year of schooling. In the second phase of the study post-intervention data were collected from six New South Wales secondary schools following the implementation of a range of boys' education initiatives. This paper will present the results of phase two which show differential gender effects on students' perceptions of school life and also significant effects for school following the boys' initiatives.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 55, HAR08543 Have male identities been adequately addressed in the policy and practice of boys' education?
Keywords: Gender and Sexualities
The implications of the digital revolution on the professional learning needs of literacy teachers are many. Teacher professional learning needs to be conducted through relationships that reflect the egalitarian relationships enabled by the Internet. Teacher engagement with theoretical perspectives on new literacies and with frameworks that enable classroom application can be productively fostered within a context of self-study.
This paper describes the evolution of a research design into teacher professional learning in the context of my workplace, a state department of education during a period of reform. The habitual practices of the day are described; relationships between my7 work and the evolving research project, the unfolding of the research process and the iterative cycle of data collection and professional learning interventions. The account presents a research design which was emergent, developed to meet the situated demands of both a professional learning project and a research project.
Keywords: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
At the turn of the third millennium Victorian Department of Education early years literacy policies and programs assumed that literacy simply referred to reading, writing, speaking and listening to linguistic resources-in other words, they were print-focused (Education Victoria, 1999b; Education Victoria, 1997h; 1998b). However, theoretical cases for reconsidering this view of literacy, allowing it to acknowledge and address modes of meaning other than linguistic as literacy meaning-making resources, were being persuasively argued (Alvermann and Hagood, 2000; New London Group, 2000; Reinking, McKenna, Labbo, and Kieffer, 1998; Unsworth, 2001).
Within the Department of Education, Victoria, such arguments were being considered, in part due to the rapid developments in digital communications and in part due to local political shifts. Pressure was mounted for a broad policy renewal which acknowledged the changing social, historical and political context. Prevailing state models of curriculum, organised around eight key learning were increasingly seen as inadequate.
This paper is derived from a study which sought to develop professional learning experiences for teachers which involved intervention in teacher professional learning as a means for influencing print based literacy pedagogy to incorporate multimodality literacy practices. This paper describes the Victorian early years literacy policy context in the late 1990s and review of these policies in the opening years of the third millennium. Key influences which impacted on literacy policy development are tracked, and policy including the Early Years Literacy Program and the Victorian Essential Learning Standards are discussed.
Keywords: English Education, Literacy and languages (including TESOL, LOTE and ESL
The term critical literacy has come to be regarded in many quarters as an integral component of the Australian secondary English curriculum for over a decade. The major drive to this approach came in Australia in the early 1990's at a time of increasing awareness of unequal outcomes, disadvantage and exclusion, and a questioning of the role curriculum might play in this. In English educational theorists were beginning to ask questions about texts and reading experiences that challenged English teaching practices, questions such as those Morgan asked in 1997, "...who constructs the texts, whose representations are dominant in a particular culture at a particular time; how [do] readers come to be complicit with the persuasive ideologies of texts; whose interests are served by such representations and such readings; and when such texts and readings are inequitable in their effects, how these could be constructed otherwise." (p 2). While there was much interest in the use of what was coined 'critical literacy', it was (and still is) highly contested in educational circles and the public arena, and exists in many differing forms.
The project reported on in this paper is examining the protean constructions of the critical literacy entity in academic theory, curriculum policy documents and classroom practice, with the major research question being: 'How has critical literacy been constructed in theory, Australian Curriculum and Australian secondary English classrooms and what is the relationship between these constructions of critical literacy in these fields?'. Luke and Freebody argued in 1997, "The term critical literacy has come to refer to such a wide range of educational philosophies and curriculum interventions that their family resemblances and shared characteristics would be hard to pick." (p1). More recently Misson and Morgan have argued that constructions of critical literacy can often have a limiting effect on the treatment of aesthetic texts in the classroom and their deliberations over this may have "...produced something that is no longer recognisable as critical literacy." (p 226). While educational theorists have identified the multiplicity of this entity and may be beginning to discuss what classrooms could look like 'post' critical literacy, this does not necessarily reflect the state of critical literacy in curriculum in Australia today, or the way teachers are constructing 'critical literacy' and using it in their classrooms. Curriculum developers and classroom practitioners continue to work from their own understanding of what critical literacy is and create further new meanings for this entity in today's secondary English classrooms. These differing understandings of critical literacy raise questions such as what is the state of critical literacy today? What does it mean to people in academia, curriculum and the classroom and what is the relationship between these constructions? Is the term worth holding onto, or is it time to move on? An examination of the constructions in educational theory, curriculum and practice, and the complex relationship between these fields, will allow a greater sense of the state of critical literacy today.
This paper will focus on two of the fields under investigation, educational theory and curriculum. It will specifically map theoretical perspectives on critical literacy as they have impacted on English education in Australia, and analyse the constructions of critical literacy in Victorian and Queensland secondary curriculum policy documents. The theoretical mapping will include tracing the overarching theoretical movements that have influenced Australian educational theorists' constructions of critical literacy from the late 1980's up until current constructions, which will allow for some similar variants (or constructions) of critical literacy (and their proponents) to be identified. These theoretical constructions will then inform a discussion on curriculum constructions of critical literacy in the secondary English curriculum policy documents in Victoria and Queensland. By doing this the relationship between theoretical perspectives and their translation into curriculum can be identified, particularly in relation to the way major educational theoretical movements can be transformed differently as they are developed in different states. As state curriculum documents can have differing constructions of critical literacy, the question may be posed, how are these documents impacting on teacher's constructions of critical literacy, and what is the relationship (if any) to academic theoretical discourse? The final section of the paper will look at constructions of critical literacy in textbooks that can be found in many Victorian and Queensland English departments designed to aid in the development of 'critical literacy skills', and some recent articles from English teaching journals by practicing teachers in these states. Analysis of documents such as these, together with textbooks designed to teach a critical literacy framework, are a necessary precursor to the case studies that will follow. The last part of the paper will be an open invitation for a shared discussion about what is happening in Victorian and Queensland classrooms in relation to critical literacy entity.
Keywords: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE and ESL
Indigenous students in Western NSW are not completing Year 12 at the same rate as non-Indigenous students. A federally funded initiative "Sporting Chance- School Based Sports Academies" was established in 2007. Thirteen sporting academies have now been established under this initiative with the primary purpose of improving retention, attendance, and literacy of Aboriginal students in secondary schools across Australia through a sports focussed program that is supplemented by academic activities. The present research tests the longitudinal impact of one of these programs on Aboriginal students' psycho-social drivers, educational outcomes, and school climate. This paper will examine the first year of the research. The sports academy, Girri Girri Sports Academy for Indigenous Students is based in Western NSW and has currently 170 students enrolled. Self-concept, self-efficacy, and identity theory and research (Averis, 2003; Bandura, 1983; Craven, 2005; Falk, 2003; Purdie, 2003; Sharp, 2005) has influenced the intervention strategy employed by Girri Girri. The aim of this research is to test the longitudinal impact of one Sporting Chance program on Western NSW Aboriginal secondary students': psycho-social drivers of life potential (e.g., multi-dimensional self-concepts), educational outcomes and schooling climate. The research uses a multi-method and multi-occasion multi-cohort (MCMO) methodology. Quantitative data focuses on a student questionnaire administered at the beginning of each calendar year and in November for a period of two years from multiple cohorts of students participating in the Girri Girri sports academy. Students' academic outcomes in Mathematics, English and PD/H/PE will be tracked over the two year period as well as retention data sourced from school records. The qualitative data comprises of focus groups with students, teachers, parents, and Aboriginal Education Assistants.
Keywords: Indigenous Education
The National Accelerated Literacy Program (NALP) is a classroom-teaching program that provides resources for educators to teach all aspects of literacy to students from pre-school to Year 12. The program has derived its name from its success in accelerating the literacy learning of marginalised students including Indigenous students in remote schools although the program has also been highly successful in extending the competence of even the best literacy students (Gray, Cowey, Axford, 2003). It aims to teach students to be fully participating members of a literate society: "full members, not just with access, but also with a zest for participating and an instinct to exercise agency" (Freebody, 2004, p. 4).
The program has unique features that would seem counter intuitive to many teachers of literacy. In many conventional programs students in a class work at their 'own level'. In other words, teachers assess each student's individual level of reading competence and then teach just ahead of this individual level. As a result, each student can be grouped with others at a similar level and all work at tasks designed to take them level by level to reading competence. Thus, high achieving students are challenged to achieve their potential and lower achieving students helped to reach their lower but achievable potential.
Accelerated Literacy teaching, in contrast, is based on the understanding that students can be taught in a Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD), as described by Vygotsky (1978), well above the level they can achieve individually. As a result, a whole class can be taught at the same high level from a class reading text (Cowey, 2007). This achievement is made possible by applying a group of teaching strategies known as the Accelerated Literacy teaching sequence (Cowey, 2007 and www.nalp.edu.au).
In a NALP classroom, students work on a class text over several weeks until all students can read it and share 'common knowledge' about the writing techniques used in its creation. The value of such common knowledge (Edwards and Mercer, 1987) or 'intersubjectivity' (Wertsch, 1987), is that students are able to come from different backgrounds, different cultures and different individual achievement levels and, on one study text, negotiate common understanding and interpretations of a study text. They develop a high level of comprehension and can discuss the text critically.
As a result of such teaching the NALP has been successful in improving literacy outcomes for marginalised students to the extent that it is being implemented in Australia by the Northern Territory Department of Education and Training as well as receiving Commonwealth Government support to implement it widely in other jurisdictions in Australia from 2005 - 2008. At the end of 2008, up to ten thousand NT students will have access to the program.
Throughout the span of the program, a data base of student oral reading and comprehension data has been recorded at Charles Darwin University (CDU) on a system known as the Accelerated Literacy Information Analysis System (ALIAS). In 2007, this data provided information about the oral reading levels of 5,167 students at Northern Territory (NT) schools (Dunn, 2007). Of these students records 1,599 provided records provided assessment sequences. That is, they provided oral reading records of the same type in more than one term. In addition, 548 of those students, who were able to read at Year 4 level or above, completed a sequence of Tests of Reading Comprehension (TORCH) (Mossenson, Hill, Masters, 1987). The oral reading assessment is based on the PM Benchmark Kit 2 (Nelley and Smith, 2002) and provide information about each student's ability to decode and read fluently from texts at age appropriate level. The TORCH provides additional information about reading comprehension.
In addition to the NT students other NALP participants have access to and use the ALIAS data base. These students are not included in this paper. Rather, this paper investigates the literacy progress of the 1,599 students from the Northern Territory. These students, in 2007, made 1.18 years progress in one school year in their oral reading assessment. In the TORCH students made an average 1.35 years progress in one school year. These results included students from remote Indigenous schools with some students coming from urban Darwin and Alice Springs schools. If we presume that students could be expected to make one year's progress in one school year then this rate of progress indicates that students who were behind in their literacy progress previously have the potential to make up this difference.
Problems associated with keeping this data have included the highly mobile student population and the challenge of collecting sequences of data that show student progress or lack of it. Through the dedication of teachers the number of students assessed has steadily increased across the span to the program. In addition, teachers in remote schools are constantly on the move and the training associated with teaching the NALP is often given at the introductory level much more often than at advanced levels. A constant turnover of students and staff has posed interesting challenges to program implementation.
This paper describes the theory and practice of Accelerated Literacy teaching and how it aims to accelerate the literacy progress of marginalised students. It then discusses in more detail the data collected. In particular, it discusses the reason for collecting oral reading data and for using the TORCH. It analyses what has been learned from the data that has implications for literacy teaching and what still has to be achieved for the target groups of students. With the literacy levels of Indigenous students in the news at present, this paper will demonstrate that what has been achieved by the NALP is highly encouraging for all teachers of literacy.
Keywords: Indigenous Education
The purpose of this research is to: (a) examine the applicability of the Self-Description Questionnaire I (SDQI) for Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian Year 5 and 6 students to identify a psychometrically sound measure of self-concept for Indigenous upper primary students, and (b) compare and contrast the structure and levels of self-concepts (SC) for these students to elucidate understandings about the nature of Indigenous students' self-concepts in comparison to those of their non-Indigenous peers. Applying a confirmatory factor analytic approach with Indigenous (n = 185) and non-Indigenous (n = 518) primary students (Years 5 and 6), the SDQI factor structure was found to be invariant across the 2 groups. All scales showed strong internal consistency and the factor structure was well defined for both sub-samples. The factor loadings and factor correlations were acceptable. Results of Multiple-Indicator-Multiple-Indicator-Cause (MIMIC) models found small but significant ethnicity effects favouring Indigenous students in Physical SC, but non-Indigenous students had higher School SC and Math SC compared to Indigenous students. Boys had higher Math SC and Physical SC compared to girls but girls had higher SCs in 5 of the 8 factors. A significant ethnicity x gender interaction effect was found for School SC indicating particularly low School SC for Indigenous boys. These results suggest that a tangible approach to improving Indigenous students' academic potential needs to involve enhancing academic self-concepts and that Indigenous boys' academic self-concepts need particular attention.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 84 MAG08731 Understanding the nature and effectiveness of self-concept within academic settings.
Keywords: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
There is a revolution sweeping psychology that emphasizes a positive psychology and focuses on how healthy, normal, and exceptional individuals can get the most out of life. Self-concept has been established as one of the most important constructs in of itself in the social sciences and as fundamental to psychological wellbeing. Self-concept is one of the most important constructs in education and as such many educational policies around the world advocate the development of positive self-concepts as an important outcome of schooling. Self-concept has also been demonstrated to be an important mediating factor that facilitates the attainment of other desirable psychological, behavioral, and educational outcomes that underpin human potential. Recently a body of research has demonstrated that specific domains of the multidimensional construct of self-concept positively impact on achievement and also display a causal positive impact on achievement over and beyond prior achievement. As such self-concept theorists advocate that educators seeking to maximise educational outcomes can best enable students' potential by simultaneously enhancing students' self-concept and learning. The purpose of this paper is to provide teacher educators with an overview of recent advances in self-concept theory and research in order to inform their work with student teachers, children, and schools. Firstly, a brief rationale for the centrality of the self-concept construct for teacher education is presented in order to demonstrate that enhancing self-concept is a highly desirable goal and a vital key to wellbeing. Secondly, recent theoretical advances in conceiving self-concept as a multidimensional hierarchical construct are summarized. Thirdly, findings from meta-analyses and key recent research studies are presented to identify important directions in research and practice and to demonstrate the pervasive significance and salience of the self-concept construct for teacher education. Finally, based on a synthesis of the findings from this article the implications of this body of research for theory, research, and practice are discussed.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 61 WAT08572 How can psychological theory inform research in teacher education?
Keywords: Motivation and Learning
This paper explores how we might look at educational leadership differently by drawing on three different sources for ideas. The first part of the paper examines some of the key leadership learnings from recent research with a number of prominent Australians- all from non-education sectors. The second part of the paper then examines recent national and international research to identify emerging trends in school and educational leadership. The final part of the paper then draws together the commonalities across these two different yet complementary approaches (outside and inside) to thinking about leadership, identifying some critical dilemmas that need to be considered.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 22 CRA08246 Sustainable leadership: Generating ideas for the future.
Keyword: Educational Leadership and Management
This paper takes stock of where we have come in the last 10 years since the inception of the Commonwealth Literacy for All policy in 1998, with a particular focus on educational provision as it relates to the needs of English second language (ESL) students. A review of such an issue is timely, not least because of the window of opportunity that we now have before us with the first change of government at the federal level for more than a decade. More than this political imperative, though, is a consideration of what contemporary research now shows us about second language development, and the implications this raises for the teaching and learning of English to students from language backgrounds other than English.
Keywords: English Education, Literacy and Languages (including TESOL, LOTE and ESL)
My paper will go on to consider the effect of the Private Schools Conditional Integration Act on New Zealand state schools. The Act was introduced in 1975 just prior to the election though it didn't assist the single term Labour Government in being re-elected. From then on the Government picked up the full salary and operating costs of religious schools though the Church continued to own the land and buildings and was responsible for maintenance. Initially the only schools integrating were Roman Catholic but later some of the more elite private schools joined the state system. Most recently, there has been a significant expansion in the number of Fundamentalist Christian Schools established under the Act. One Islamic school has been set up and other faith schools seem inevitable. Questions are now being raised about the extent to which these changes are simply fuelling privatisation and the challenge being posed to the notion of the secular state.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 7, DEV08097 Achieving fair and effective schools funding: Is an integrated public/private model the answer?
Keyword: Social Justice
Over the past decade photography has been incorporated into development projects as a means of providing a voice to poor and marginalised groups, through the practice of PhotoVoice. PhotoVoice combines photography with participatory action research to create a method for self-representation and expression. PhotoVoice takes the camera out of the hands of the researcher, development practitioner, teacher and into the hands of children, women, the poor-providing a means for people to explore and communicate their own experiences and needs (Wang and Burris, 1994). Modern technology is now shaping PhotoVoice to incorporate filmmaking and innovative forms of storytelling, through the use of compact digital cameras-developing into a practice known as digital storytelling.
This paper explores the ways in which digital storytelling can be utilised as an autoethnographic practice to develop the confidence of young people. It investigates the ways in the digital storytelling process can empower young people through self-expression, handing over control of the research and learning process to "subjects" and "students". This paper will present the first outcomes of a digital storytelling curriculum implemented in a local high school in urban Australia, working with Indigenous students aged 14-15 years old. Armed with handheld digital cameras and equipped with basic skills in storyboarding and filmmaking, the students will participate in a guided digital storytelling program over 18 weeks in 2008. Examples from a World Bank funded project in Vietnam targeting unemployed youth, Voices of Change, will also be presented. A key outcome of Voices of Change has been the enhanced confidence of participants and their ability to communicate their needs with others, demonstrating the link between the digital storytelling process and the empowerment of young people. Through the presentation of digital stories created by Indigenous students and Vietnamese youth, this paper aims to explore the ways in which creative practice can be utilised to foster the social and emotional wellbeing of young people.
The paper will conclude with a discussion on new directions for the use of digital storytelling within development practice both internationally and locally, exploring the potential within mainstream education to utilise digital storytelling to promote the social and emotional wellbeing of young people, and ultimately to reengage with young people.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 87 HUN08787 Young people, research, and education: intersection tensions.
Keywords: Social Justice
The paper compares Early Childhood Education in Australia and in Germany. Traditionally, in both countries there was a clear structural and cultural distinction between formal learning in schools and non-formal learning in kindergartens (Froebel), preschools, and day care centers, often critically referred to as a distinction between education and care. This distinction has become less definite in recent years, as a result of several reforms. One major influence are curricula for Early Childhood Education, which define learning in the age span of 0 - 12 years, regardless of institutional differences, school entry regulations, and type of service providers.
Since improving school readiness and transition to school imply a central goal, there is strong emphasis on literacy and numercy. This paper concentrates on comparing the status of Social Studies (Humanities or Society and Environment) in the curricula of both countries, which in comparison has been rather neglected, and discusses its implication for the conceptualization of Early Childhood Education. Furthermore the paper investigates how national history is being taught, including questions of discrimination, persecution, and genocide, while also looking at teaching material and children's literature.
The paper is part of a larger theoretical study comparing the cultural meaning of school entry in Australia, Canada, and Germany.
Keywords: Early Childhood
In this paper I discuss 'At home in Gippsland' Story Workshops that were central to a project investigating some of the ways in which femininity is constituted and has been constituted in the spatial context of Gippsland, Victoria. The Workshops were the primary method of data collection however, outcomes from the Workshops also point to valuable informal learning and evidence of significant place-making in this activity (Carter, 2007).
The Workshops were held in a local Neighbourhood Centre as part of their programme and engaged women who are generally outside of formal educational programmes. The Storytelling method was derived from collective biography (Davies & Gannon, 2006) to facilitate the remembering of embodied experiences of home. Using the named place 'Gippsland' as a frame opened exploration of the geo/physical space and lived experience of cultural practices and representations of it. Gippsland is a region of Victoria where privatisation of the power industry severely impacted on the local population destabilising social life, particularly in the Latrobe Valley. Collective biography enabled story telling to ease memory beyond dominant storylines (Sondergaard, 2002)that colonise imagination and effectively silence other experiences. The activities stimulated reflexive conversations and engagement with broader social issues. Working collaboratively with the participants, a book, Peripheral Vision, was produced from the Workshops. The participants expressed a keen interest in also producing an oral recording of the book and consequently a DVD/talking book is in production. New friendships and networks formed during the Workshops have encouraged further learning and the participants plan to continue working together and independently to tell stories with peripheral vision.
This paper outlines the methodology that used place as an enabling pedagogical approach (Somerville, 2008) to facilitate diverse informal learning in the activities that were both pleasurable and purposeful. The paper will also show how the workshops were a valuable place-making activity moving participants towards the place-consciousness important to sustainable futures (Carter, 2007, Cameron, 2003, Plumwood, 2003, Gruenewald, 2003).
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 79 SOM08698 Methodologies for sustainable places.
Keywords: Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts Education
Support from school leadership and from peers has been recognised as beneficial to the morale of teachers. It can enhance job satisfaction and can have a moderating influence on felt occupational stress. This paper reports on a study that conceptualised support as three distinct dimensions of organisational communication. The three dimensions are described in terms of their manifestation as communication practices in schools. Relationships between these dimensions and job satisfaction and occupational stress of school staff members were also investigated. The participants were three hundred and fifty six staff members from primary schools of Catholic diocesan systems across New South Wales, Australia. Quantitative and qualitative data were obtained using a questionnaire survey. The findings suggest that supportive communication can indeed be beneficial to school staff. Implications for school leadership teams and staff members are discussed.
Keywords: Educational Leadership and Management
At a recent lecture marking the 21st birthday of the Centre for Women's and Gender Studies at Monash University, invited presenter, Robin Weigman, Professor of Women's Studies at Duke University, posed the question: can 'gender' as a concept shoulder the burdens we ask of it? She alluded specifically to the aspirations we--as feminists committed to progressive social change--hold for it, conceptually, methodologically, politically and institutionally. Wiegman was claiming that the notion of gender is radically overburdened, which isn't to say that research related to gender is no longer relevant. Rather, she suggested it is becoming increasingly unclear what one means when one purports to be doing research on gender or announcing their field of expertise as gender and education. Our goal is not to redefine gender, but to consider the challenges presented in Weigman's problematisation. Using her notion of political desire (2006), we analyse the ways gender has been taken up, contested and refashioned in recent years in our fields of enquiry and in our research programs.
In her analysis of two recent studies in sex education, Mary Lou argues a sustained critique of hetero-normativity has its own normalizing effects. In her analysis of one of her own early articles, and a recent edited collection in the field of lifelong learning, Anita argues that a highly developed critique of neo-liberalism sustains us as particular sorts of gender researchers.
From these analyses we argue it is productive to consider the ways desire shapes and constrains the kinds of work we do, what we might imagine it is possible to do, and how our project may falter 'on the terrain of its own political desire' (Weigman, 2006, 98). We argue the value in examining the interconnections between the theoretical work we do and our political desires as the basis for developing new lines of gender enquiry and research.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 68 MCL08604 Reconsidering 'gender and education': Questions from and about the field.
Keywords: Gender and Sexualities
This paper takes the position that children are at risk of being marginalised when research methods are not tailored to their requirements. In particular, children who are negotiating early adolescence are presented as an ideal group for involvement with narrative research approaches that attempt to be flexible and creative. With the premise that the need to juggle multiple realities within complex societal structures is challenging and isolating for such children, narrative methods offer a promising mode of access to their individual realities. Children's own self-narratives in the form of email journal entries are proposed as research tools that can help to minimise issues arising from resistance to adults and problems of shared vocabulary that may occur using more traditional methods. Digital journaling, as a means of capturing self-narratives, can provide a convenient space for young people to generate and share their own personal accounts of their lives and their experiences that can also serve to inform others. Guidelines are offered for how to manage a journaling project that is not reliant on children's physical presence within school settings. Digital journals are thus described as multi-function mechanisms that can support personal growth as well as promote shared understandings and social fairness between adults and children.
Keyword: Information and Communication Technology
Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) as a medical explanation for the inattentive and/or hyperactive behaviour of some children is a very contentious issue. While some parents and professionals believe ADHD to be a proven medical disorder, others vehemently doubt its validity. The same degree of disagreement is manifest in adults (both parents and educators) when considering what is the best response for dealing with those children who display ADHD-type behaviours. Regardless of whether or not a parent accepts or rejects ADHD as an explanation for their child's behaviour, these children, if they are of school age, will enter a learning environment that has implicit or explicit procedures for managing children with ADHD. How these procedures impact on the child's learning experiences and outcomes is likely to be significantly influenced by parents' beliefs regarding the nature of ADHD and its underlying causes. It would therefore seem useful to know what factors influence a parent when deciding to accept or reject a diagnosis of ADHD for their child. There is a paucity of research explicating parents' decision-making and responses. This research seeks to capitalize on cutting-edge interdisciplinary theory and research and an innovative multi-method design to elucidate parents' perceptions of ADHD and the impact of psycho-social constructs on parents' decisions to accept/reject a diagnosis.
Keyword: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
Student wellbeing is of central concern for parents and teachers and for state and national governments. Policies on wellbeing are now articulated within all educational systems in Australia (e.g.DECS 2008). Effective enactment of policy depends in part on the suitability of judgements made about students' mental health.
This paper investigates teacher and parent/caregiver assessments of students' mental health based upon data from the evaluation of the KidsMattter mental health promotion, prevention and early intervention pilot program in 100 primary schools across Australia. Goodman's (2005) Strength and Difficulties Questionnaire (SDQ) was completed by parents/caregivers and teachers of almost 4900 primary school students in KidsMatter schools. The SDQ was developed as a brief mental health screening instrument and is widely used in many nations, including Australia (Levitt, Saka et al. 2007). A second measure, specifically developed for this study, canvassed the five core groups of indicators of students' social and emotional competencies identified by the Collaborative for Academic, Social and Emotional Learning (CASEL 2006), namely, self-awareness, self-management, social awareness, relationship skills, and responsible decision making. This second measure was also completed by the students' teachers and parents/caregivers. A third measure was based on a non-clinical assessment by teachers, who identified students considered to be 'at risk' of social, emotional or behavioural problems.
The first focus of this paper investigates how closely the three measures of identification of the mental health status of students correlate. The second focus of this paper investigates relationships between teachers' and parent/caregivers' SDQ and CASEL based ratings.
Results indicate that significant correlations were found between the three measures of students' mental health. This suggests that teachers' non-clinical ratings can provide one means of identifying students 'at risk', according to comparisons with the SDQ and the CASEL based measure. Further comparisons, using confirmatory factor analysis, examine how closely the five SDQ subscales of hyperactivity, emotional symptoms, conduct problems, peer problems, and pro-social behaviour correlate between parent/caregiver and teacher responses. And finally, in triangulating the three sources of measurement, we provide a detailed picture of the mental health status of primary school students in KidsMatter schools.
This paper provides a national snapshot of the mental health status of Australian primary school children. It also contributes to the growing body of literature examining the psychometric characteristics of the SDQ in the Australian setting, and to alternative measures for assessing student mental health in school settings.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 37 DOB08370 The KidsMatter initiative: Building schools'T capacities for addressing children's mental health.
Keywords: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
Change for sustainability occurs through systemic and transformational processes. In an educational context, 'transformation' is dependent upon interactions between the school and its stakeholders. In this paper, the authors being to develop a monitoring and evaluation framework towards informing transformative change programs, developing effective education for sustainability initiatives, and predicting their potential for success or lack there of. This research is timely as providing education for sustainability has recently been endorsed as an imperative in all states and territories of Australia, guided by the document Educating for a Sustainable Future - A National Environmental Education Statement for Australian Schools. It also coincides with the United Nations Decade of Education for Sustainable Development (UNDESD) 2005-2014. In exploring relevant systemic and transformational processes, the authors examine a range of drivers that influence the design, delivery and uptake of schools-based education for sustainability including the document Educating for a Sustainable Future and the National Action Plan in Education for Sustainability (NAP ESD). Analysis of drivers indicates that transformative change for sustainability can be attained through: 1) preparing both teachers and students for change; 2) empowering teachers and students to build their capacity for self-driven action for transformational change; and, 3) developing a systemic monitoring and evaluation framework that enables students' and teachers' learning outcomes to be evaluated and extended. In the process of developing the monitoring and evaluation framework, the authors introduce the concept of an Ecolect (EcoI); a person's tested and measured understanding of ecological, economic, social, and political sustainability factors, the interactions between these factors, and capacity for transformative change for sustainability.
Keyword: Secondary Education
New Zealand's tertiary education sector is making increasing use of e-learning (Suddaby & Milne, 2008). In addition, changes in the New Zealand early childhood context have spawned the use of online technologies in delivering teacher education programs. One early childhood teacher provider, New Zealand Tertiary College, is piloting a web-enhanced distance learning project. This paper sees a brief review of the New Zealand early childhood context, online learning, and online teaching. Following an introduction to the web-enhanced distance learning pilot project, findings from the project with regards to the three lecturers who participated in the project, and their experiences of web-enhanced teaching, are illustrated using thematic analysis. Recommendations for improving the web-enhanced project are noted, and finally, the importance of a dedicated professional development program in readying lecturers to teach in a web-enhanced learning environment is discussed.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
The needs of refugee youth are complex and multi-faceted requiring a co-ordinated approach between educational institutions, families, communities and service agencies. The results of the study by Earnest, Housen & Gilleatt, (2007), revealed that educational institutions are the settings in which many of the hopes of refugee youth materialise. The refugee youth find educational institutions a safe environment. They enjoy learning and the routine that educational institutions provide. Whilst a small percentage of this cohort successfully make the transition to university, students from this group very often find the multiple challenges of academic study, coupled with resettling in a host country and having to adjust to new belief systems, values and mores, too daunting.
Strong educational institution-based programming inclusive of communities and educational staff has shown to increase psychosocial well-being and educational outcomes of refugee students. Interviews with students and key informants clearly demonstrated an inner strength that drives students to strive for educational outcomes that would enable them to accomplish their hopes for a better future. This paper reports on a Needs Analysis undertaken at Curtin University in Semester 2, 2007 & Semester 1 2008. The Needs Analysis was undertaken with a small cohort of African refugee student using in-depth semi-structured interviews. The subsequent analysis revealed areas of need and is currently informing the design of a teaching programme to support the transition of refugee youth into universities.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 45, EAR08486 The needs of students from refugee backgrounds in tertiary institutions: Case studies from Western Australia.
Keyword: Higher Education
Amidst Federal government advances towards a National Curriculum, this paper focuses on the prospective future curriculum position, content and requirements for Health and Physical Education (HPE) across Australia. Research that is exploring political and policy discourses relating to these issues is used as a basis from which to identify the current position of HPE as simultaneously one of marginality and opportunities. In Federal and State/Territory arenas, limited attention is being directed towards HPE amidst a dominant focus on other learning areas that have widespread acceptance and privileged status as 'core' curriculum components. From the perspective of the States and Territories, Health and Physical Education is not amongst what have been termed 'fundamentally important disciplines: English, mathematics, science and languages other than English' (Council for the Australian Federation, 2007, p.14). In the Federalist paper 2 it was acknowledged, however, that 'Health and physical education are increasingly critical for student and community well-being' (p.14).
This paper identifies HPE as a learning area capable of presenting a strong case that it has the potential to effectively service multiple political imperatives, and more specifically, prompt greater linkages between health and education. Continued diversity in HPE curriculum across the States and Territories is highlighted, however, as posing questions, about the willingness and capacity of key stakeholders to actively advance that linkage. Further, it is acknowledged that some members of the HPE professional community may justifiably challenge the merits of pursuing enhanced policy alignment between health and education. Amidst a professional arena renowned for fragmentation, this paper explores whether and in what ways, a national professional association may be able to facilitate collaborative action that will enhance the curriculum future for HPE across Australia. The paper reports and critically analyses the action that the Australian Council for Health, Physical Education and Recreation (ACHPER) has instigated and may seek to advance in this regard. At the end of 2007 ACHPER formed a national working group with a remit to develop a national statement and national action plan in response to a rapidly changing education policy scene in Australia. The stated view of the States and Territories at that time was that 'it is time to reassert the importance of national collaboration to promote high-quality schooling for all Australian students, whatever jurisdiction, school system or individual school is involved' (Council for the Australian Federation, 2007, p.6). National professional associations are identified as having a potentially important role to play in facilitating, informing and mediating collaborative action with regard to curriculum provision and expectations for student learning across State/Territory jurisdictions. National and international examples are drawn upon in evidencing this potential. Revisions to the National Curriculum in England are presented as exemplifying highly effective strategic action on the part of a national professional association to secure a core curriculum presence for physical education across all years of schooling.
From this backdrop, ACHPER's prospective role and progress to date in countering continued marginalisation of HPE in education policy and curriculum developments, is addressed. Ball's (2007) emphasis that most policies are 'ramshackle, compromise, hit and miss affairs' that are also destined to be 'reworked, tinkered with, nuanced and inflected' as they are progressed towards expression in practice (p.44) is used as basis from which to identify scope and potential for the HPE professional community to counter marginality and actively inform future curriculum directions. The concepts of policy 'borrowing and copying' (Ball, 2007, p.44) are presented as potentially productive tools to employ in this endeavour.
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
Introduction
How do students actually perceive Physics and Physics-related careers? How does this perception develop? As a Physics teacher these are intriguing questions that established a motivation and curiosity to research how students and the wider community perceive Physics.
The increasing urgency with which governments, industry and academia both nationally and internationally are pressing for a greater number of Physics students and graduates further fuelled the desire to research this issues and contribute to the discussion.
Aims of the project
The research project has three aims and stages:
Research Framework
The focus of the study is on state and independent schools from Queensland's Sunshine Coast. The cohort consists of all Year 11 students, those that have and those that have not selected Physics.
An initial student questionnaire was constructed and trialled at the Sunshine Coast Grammar School to establish the effectiveness of the questions posed, however, the questionnaire has evolved to encompass contributions from individual and group discussions with students and Heads of Science departments, who have commented on the structure and nature of the questions.
The final questionnaire to be implemented for the first stage reflects a combined quantitative and qualitative approach and embraces the researcher phenomenologist theoretical perspective which is delivered through a 'blended -methods' pragmatic methodology.
Research Findings
The findings from the preliminary study at the Sunshine Coast Grammar School indicate that over 90% of students perceive Physics and Physics-related careers as challenging and difficult, with the major contributors (over 75%) to this perception being close friends, personal experience and older Physics students. When making subject selections, parents and teachers (not necessarily Science teachers) are the most influential with over 70% of students seeking advice from these sources. Some of the questions to be pursued are: Are they (parents, older students and teachers) aware of their influence and is their knowledge abreast of syllabus changes and the current employment opportunities in the Physics field? Do they appreciate the influence they have of creating a perception?
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 76 TUO08686 Addressing students' perceptions that physics and maths are too hard.
Keywords: Science and ICT Education
Once a research project has been completed, one of the most prestigious forms of publication is a journal paper. In the current outputs-driven environment there is not only increasing pressure to publish, but to publish in 'top tier' journals. However, there is little comprehensive information about the range and scope of refereed research journals in education. The SORTI team aimed to thoroughly scope and analyse the field of research journal publishing in Education internationally, and to provide a context for discussion about the emphases in journal publication in the light of assessments of research quality.
A database of over a thousand journals was compiled. The criteria for inclusion were that the journal be about education, publish research, be peer reviewed, and be published in English. Using a seven-step methodology, data on the 1042 journals was collected and refined covering information needed to identify and locate journals, to select journals to meet your publication and to make a judgment about journal quality.
A profile of the1042 journal is presented with all necessary information to allow authors to select appropriate outlets for their work including details on peer review, editorial boards, manuscript formatting requirements etc. Two new fields of information are described: a 26 discipline classification covering all areas of education; and the QScore - composite measure of journal quality which encompasses the views of Australian and international scholars, the ISI Impact Factor and the internationalisation of the journal's editorial board. A table of QScore ranges by discipline is presented.
Australian journals claiming to be 'top tier' have been challenged as being too parochial. The mapping of the eight of top tier journals by QScore demonstrates that this charge cannot be upheld: Australian journals are no more or nor less parochial than those from other countries.
Keywords: Educational Technology and Media
This paper is offered as a contribution to inform both the research and educational practitioner communities of the contemporary place of Montessori education in the empowerment of young children and the foundations of social justice created by young children's lived experiences. The research is based upon practitioner observation of spontaneous expressions in a Montessori centre for children aged three years to six years in Aotearoa New Zealand.
The practitioner lens of contemporary Montessori practice in Aoteroa New Zealand is framed by both Montessori pedagogy and the national early childhood curriculum Te Wh?riki, He Wh?riki M?tauranga m? ng? Mokopuna o Aotearoa: Early Childhood Curriculum. The paper explores the interconnecting paradigms of Te Wh?riki, a woven mat of the principles and strands of early childhood curriculum that will assist all children to be "competent and confident learners and communicators; healthy in mind, body and spirit; secure in their sense of belonging and secure in the knowledge that they make a valued contribution to society" (p.9).) and Montessori's comparison of the stages of social development to the stages and process of weaving of a cotton cloth (Montessori, 1988). The Montessori activities of Practical life, including activities for care of the self, care of the environment and exercises in grace and courtesy are acknowledged as lived experiences contributing to the spinning weaving and darning of the cloth of social cohesion.
The paper further explores the connection between Montessori and Maori pedagogy in respect of three key principles in the weaving of curriculum or the lived experiences of young children in a Montessori environment for three to six year olds.
The author offers personal interpretive definitions for the context of this inquiry, derived from the principles outlined by Bishop & Glynn, (2000), Macfarlane (2000) and Montessori (1988, 1967).
As a research process, recording spontaneous expressions honours the child's voice. From both the Montessori and Maori pedagogical frameworks it allows the child to reveal themselves according to the natural laws of development. Impressions are absorbed, connections are made over both time and context, and expressions are revealed. The limitation of this approach is that by definition spontaneity means that the expressions follow a natural process, without external influence or artificial probe and therefore the practitioner researcher may not always be in the presence of the child when expressions occur. Spontaneous observations of children are further supported in Aotearoa New Zealand by the documentation of learning, evaluation and assessment through narrative in the form of learning stories (Carr, 2001). Learning stories may incorporate the voice of the adult observer, the child and the child's family. As each learning story captures elements of learning and development for a child or group of children, it contributes to an evolving narrative that celebrates the life story of the individual, extended family and the learning community.
Children's spontaneous expressions through narrative and photographic representation are offered for reflective appreciation.
With this limitation accepted, the expressions observed were deeply rooted in the exercises of practical life. Activities such as, learning to button and unbutton directly assists the child to dress or undress. Learning to pour water from a jug to a glass assists the child to pour a drink when they are thirsty. Learning to shake hands develops the child's interpersonal skills as a foundation for respectful interactions. Returning an activity to the shelf tidy and complete demonstrates a respectful regard for the learning and development of the next child who may wish to use that material. It further sows the seed for ecological responsibility, - we should leave the planet tidy and complete for the benefit of future generations. Impressions absorbed and acted upon in the practical life activities were connected to real life experiences, and expressed in the interpersonal interactions that are the life experience on a daily basis within the centre community.
The observations revealed that activities that facilitate the care of the self, the care of the environment and the exercises of grace and courtesy, develop concentration and independence through freedom of choice, and in so doing create the social cohesion of independence, interdependence in the deepest sense of the term. The concepts of a community that promotes belonging and well-being, participation by all in both teaching and learning, and the child's right to reveal themselves through natural laws is evident in the observations.
It may be more than one hundred years since Maria Montessori observed phenomenon in the first Casa dei Bambini established in Italy, yet spontaneous expressions in a contemporary Montessori context in Aoteroa New Zealand reveal similar expressions. This paper supports the view that unconscious social cohesion in the period of the absorbent mind and sensitive period for the social aspects of the world have remained constant over time and place in a Montessori prepared environment.
The observation of children through the lens of a practitioner remains a perpetual "work in progress".
Keywords: Social Justice
The aim of this paper is to analyse what kinds of work-related literacy demands structural adjustment places on local and regional communities and to consider what might constitute innovative, and socially, economically and environmentally sustainable, strategic approaches to those demands.
In the context of this discussion structural adjustment refers to 'changes in the size and make-up of an economy in terms of the distribution of activity and resources among firms, industries and regions (McColl and Young 2005).' Structural adjustment occurs when existing industries, or work practices, are no longer sustainable because of economic, social or environmental changes. In Australia at present structural adjustment is especially acute in rural and regional communities which rely on irrigation for food production and processing for a domestic market. Pressures on those communities include the development of global agri-businesses and dramatic restriction of water for irrigation, and the perceived shortage of appropriately skilled labour to support existing and emerging industrial innovation. Structural adjustment of the kind that is or will soon be occurring in these communities is often understood to adversely affect those already most disadvantaged in a community (indigenous people, migrants, refugees, older workers with little formal education, young people who have little formal education and little or no work experience) often because of their assessed low literacy levels and their perceived inability to meet the escalating literacy demands of contemporary global economic activity.
It has become axiomatic that Australia (and, indeed, most of the developed world) is facing a 'skills shortage'. It is, however, generally a hopeless cause to use workforce education to try and bring skills into balance with what the market (or a particular segment of the market) needs or thinks it needs at a particular time (Shah and Burke 2006). Sophisticated literacy skills are often regarded as a critical means of quickly and efficiently bridging the gap between the skills people have and the skills they need. The contemporary globalising economy relies heavily on a literate workforce which has both control of standardised forms and the capacity to innovate to meet local conditions as they arise. Work-related literacy education is, therefore, a significant element in industry policy at local, national and international levels although specific reference to work-related literacy policy is rare.Work-related literacy education, in terms of both policy and provision, is shaped by globalisation from above (Appadurai 2000) in ways that we now take for granted, although they are not straightforward. It is frequently suspended between the perceived need for generic literacy skills that have global relevance and can be transferred between firms, geographical locations, and even industries, and the perceived (and often urgent) need for highly customised literacy skills and capacities that local employers and firms experience (Farrell 2006, Farrell and Fenwick 2007).
I argue here that we need to understand the potential of workforce literacy education, and the tugs and synergies between the global and the local, in more complex ways if we are to realise its capacity leverage global networks at local sites, rather than to respond uncritically to urgent calls fitting people to standardized processes, migration routes, consumption patterns and knowledge protocols. Specifically, we need to understand workforce education in terms of dynamic interactions between local relational networks defined by territory and global networks defined by production, within the context of various regional governance structures that are in a constant state of change (Coe, Hess et al. 2004, 2006).
A significant dimension of 'the local' within this context is the local ecological environment, and the distinctive ways in which global climate change impacts on local environmental conditions, the industries that can operate within these contexts and the knowledge that is needed to conduct those industries in environmentally, socially and economically sustainable ways. While workforce literacy education sometimes has a role in responding to these pressures I also want to consider its role in leading the articulation of the problem and the search for new solutions.
My argument is that we require a fundamental re-conceptualisation of the role of work-related literacy education if it is to support and connect local communities as they engage in dynamic interaction with global networks of production within a context of relatively fluid regional governance structures. I explore the argument through an examination of a case study community - the City of Greater Shepparton. The challenges facing the City of Greater Shepparton are typical of those facing local communities in Australia and around the world. Shepparton , with a population of 61,420 people (2006 census) is situated within the principal food growing area of Australia. Food processing accounts for half the region's turnover. Increasingly, agricultural businesses are and will need to be integrated into global economic activity. If they are to be globally competitive they will rely progressively more on Information and Communications Technologies and on the overall technologisation of many work practices in line with the demands of global agri-businesses. This transition will require a differently skilled labour force. A serious problem identified by the community is that, while the overall population of the region is increasing it is also aging as young people move to the cities for education and employment. Thus, while the population is increasing, the available local labour force is decreasing. Paradoxically, there are still unacceptably high numbers of long-term unemployed, especially amongst youth, those over fifty years of age, Aboriginal adults, those from non English speaking backgrounds (25% of the population in 2006), ex-offenders and the disabled. Indigenous unemployment is high (80% in the Goulburn Valley Region as a whole).
How can communities like Shepparton develop work-related literacy education approaches that meet current needs but, importantly, predict and address emerging literacy demands so that the local community is well placed to respond to the opportunities and challenges of the future?
Keywords: Vocational Education and Training
The OECD (2006) Starting Strong II report identified two broad categories as being critical to the provision of quality in children's services: external legislated requirements and internal processes and practices. In this paper, the authors suggest that the regulatory environment in which long day care (LDC) centres in New South Wales operate (National Childcare Accreditation Council, 2005; NSW Department of Community Services, 2004), and the observation ratings scales predominantly used in research to assess quality practices in children's services (Harms, Clifford, & Cryer, 1998; Harms, Cryer, & Clifford, 2003), are grounded in positivist approaches. Drawing on Foucauldian (1978, 1980, 1983) notions of power and discourse, they argue that while useful, such positivist understandings of quality have their dangers. Resisting a binary positioning, we propose that a multiple perspective approach to quality, and one that embraces positivist and poststructuralist underpinnings, has the potential to lead to richer, and appropriately, deeper understandings of the complex processes and practices that underpin the consistent provision of high quality LDC.
This conceptual problematising of quality is complemented by drawing on preliminary findings from a multi-phased project, A multi-modal investigation of current and proposed structures and processes determining and sustaining quality in Australian centre based child care, funded by the Australian Research Council to Charles Sturt University (Discovery Grant DP0881729, 2008 -2010: L Harrison, F Press, J Sumsion, J. Bowes, M Fenech. $257,196). This project is investigating current and proposed structural and process level elements that determine and sustain quality in Australian centre based child care. Findings from an in-depth case study of an identified high quality LDC centre will be used to elucidate less tangible but equally critical dimensions of quality - teachers' reflective practices being a notable example (Goodfellow, 2003) - than those generally acknowledged in quality child care research and accreditation discourses. As the Rudd Labor government moves to a five tiered system of accreditation in Australia, this paper will raise considerations for how a multiple perspective approach to quality, and its ensuing refined understandings of 'within centre' processes that determine high quality, might inform current Federal government policy.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 62 HAR08588 Investigating quality in Early Childhood Education and Care (ECEC) - A multi-perspective approach: (1) conceptual issues.
Keywords: Early Childhood
Teacher retention is an issue in many education systems, and retaining early career teachers is even more problematic. There is a need for support and professional learning for beginning teachers. This paper explores results from classroom observations and interviews with two early career teacher participants after professional development in cooperative learning (CL). The classroom observations focussed on the implementation of cooperative learning, with follow-up interviews focussed on understandings of practice. Difference was found in the impact of professional learning between the two teachers (an early career teacher in her third year and another in her first year of teaching). Whilst both teachers made gains, the more experienced teacher made greater gains in understanding and practice, while the inexperienced teacher, improved in knowledge and practice but also struggled with other factors related to beginning teaching. The prevailing culture of the school also had a huge impact on the practice of these teachers. It is important to have a focus on pedagogy to enhance early career teachers' professional accomplishment, as well as maintain the enthusiasm that they portray in these early years, if we are to retain quality teachers in the profession.
Keywords: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
Physics is universally recognized as a complex subject where many students struggle. Traditional Physics teaching methods can leave many members of the Y generation disengaged and looking for an easier option.
Physics material is difficult to understand because its high element interactivity causes a large intrinsic cognitive load resulting in cognitive overload for many high school students. In this research project, the Cognitive Load Theory (Sweller et al, 1998) was used to design a new instructional method to reduce extraneous cognitive load while increasing germane cognitive load. The Tablet/Workbook Pedagogy exploits digital pen technology using a single Tablet PC connected to a data projector in association with electronic workbooks and online resources operated by a teacher.
The workbooks contain a structured but incomplete record of the information, diagrams and images pertinent to the lesson. As the lesson develops through dynamic teacher/class interactions, it is captured by the teacher in digital ink in the electronic workbook. Students complete the missing details, e.g. key terms, in their paper workbooks. Online multimedia resources are used frequently to add real world context and to visualize complex concepts. More class time is devoted to the activities, discussions and problem solving which assist students to construct meaning and develop schemas.
Literature indicates that Tablet PCs have been used for teaching purposes in high school and university settings in Australia and internationally. In most studies all students have Tablet PC's. For the majority of schools such an investment in technology is not possible so this research has focused on the more affordable option of a single Tablet PC for the teacher. The literature also indicates that there is a need for research that investigates the effect of Tablet PC use on students' performance in assessment tasks rather than just on attitudinal changes.
The research was conducted with Year 11 and 12 Physics classes. Design Experiment methodology was used and a blended methods approach to data collection and analysis was adopted. It was found that this approach leads to a significant improvement in assessment performance for Physics students, particularly on far-transfer tasks. Gender-based analyses indicated that boys, particularly benefited from the use of the workbooks. Students reported a strong preference for this teaching style and the reasons for their preference resonate with several aspects of Cognitive Load Theory such as The Split Attention Effect, the Worked Example Practice Approach and the Completion Practice Approach.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 76 TUO08686 Addressing students' perceptions that physics and maths are too hard.
Keywords: Science and ICT Education
An increasing awareness of the detrimental effects of single-item scales to measure bullying has recently become apparent. A new multiple-item multiple-scale behavioural measure of bullying was developed for secondary schools by Parada (2000) and found to be a reliable and valid scale for adolescent students. However, it is not known whether a similar instrument would yield sound psychometric properties for younger students and therefore provide a salient measure for those students. The aim of the present investigation is to examine the multi-dimensional and hierarchical structure of the Adolescent Peer Relations Questionnaire (APRI)(Parada, 2000) for upper primary aged students. A total of 894 students from Years 5 and 6 from eight Western Sydney primary schools completed the questionnaire. The APRI contains 36 items, 6 scales, and measures 3 types of bullying (Physical, Verbal, Social) in 2 categories (bullying, being targeted). Each scale (e.g., Bullying Physical) is comprised of 6 items. In addition, this investigation analyses the ability of these 3 types of bullying and being targeted to define 2 global second order factors - Global Bullying, and Global Target. Results from the first- and second order Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) showed excellent results for the APRI. The APRI was as such deemed appropriate for use within the upper primary school years.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 69 MAG08606 Innovations in school bullying research: Theory, measurement, analysis, and intervention.
Keywords: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
This paper introduces a range of issues involved in researching classroom activities in the growing curriculum area known as the "New Life Sciences" (NLS). It describes the need to continue and support new ways of learning and using literacy as the school years progress and then outlines the significance of multimodal representations of knowledge in NLS and the foundational use of digital technologies in the growth of this discipline. It gives a brief outline of the nature of NLS developments and concludes with a summary statement of the context for the NLS research project from which the papers following in this symposium are drawn.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 47, NIC08490 Transforming knowledge and learning through technologies and modalities: The case of the 'New Life Sciences' in secondary schooling.
Keyword: Science and ICT Education
On Wednesday August 27 at the National Press Club the Prime Minister outlined plans to take to COAG by the end of the year concerning the reform of Australian schools, part of his unveiling of Labor's Education Revolution, which separately also includes curriculum reforms. He indicated that the government was committed to investing substantially in schools to deliver better outcomes but only on condition of better accountability and transparency. Rudd's remarks build on prior comments made by Education Minister Gillard about the need for parents to be given as much information as possible to inform their choice of school. As yet it is unclear as to how the Government precisely proposes to do this and the Government's signaling of proposed changes has aroused much comment as well as controversy.
While the response of state school teacher unions, opposed to the funding of non-government schools, is known, other parties with an interest in such developments, such as the states and territories, the Catholic systems and the independents have been mute. While it is unlikely that the states and territories will give in without wresting some concessions from the Commonwealth, few are likely to be gained, given the power of Treasury and, on judicial interpretation of the Constitution, a likely further overriding of states rights. The position of the Catholics on transparency, and who are committed to a complex needs-based funding formula as well as an appeal to the use of confessional politics before elections, is likely to be opposed to change. The independents have indicated their general support for change. The Government has additionally promised not to dislocate funding arrangements for the forthcoming quadrennium, while currently legislating to ensure that all schools' private income is declared, a proposal opposed by the Coalition and the private schools. What is therefore to happen from 2012 should be of considerable interest to Conference participants, especially those working in social contexts and policy. AARE has two or three years in which to influence such an agenda.
A timely opportunity occurs here for AARE to address the concerns and interests of its members, arising especially from what might be meant by greater accountability and transparency, particularly in a climate in which all Australian school provision is to varying degrees publicly-funded, and as a consequence of which Australian schools are remarkably socially differentiated, both between the public, Catholic and independent sectors, as well as within them. This symposium will investigate the research questions arising out of the above pressing policy and education agenda, so that members and conference participants may have an opportunity to generate and exchange ideas and suggestions, views and opinions about how conference might proceed to address questions arising out of the Government's proposals, both pro-actively as well as in terms of offering an informed and scholarly commentary on school funding policy as it unfolds, with implications for research as well as teaching. A panel of five provocateurs, including Professors Jack Keating (UMelb), Bob Lingard (UQ), Margaret Vickers (UWS) and Louise Watson (UCanberra), has been asked to give short presentations on its views relating to the research and teaching implications of this fascinating and far-reaching policy area. Half an hour has thereafter been allocated to questions and comments. We very much look forward to seeing you there.
Keyword: Sociology of Education
This paper examines the perspectives of primary school teachers, administrators and personnel working in eastern suburban Melbourne as they consider the rationale for, and the purposes of, gifted education within the broader landscape of teachers' work. The data for this presentation are drawn from a single case qualitative case study where semi-structured interviews were held four years after the school participated in the Bright Futures gifted professional development. The school proudly proclaims a tradition of scholarship and excellence within a friendly, caring, cooperative and democratic ethos. Teachers welcomed the opportunity to express their thoughts, sentiments and opinions on curriculum, assessment and reporting practices, their attitudes to the aims of gifted education, the selection of children for pull-out programs, and their views to school management and to parents in relation tho these matters. Using a Foucoultian framework, I analyse how teachers juggle many goals within the complex reality of daily classroom teaching, and how they are wedged between the power of formal school rhetoric and educational policy working to improve learning outcomes for all students. This, in turn, has significant repercussions for addressing the needs of gifted students and generates considerable ambivalence about the implementation of gifted programs. I propose that such responses are important elements in the contemporary landscape of teacher's work
Keyword: Special Education
In their account of special education policy in New Zealand O'Brien and Ryba (2005) argue that "[i]t is timely now to move further from individually allocated resources to the provision of school-based resources" (p.43). Using the example of the circumstances and impact of the suspension of one student from a special school, we argue that there is still a need for individually allocated resources in special education. O'Brien and Ryba (2005) contend that the targeting of specialist staff to individual students maintains the distinction between regular and special education and, as a consequence, "does little to advance the ecosystemic approach" that they advocate (p.43). After looking at how an individual entitlement was used to provide a safe working environment for students and teachers at one special school, we suggest that the medical and ecosystemic discourses in special education should be viewed as complementary rather than conflicting.
Keyword: Special Education
The three theories of intellectual development that have had greatest influence on school classrooms since the turn of last century, behaviourism, constructivism and socioculturalism, were all conceptualised before the development of digital technologies. Current reform agendas in mathematics education emphasise the importance of social aspects of learning while, at the same time, recommending the incorporation of digital technologies into teaching and learning practice. While these influences on curriculum design draw theoretical underpinnings from sociocultural or socio-constructivist perspectives of knowledge acquisition and meaning making, theoretical frameworks that help explain the role of technology in mediating collaborative learning are only beginning to emerge.
This paper will document the emergence of a social perspective on teaching and learning mathematics in conjunction with digital technologies by examining the proceedings of events sponsored by the International Commission on Mathematical Instruction over the past 20 years. Recent research literature that addresses the role of technology in mediating collaborative learning practices within mathematics classrooms will also be reviewed with particular attention to theoretical frameworks which seek to describe and explain the interactive processes which take place when students work with technology as individuals and when working with teachers and peers.
Four typologies of digital technologies and their role in collaborative practice are identified: technologies designed for both mathematics and collaboration; technologies designed for mathematics; technologies designed for collaboration; and technologies designed for neither mathematics nor collaboration. Distinctions between these typologies are based on the degree to which a technology is designed specifically for collaboration and the extent to which the technology is enabled with mathematical capabilities. The existence of the typology technologies designed for neither mathematics nor collaboration demonstrates that collaborative practices in mathematics classrooms can be mediated through interaction with digital tools such as robots. This suggests that such collaborative practice is influenced by factors other than the alignment of a technology to a specific purpose; broader influences such as the supportiveness of a classroom culture in relation to the use of technology and of collaborative interaction must also be considered.
As new technologies continue to be developed and refined, they offer new ways to construe communication, collaboration and social interaction and thus change the availability and feasibility of different kinds of productive social interaction. This has implications for both research and practice.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 23, GOO08255 Sociocultural approaches to understanding technology integration in secondary mathematics education.
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
This paper investigates the nature of student-student-technology interaction when working in partnership with computer algebra systems (CAS) on mathematical modelling tasks and the classroom affordances and constraints that influence such interaction. Mathematical modelling - formulating a mathematical representation of a real world situation, using mathematics to derive results, and interpreting the results in terms of the given situation - is a significant element of the senior mathematics syllabuses in Queensland and appears, as applications of mathematics, in the curriculum documents of most other Australian states. CAS enabled technologies not only have the capability to perform a wide range of mathematical procedures, such as function graphing, matrix manipulation and symbolic operations, but also the capacity to provide real time advice about errors as mathematics is done. As CAS enabled technologies are developing increasing acceptance in mainstream mathematics instruction there is need to explore and understand the synergies that might be developed between these technologies and current curriculum objectives and to identify implications of these synergies for classroom practice.
While there is significant research related to solving contextualized problems through the use of the multiple representational facilities offered by digital technologies, and substantive argument to support the use of CAS to enhance the process of mathematical modelling, literature that deals with technology mediated student-student interaction is only just emerging. The project reported upon here aims to develop a greater understanding of the nature of interactions which take place within CAS enabled classrooms and so add to developing sociocultural theory in this area.
Data are drawn from a one year pilot study of three different senior secondary school classrooms where CAS is used on a regular basis in the teaching and learning of mathematics. Analysis of these data indicates that CAS technologies have a role to play as provocateurs of productive student-student interaction in both small group and whole class settings. This analysis also suggests that the teacher has a vital role to play in creating a classroom culture where students' investigative and collaborative approaches to problem solving are supported through the use of CAS. Further, a teacher's expertise with CAS, in addition to a disposition towards exploratory approaches to learning mathematics, was noted as an influential factor.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 23, GOO08255 Sociocultural approaches to understanding technology integration in secondary mathematics education.
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
Some educational theorists have suggested recently that educational theory would benefit from adopting spatial theories to inform knowledge of educational processes and practices (Gulson and Symes, 2007, p. 98). Indeed, by framing this discussion around rural-regional sustainability, foregrounding space is inescapable, for the term 'rural-regional' is itself a spatial construction. A spatial question requires a spatial answer, and this paper will investigate the relationship between space and education in inland NSW through an exploration of educational policy and educational spatial practices.
As with other public-sector organizations, the education system can be conceptualised as an explicitly spatial endeavour. In NSW, the Department of Education and Training (DET) has responsibility for delivering public education and training from early childhood to the senior secondary level, and beyond (ie TAFE). These services are delivered spatially, through structures like classrooms, schools, offices and departmental buildings; through various policies that imagines space, such as education regions, clusters and future plans; through resources that flow across space, such as materials, money and people (e.g. teacher recruitment); and through knowledge transfers across space via meetings, conferences, research reports and everyday discourse. Such considerations will be briefly compared with the spatial conceptions of two other professional practice fields, health and policing. In each instance, defining and territorialising space is a key component of imagining and practicing space, yet each field organises space differently. By exploring spatial conceptions in other fields, we can imagine new ways of conceiving (educational) space.
The paper will explore notions of space and education for rural-regional sustainability by focusing on the administration of NSW's large, sparsely-populated inland rural areas. Drawing on concepts of territoriality and policy discourse, it will investigate how education practices are sustained across these large, open spaces through a system of administrative units currently called DET Regions. These regions constitute a particular conception of space, a conception rendered through policy and implemented through educational practice in space. Although these spaces are arbitrarily imagined spaces, their effects on practice are nonetheless real. They structure our understanding of what space is, how to define it, how to work in and with it. One question this paper will seek to answer is why are DET Regions arranged and defined as they are? Why, in NSW, are there ten Regions, of which three would be considered inland NSW? Why not more than ten or less? By what discursive process were these regions formed, and how does this discourse affect educational practices through the spaces of education?
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 59, GRE08563 Education and rural-regional sustainability.
Keyword: Rural Education
Schools in New Zealand subscribe to a national curriculum. That document specifies the direction for teaching and learning in English-medium New Zealand schools. While all schools must align with the intent of that document they have considerable flexibility when determining its detail. This paper represents a case study of a small New Zealand primary school as it begins to make decisions about how to give effect to the national curriculum in ways that best address the particular needs, interests, and circumstances of the school's students and community. The school's principal initiated a research project with partners from the local university to track this development. The research team has worked alongside staff, students and parents of the school's community to monitor and evaluate the 2020Vision development during 2008. Data shared in this paper are reports on the initial phase of the project. This includes interview data, observations of staff meetings, a survey and an extensive analysis of school documents to highlight the shared understandings of the emerging vision, the processes of consultation and the effects of this development on student engagement and achievement. Findings from our initial phase reveal some preliminary steps towards answering questions such as what knowledge and skills do the school's learners need for life in 2020, what will be needed to ensure that the children get these and what short term goals will help this vision to be realised in practice?
Keyword: Curriculum Theory and Development
The importance of the teacher-student relationship in educational practice is well established (Freire, 2003; Shor, 1992; Purpel & McLaurin, 2004). Indeed, our understandings of the relational nature of education have given rise to a range of expressions such as relational connectedness (Gibbs, 2006; Palmer, 1998, 2004), narrative pedagogy (Diekelmann, 2001), ?ta (Forsyth, 2006), Ako (Bishop, 2008) and the like. These expressions provide ways of viewing the teacher-student relationship.
Research on the 'lived experience' of the teacher-student relationship in teacher education is not prolific. A particular research approach that offers a way of researching the lived experiences of lecturers and student-teachers that is well suited to such an exploration is the phenomenological research approach. In this research approach, the researcher seeks taken-for-granted and ontological meanings of phenomenon such as the teacher-student relationship from the participant's stories.
The purpose of this paper is to consider some stories from a phenomenological research project which explored the meaning of the teacher-student relationship as this is lived by lecturers and student-teachers. After gathering stories of the experience of this relationship, hermeneutic interpretations of the text led the inquiry towards a greater appreciation of the ontological nature of the phenomenon. The stories and their meanings have the potential to influence teacher educators practice to the subtleties of the teacher-student relationship and the nature of relating with student-teachers.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
Adolescent mental health in Australia is currently a major social issue. The occurrence of such disorders as depression and anxiety in the secondary school aged population has consequences both for learning capacity and emotional well-being. However, young people who experience mental health difficulties are reluctant to seek help through face-to-face counselling. This is particularly so for boys more than girls. Young Australian males have been shown to have poorer educational outcomes, more incarceration, illness and completed suicides compared with young females. This is happening at a time when technology is an integral part of young people's social interaction. Young people use technology as an adjunct to face to face communication with their peers. They also seek health information and help through technology such as the internet. Sometimes they seek help only by technology. The potential for relative anonymity, which technology can provide, makes this medium a powerful resource for adolescents unwilling and hesitant to seek 'face to face' assistance. These facts challenge school professionals who work with this generation to use technology to assist students who need counselling help. This paper reports on an action research study in one secondary school where synchronous online counselling services were made available to the students. It outlines the process that was followed to implement this service. As the action of using online counselling progressed, the researcher gained insights, knowledge and skills which in turn informed subsequent developments for the innovation. Though the needs of the students who accessed the service were varied, the majority of clients considered their experience of online counselling as a positive interaction. Initial results suggest potential benefits, especially for boys, in incorporating online technologies into the current support methods already in place in schools.
Keyword: Educational Counselling
Curriculum frameworks nationally have embraced the idea of crossing the disciplinary boundaries, notably in Tasmania (Department of Education, 2000, 2006), in Queensland (Education Queensland, 2002, Education Queensland, 2001a, 2001b) and in Victoria (Victorian Curriculum Assessment Authority, 2005), as does the International Baccalaureate's (2007) Primary Years Program and its Middle Years Program. Interdisciplinary curriculum is defined in this paper as being intrinsically linked to the disciplines (Boix Mansilla et al., 1998) with the disciplines serving as points of entry for considering the deep questions and concepts that can cross the disciplinary boundaries. The disciplines are regarded as discreet lenses through which to view the world (Boix Mansilla et al. 1998), offering the students different methods and content knowledge to orient and enrich their perspectives.
This paper aims to provide snapshots of the findings of a small research project that explored the implementation of interdisciplinary curriculum in Year 8 classes in a large independent school located in the inner suburbs of Melbourne. The perspectives of teachers and students drawn from video-taped focus group interviews address the question: Is interdisciplinary disciplinary curriculum a sustainable future or an unattainable vision in the changing educational climate? The dialogic stance taken with the focus groups aligns with the dialectic -- a more formalised inquiry approach that encourages teachers and students to theorise their perspectives (Thomas & James, 2006). The interdisciplinary unit generated excitement and intellectual stimulus among students and teachers. We believe, however, that the success of the unit can be attributed to the curriculum learning experiences crossing but not transcending disciplinary boundaries (Strathern, 2006). It is the process of honouring disciplinary understandings before the interdisciplinary connections that suggests the likelihood of a sustainable future for this school's curriculum design.
Keyword: Curriculum Theory and Development
This paper presents results of a two phase-study in which curriculum plans developed by pre-service teachers in a regional Australian university were analysed using directed content analysis to determine the extent to which they contained concepts that (a) enhance school children's thinking and learning about complex environmental issues; and (b) encourage school children to act in environmentally responsible ways. In the first phase, environmentally focused curriculum plans developed and implemented by final year primary pre-service teachers were analysed. In this instance the pre-service teachers were not exposed to concepts of action-oriented knowledge either before, during or after they had written their plans. Nor had they undertaken any subjects about the SOSE (Study of Society and Environment) key learning area. As part of the second phase, secondary SOSE pre-service teachers who were exposed to Jensen's concepts of action-oriented knowledge throughout the semester were each asked to write a curriculum plan that focused on teaching about an environmental or social issue of interest to them. These plans were then analysed to see the extent to which explicit teachings about SOSE and action-oriented knowledge helped pre-service teachers to write action-oriented unit plans.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
In this paper we report on a research project that is seeking to develop a more sophisticated theoretical understanding of how and under what conditions mathematics teachers learn to effectively integrate technology into their practice. The aim of the project is to identify and analyse individual and contextual factors influencing secondary mathematics teachers' use of technology, and compare ways in which these factors come together to shape teachers' pedagogical identities. To do this we have undertaken longitudinal case studies of four secondary school mathematics teachers who were selected to represent contrasting combinations of factors known to influence technology integration Analysis of the data is from a sociocultural perspective, using Valsiner's zone theory as the theoretical framework. We compare similarities and differences between the teachers' professional identities to understand how these might influence the extent to which they adopt innovative practices involving technology. This provides a picture of each teacher's professional identity as an individual-acting-in-context.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 23, GOO08255 Sociocultural approaches to understanding technology integration in secondary mathematics education.
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
While substantial energy has gone into understanding the mechanics of assessment in higher education, little attention has been paid to developing means by which university lecturers can monitor the quality of the assessment tasks they develop. This paper introduces a research project, funded by the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, which was designed to (a) enhance the quality of assessment in the social sciences in the tertiary sector and (b) refine and evaluate a model for analysing and improving the quality of assessment tasks in the social sciences, primarily in first year courses. The research has its foundation in the NSW Quality Teaching model, with the major focus on the link between task quality and student performance. Initial findings are reported in the paper. We discuss the validity of the Quality Teaching model for the tertiary setting. We report a strong positive correlation between task quality and student work as measured by our instruments. We share some of the tasks before and after refinement to illustrate the kinds of gains to be made when diagnosing and redesigning tasks with reference to the detailed specifications provided by the Quality Teaching model.
Keyword: Higher Education
The 2006 round of the Program of International Student Assessment (PISA), run by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD), included 57 countries - nearly 90 per cent of the world's economy. How has PISA managed to gain such reach? How has it made itself relevant to such a large and diverse set of nations? The growing popularity of large-scale testing is but one example of the global spread of policy ideas. How do policy ideas become global phenomena? Finding theories of diffusion and globalisation inadequate in explaining the large-scale spread of policy ideas, I argue that the notion of assemblage offered by the process sociology of actor-network theory (ANT) provides a useful analytic. Rather than using big ideas to explain how certain situations have come to be, ANT uses situations to explain how certain ideas have become big. It offers a way to understand even apparently established networks as fluid assemblages that are continually built and translated, and provides the tools for thinking differently, and with greater agency, about issues that appear powerful and entrenched. It has been argued that deconstruction, which has been the main approach of policy researchers in recent years, is no longer adequate, and that new theories to understand and to engage with policy-making are urgently needed (Gale, 2006). ANT offers the role of 'assembler' rather than 'deconstructionist' to the policy researcher, and thus has the potential to transform policy analysis. To view policy phenomena using this analytic is to bypass tired debates and adversarial stories of power struggles, and to create spaces of hope and negotiation.
Keyword: Sociology of EducationIn the analysis of assessment tasks, significantly higher scores were found on all three dimensions of QT in the Physical Education assessment tasks than in any of the other subjects. These relatively high quality tasks are illustrated in the paper with task and student work samples. Possible explanations for these results that are explored in the paper are (1) qualities and capacities of the teachers themselves who, in Australia, unlike some other countries, enter universities with some of the highest university entrance scores of any students (including engineering and medical students), and/or (2) that they are used to challenging work themselves as learners and thus have higher expectations than some teachers for the work students can produce; (3) the PE syllabuses which are organised around key concepts and deep understanding; (4) the subject matter itself, especially in easily achieving Significance in the relation of topics covered to students' lives and hence close alignment with the QT model (affirmed through content analysis of tasks) (5) the richer or more comprehensive nature of the tasks given in PE which tend to be project-based and designed to be completed over several lessons or weeks.
On the other hand, scores for classroom practice were lower in PE on Intellectual Quality than in any other subject (significantly different only for some), they were the highest in Quality Learning Environment, and in the middle for Significance. Possible explanations for these ratings of classroom practice include - (1) the lower Intellectual Quality of practical lessons versus theory lessons (test this by separating the data where possible); (2) the organisational strengths of PE teachers and the more relaxed relationships of PE teachers with their students which have been documented in the literature that might account for the high scores in Quality Learning Environment; and (3) Significance scores that are affected by the differences between practical and theory lessons. These explanations are explored with reference to the qualitative accounts of lessons and with reference to the interview data gathered from teachers in the study. Comparisons with other analyses of PE curriculum are made (Green, 2000; Kirk, 1992; Penney, 1998).
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 53, GOR08530 School subjects, conceptions of curriculum, and pedagogical practice: An empirical investigation.
Keyword: Curriculum Theory and Development
No Country for Old Men is a 2007 crime thriller movie that tells the story of a botched drug deal and the violent cat-and-mouse drama that ensues as the protagonists crisscross each other's paths in the desert landscape of 1980 West Texas.
No Country for Young People is not a crime thriller, although it includes an accusation of criminality and lashings of symbolic violence. It's a story of botched educational ideals and the political melodramas that ensue as multiple stakeholders crisscross each other's paths in the educational policy landscape of 21st century Australia. But beyond this slightly stretched comparison, No Country for Young People is primarily a meditation on contemporary anxieties in Australian education. It is partly inspired by Peter Pierce's 1999 monograph, The Country of Lost Children, in which he portrays Australia as a place where the innocent young are most especially in jeopardy. In 19th century literature and art, the recurring motif of a child lost in 'the bush' became an increasingly significant dimension of European settlers' experiences of Australia, whereas the latter half of the 20th century saw analogous cultural narratives shift towards urban environments and the plight of young people abandoned or endangered by their parents' generation.
In contemporary popular culture, Australia's late industrial cities and suburbs are places where children are aborted, abandoned, murdered or never conceived, and in which many adults and social institutions - through neglect or deliberate intention - are dedicated to their ruin. In life these young people are prey to parental abuse, prowling paedophiles, Internet porn peddlers, religious sects, and serial killers, and in death they become raw material for sensationalising community fears through media-driven and/or politically motivated moral panics. Like the bush-lost children before them, these 'at risk' young people symbolise adult fears of self, society, and the future, but now they also attract more obscure anxieties. Characters worry about whether their children have a future in Australia, sometimes asking if succeeding generations should be brought into being at all. Doom-laden scenarios concerning global warming, food and energy security, and other aspects of Australia's social, economic and environmental sustainability exacerbate such fears.
My concern is that the most common public policy response to these persistent fears and insecurities is to retreat to a politics of complexity reduction. Many politicians and public opinion leaders see teachers and schools (aided and abetted by trendy intellectuals and postmodernist academics) as being in the vanguard of people and institutions dedicated to Australian children's educational ruin, and simplistically seek to 'protect' them with blunt instruments such as back-to-phonics literacy and a national curriculum. I will argue that Australia's young people are much more seriously endangered by the symbolic violence of those who position them as docile receptors of whatever schools and teachers serve up to them, and who treat them as passive screens upon which to project their own anxieties about their location in place/space and time.
This paper examines the position and role of 'place' in primary school curriculum. Drawing on the research literature and preliminary data the paper analyses a re-imagined environmental education program at a primary school. Innovative and collaborative processes that depict children as integral designers of a new garden place are discussed. Focus is given to the school ground as an important site for teaching and learning. The role of an ecological centre designed to teach children about sustainable building principles is discussed. Attention is drawn to the importance of children as place makers via endeavours that encourage and support children's fascination and affinity with outdoor places in the school ground. Tending a food garden is proposed as a significant pedagogical pathway for nurturing children's sense of wonder and enabling familiarity and a love of the natural world.
Keyword: Curriculum Theory and DevelopmentWhilst literature on traditional bullying continues to grow, a paucity of research exists regarding its newest form: cyber bullying. The present study consisted of a sample of Australian secondary students (N = 803) and aimed to identify the underlying structure of cyber bullying. A previously validated measure of traditional bullying, the Adolescent Peer Relations Instrument - Bully and Target (APRI-BT; Parada, 2000), was extended to include cyber bully and target behaviours. Reliability analyses and Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) demonstrated that the newly extended measure of traditional and cyber bullying behaviours was psychometrically sound. It was concluded that the current investigation provided a firm understanding of the nature and structure of cyber bullying, thus forming a sound base from which to conduct future bullying research. Moreover, potential limitations of the present investigation, and implications for theory, research, and practice were discussed.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 69, MAG08606 Innovations in school bullying research: Theory, measurement, analysis, and intervention.
Keyword: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
The present investigation consisted of a sample of Australian secondary students (N = 803) and aimed to elucidate the relation between traditional and cyber bullying and being bullied with multidimensional facets of self-concept. Structural Equation Modelling (SEM) demonstrated a similar pattern of primarily negative outcomes for traditional and cyber forms of bullying and being bullied with the self-concept domains, as measured by the Self-Description Questionnaire II-Short (SDQII-S; Marsh, Ellis, Parada, Richards, & Heubeck, 2005). Findings were interpreted in the context of bullying theory, and it was concluded that in order to fully capture students' experiences of bullying, future studies must be inclusive of traditional and cyber forms. Finally, potential limitations of the current investigation, implications for theory and practice, and directions for future research were presented.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 69, MAG08606 Innovations in school bullying research: Theory, measurement, analysis, and intervention.
Keyword: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
Objectives
The purpose of this paper is to report findings related to curriculum implementation of two types of mathematics textbooks that have different organizations of mathematical content and to discuss implications of these findings. Research has established that students learn what they are given the opportunity to learn (for mathematics, see Floden, 2002; Hiebert, 1999; Hiebert & Grouws, 2007). Ultimately teachers are the decision-makers with regard to specific content taught, but they rely heavily on curricular materials, especially textbooks, to inform such decisions. Thus it is important to determine how teachers use textbooks in the classroom. Findings reported in this paper are based on data collected as part of an NSF-funded research project: Comparing Options in Secondary School Mathematics: Investigating Curriculum (COSMIC). The COSMIC project involves a three-year longitudinal comparative study of integrated mathematics curricula and single-subject mathematics curricula on student learning at the high school level. One group of students (N ? 1300) studied from an integrated content approach (e.g., Core-Plus Mathematics) and the other students (N ? 1300) from a subject-specific content approach (students followed an Algebra I, Geometry, Algebra II sequence). Curriculum implementation was assessed using multiple measures including classroom observations, on-line Textbook Use Diaries (TUDs), Table of Content Logs (TOCs), teacher surveys and interviews.
Perspective/Rationale
When examining what students are learning when interacting with specific mathematics curricula, we cannot assume these curricula are being implemented in any specific way (Scott, 1994). In particular, teachers modify curricula based on their personal beliefs, knowledge, and experience within the mathematics classroom. "Two classrooms in which the same curriculum is supposedly being 'implemented' may look very different; the activities of teacher and students in each room may be quite dissimilar, with different learning opportunities available, different mathematical ideas under consideration, and different outcomes achieved" (Kilpatrick, 2003).
Although we know that textbooks are the centerpiece of mathematics instruction in U.S. schools (Grouws & Smith, 2000), we know very little about the relationship between implementation levels, specific textbooks, and content specific learning. Teachers may choose to move through the textbook sequentially or not; they may choose to cover most of the chapters of the textbook or not; they may supplement the textbook with materials from other resources or not; and so forth. All of these decisions and others affect the measure of fidelity to which the curriculum is implemented and the mathematics that students are given the opportunity to learn. Each of these factors was carefully assessed via triangulated measures in this study.
Methods
Participants
Participants in this study were teachers in schools using both content organization approaches, but with different groups of students. Students were given their choice between enrolling in classes utilizing the single-subject approach or those utilizing the integrated approach. The sample for this report is comprised of 113 classes (60 integrated and 53 single-subject) in 5 U.S. states with 33 teachers and approximately 2600 students. Student learning was assessed through the use of standardized measures of achievement as well as internally developed instruments to assess students' depth of knowledge, skills acquisition, and conceptual development.
Data Sources
Curriculum implementation was measured using three instruments from the perspective of the teacher and two instruments from the perspective of the researcher.
To gain the teacher perspective we had teachers report information by completing (1) a written survey (2) a table of contents record (TOC) and (3) an on-line textbook-use diary (TUD). The written survey provided information about such things as teaching experience, professional development, views of the curriculum, and so forth. The TOC and TUD provided information about what happened on a daily basis in the teacher's classroom.
For the researcher perspective, curriculum implementation was measured utilizing classroom observations and teacher interviews. During each classroom observation, the observer took notes to record anecdotal evidence of particular presentation features being implemented. Upon completion of the class visit, the observer completed a comprehensive summary form that included judgments about the implementation of the textbook components of the specific curricula being used (extent of use or attention received). Finally, the observer assigned overall level of content and presentation fidelity scores (5 point scales) using field notes and a well-defined scoring rubric. High content fidelity consists of the mathematical content being enacted as written in the textbook and the textbook used as the primary source of content for the lesson. High presentation fidelity indicates the enacted curriculum being consistent with the expectations of the authors as expressed in the textbook author interviews we conducted and the authors' pedagogical philosophy as reflected in the notes and suggestions to teachers in the Teacher's Edition of the textbook. Each rating was independent of the other allowing for the possibility of a high fidelity rating on one aspect of implementation and a lower fidelity rating on the other for any given lesson. Data from more than 100 classroom observations have been collected (3 observations for each teacher participant).
Results and Discussion
With the data in hand and analysis currently being conducted we provide data that has direct implications for answering the following types of questions:
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
Paraprofessionals are increasingly being seen across the Western world as one way to provide support for school students with additional and high classroom needs. Their work is varied and ranges from playground supervision, to the creation of classroom materials, to sole instruction. Based on a 2007 study of twenty four English for Speakers of Other Languages (ESOL) paraprofessionals working across all levels of the New Zealand school system, this paper considers the issue of sustainability by examining current ESOL paraprofessional practices and identifying where the gaps in effective practice are.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 33, HAR08361 Working towards sustainable professional development for ESOL paraprofessionals in New Zealand Schools: An analysis of current practice
Keyword: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE and ESL
Introduction
Debates over best practice for assessing students stem, in part, from divergent ideas as to the purposes of assessment. Researchers have suggested that stakeholders hold four major conceptions about the purposes for assessment:
During the last decade, there has been an increased focus on formative assessment practices, under the rubric 'assessment for learning' (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; Black & Wiliam, 1998; Clarke, 2005). These recommendations align with the conception that the purpose of assessment is improvement. Formative practices are often contrasted with more formal and summative practices such as standardized testing that teachers commonly associate with both the accountability or irrelevance conceptions. Over-emphasis on accountability has been shown to have negative consequences for teachers, teaching, curriculum, and learning (Firestone, Schorr, & Monfils, 2004; Hamilton, 2003; Jones, 2001).
The research problem
While literature has identified four major ways of thinking about the purposes of assessment, more work is needed to examine how closely these relate to or align with practicing teachers' conceptions. Teacher conceptions are important since teacher thinking affects their practices (Clark & Peterson, 1986; Pajares, 1992; Thompson, 1992). In turn, teacher practices can greatly affect student outcomes (Muijs, 2006; Muijs & Reynolds, 2005).
Brown's (2002) work on teacher's conceptions of assessment has made a significant contribution to our understanding of how assessment purposes inter-relate in the minds of teachers. His survey instrument on teacher's conceptions of assessment has been used with both primary and secondary teachers in New Zealand and Queensland, Australia. The validity of the model has been demonstrated through confirmatory factor analyses which demonstrated acceptable fit to data among these four populations (Brown, 2004, 2006, 2007 ; Brown & Lake, 2006).
However, this instrument in incapable of capturing data relating to teacher thinking about assessment that falls outside these four categories. It also does not allow us to understand why teachers may be aligned with particular conception. The research study reported in this paper adopts a qualitative approach to investigate teacher conceptions of assessment and seeks to answer the question: What qualitatively different conceptions of assessment are held by New Zealand teachers of years 5-10? As this question deals with variation in conceptions, a phenomenographic approach was selected to investigate this question.
Phenomenographic research investigates the human understandings developed through interactions with the world. Central to this approach is the ontological assumption that a non-dualist world exists (Marton, 1981; Marton & Booth, 1997; Sjostrom & Dahlgren, 2002; Svensson, 1997). Because of this theoretical stance, phenomenographers utilise a second order perspective when analysing data, trying to understand the phenomenon from the perspective of the participant instead of evaluating the response from their own viewpoint (Marton, 1981, 1996). Differentiation, abstraction, reduction, and comparison of meaning are fundamental processes in phenomenographic analysis (Svensson, 1997).
Data collection and analysis
The study reported in this paper is part of the Measuring Teachers' Assessment Practices (MTAP) project at The University of Auckland. An invitation to participate was sent to all primary, intermediate, and secondary schools in the greater Auckland region. Over thirty schools agreed to give access to teachers of mathematics and/or English working with students in Years 5 to 10. All such teachers were asked to complete Brown's COA III abridged questionnaire (Brown, 2006). The second author analysed these questionnaire data and selected 20 teachers who exhibited noticeably different profiles in their conceptions of assessment.
The first author then conducted semi-structured interviews with the teachers, without being aware of each participant's conceptions profile. All data were transcribed verbatim and each utterance was labeled as per the method described in Lankshear and Knobel (2004).
After the data were transcribed and label, phenomenographic analysis was conducted as described by Marton (1981, 1986). Analytical decisions were made based on Sjostrom and Dahlgren's (2002) three indicators:
First, similar conceptions were grouped together into pools of meaning and then abstracted to create categories of description. Each category of description represented a qualitatively different way of experiencing the phenomenon. These categories of description were hierarchically organized into the outcome space by complexity. To judge complexity, similarities and differences between the categories were examined and examples of pregnancy (Sjostrom & Dahlgren, 2002) were often used to make decisions.
Results
As the interviews are scheduled for June, 2008, results will be available in time for the conference. It is expected that the data will find evidence that Brown's four categories accurately represent teacher thinking about the purpose of assessment. However, it is considered likely that additional ways of thinking about assessment will also be present. These data will also help better explain the reasons why teachers are aligned with specific conceptions.
Keyword: Assessment and Measurement
Teachers' thinking influences their classroom practices (Clark & Peterson, 1986; Pajares, 1992; Thompson, 1992). In turn, teacher actions significantly impact pupil learning (Muijs, 2006; Muijs & Reynolds, 2005). A large body of research has already examined teacher conceptions of teaching and learning (Bolhuis & Voeten, 2004; Boulton-Lewis, Smith, McCrindle, Burnett, & Campbell, 2001; Kember, 1997; Kember & Gow, 1994; Kember & Kwan, 2000; Samuelowicz & Bain, 2001; Trigwell, Prosser, & Waterhouse, 1999). Comparatively little has focused on teacher conceptions relating to assessment, an important and distinct part of the teaching and learning cycle.
The most robust empirical research into teachers' conceptions of assessment has been conducted by Brown and colleagues (G. Brown, 2002, 2004; G. Brown & Lake, 2006). His questionnaire on teachers' conceptions of assessment has been used with New Zealand and Australian primary and secondary teachers. This instrument identifies four conceptions of the purpose of assessment found in research literature:
The validity of this model has been shown through confirmatory factor analyses which demonstrated acceptable fit to data among New Zealand and Australian primary and secondary teachers (G. Brown, 2004, 2006, 2007; G. Brown & Lake, 2006).
While feedback is generally conceptualised as part of the assessment cycle, it is worth examining in its own right. Hattie's (1999) synthesis of meta-analyses on the effects of schooling found that feedback is the most powerful single moderator that enhances achievement, agreeing with work by Black, Wiliam, and colleagues (Black, Harrison, Lee, Marshall, & Wiliam, 2003; Black & Wiliam, 1998).
While there is a growing body of literature examining student understandings of feedback (J. Brown, 2007; Carnell, 2000; Higgins, Hartley, & Skelton, 2002; Lipnevich, Smith, & Barnhart, 2008; Peterson & Irving, 2008; Poulos & Mahony, 2008), teacher conceptions of feedback practices have seldom been investigated through empirical research. There are numerous models in the research literature (Butler & Winne, 1995; Hargreaves, 2005; Hattie & Timperley, 2007; Nicol & Macfarlane-Dick, 2006; Tunstall & Gipps, 1996), but it remains unclear how practicing teachers relate their own work to these models, if at all.
The study reported in this paper was set in New Zealand and was largely exploratory. It explored the research question: What conceptions of assessment and feedback are held by New Zealand secondary school teachers?
To address this question, research was carried out in four New Zealand secondary schools. New Zealand teachers are required to follow a national curriculum, and can use observational or informal assessment methods along with a variety of teacher-administered standardised assessment tools and teacher-created summative assessment pieces. The final three years of secondary school (Years 11-13) are dominated by external qualifications.
Focus groups were chosen for data collection because they can explore perceptions, feelings, motivations, and attitudes (Kitzinger, 1995; Krueger, 1994). This data collection technique has previously been used to explore student conceptions of feedback (Lipnevich et al., 2008; Peterson & Irving, 2008; Poulos & Mahony, 2008), making it seem appropriate for the present study.
Eleven teachers (4 mathematics, 6 English and 1 science) from four large, diverse co-educational Auckland secondary schools participated in two 90-minute focus groups, each run by a member of the research team. They were participants in the CAF (Conceptions of Assessment and Feedback) project, a larger two year study. As much as possible, teachers were separated from those they worked closely with in an effort to maximize their freedom of response. Focus groups were audio recorded and transcribed verbatim.
The focus groups were designed to address three key aspects of assessment and feedback: definition, purpose, and personal response. Fontana and Frey (2000) note that engaging recalcitrant participants can be problematic. To allow all to become involved, prior to any group discussion, the teachers wrote down their definitions of assessment and feedback, their purposes, and a personal response to each on coloured Post-It (R) notes/stickies. They placed these on a large piece of paper hung on the wall under relevant headings e.g., 'Assessment Definition' (see Peterson & Barron, 2007, for a description of this process). The stickies were collected at the end for textual analysis and triangulation with the transcripts.
Coffey and Atkinson's (1996) categorical analysis technique was used to analyse data. First, all researchers independently read the focus group transcripts. After several readings, categories were allowed to 'grow out of' or 'emerge' from the data (Lankshear & Knobel, 2004). Each researcher assigned codes to these initial categories. These codes were then compared and contrasted iteratively with codes generated by the other researchers to create a set of codes that all researchers felt aptly described the conceptions in the data. Once the research team was satisfied that all important themes within the data had been identified and coded, two members of the team recoded the data set using this set of codes; this was used to establish inter-rater reliability.
This study indicates that teacher conceptions of assessment and feedback have a tightly linked relationship. Teachers indicated that the purpose of assessment and feedback can be seen in one of three main ways. They:
With feedback, motivation or encouragement is seen as an additional purpose. Contrary to expectations, teachers did not indicate that assessment should make students accountable for their learning, as predicted by Brown's (2002, 2004) research. Instead, teachers reported taking a high level of personal ownership for their students' successes and failures when it came to assessment.
Keyword: Assessment and Measurement
Over the past four decades since the Federation of the United Arab Emirates, the country has undergone rapid social, human and economic development. The issue of sustainability of social progress has been at the forefront of recent meetings including the Federal National Council and the Dubai Women's Establishment. Of significance also is the creation of various foundations with goals to research and develop social, human and economic agendas, women and youth issues, leadership and administration. In addition, the Emirates' leaders and key educational authorities have been focused on administrative and curricular reform in the nation's schools to ensure the sustainability of educational development. While there has been considerable research into educational leadership internationally, there has not been much attention paid to women in the Arabian Gulf, their culture, leadership and learning.
Placing issues in the national context, this paper explores the impact of progressive leadership initiatives on expectations for Emirati women in education and leadership. A review of findings from 3 research projects provides clear evidence of the ways that women's identities and roles are developing within the framework of change in their community, country and region. Using a qualitative and interpretive paradigm, where research is considered a social act that is itself shaped by social and cultural conventions, the project methodologies necessarily drew on oral history, grounded theory methods and narrative inquiry respectively.
The undergraduate data were drawn from an oral history project where students interviewed family members who had attended school in the 1960s and 1970s to identify their educational experiences. Participants' stories were drafted and redrafted and later the researchers discussed the significance of the key themes which included the learning environment, curriculum, punishment, and the value of education.
Women from three cohorts of graduate students provided the second data set which comprises reflective statements about leadership written in the early stages of their graduate leadership program. In these they were asked to draw on personal and theoretical views to reflect on their current perspectives as developing educational leaders. Using a Grounded Theory approach (Glaser and Strauss, 1967) the researchers gradually refined the data categories to build a grounded theory from the data, (i.e. a formal explanation of phenomena grounded in the real experiences of participants). This was centered in several recurring themes across the three cohorts including building relationships, distributing leadership, Islamic perspectives, and the importance of role models.
The final set of data draws on the stories of five key female Emirati leaders. Drawing on critical ethnography (culture is an important construct) and narrative inquiry (strategies including reflexive ethnography, personal experience methods and narratives of the self), the five women shared their stories whilst being observed. Critical friends mentored over the years by the five women were nominated and interviewed by the authors. The stories were then written up by the authors and checked by the participants and mentees to capture the various lived experiences in narrative form. The authors identified what these stories strove to make narratable, and identified themes across the stories. Similar to the graduate research, these themes included the influence of Islam, the importance of family and family mentors, collegiality and friendship, and learning leadership.
The overarching element across the three projects was the construction of personal and professional identities. The development of identities is a historically contingent, socially enacted, culturally constructed frame of social practices where individual and collective behaviour are mediated by senses of self or identities (Holland, Skinner, Lachicotte, & Cain, 1998). If identities are being lived then they are unfinished and in process (Holland et al, 1998: vii). Therefore, meanings that attach to certain identities shift with time and vary from place to place. Identities are shaped through the tensions between knowing and being, thought and action, theory and practice, and the objective and the subjective. According to Britzman (1991:2), these relationships are not neat or binary but rather are better expressed as dialogic because they are shaped as they shape each other.
This paper discusses the way UAE women's identities and roles are developing within the framework of constant negotiation of contested meanings, shifting with time and context. The developing identities of participants in the three projects were the result of their interaction between their internal values, beliefs and assumptions and the contexts in which they lived their experiences. This development parallels and is a vital factor in the sustainability of the broader social economic and educational development that is shaping UAE society
Keyword: Educational Leadership and Management
The study which formed the basis of this paper was conducted with the aim of developing a model for the teaching of mental computation strategies to students in primary schools. A range of computation strategies were explicitly taught to a class of Year 3 students and a Strategy Categorisation Framework (SCF) was used to conceptualise and guide the explicit teaching of the strategies. This framework served as a scaffold for the students to organise their thinking and to guide strategy choice. Students were asked to record their thinking during lessons and in assessment tasks and to explain their strategies and thinking during classroom discussions. The young students in this study were able to develop their ability describe and record their thinking on paper and the researcher and class teacher were able to identify which strategies were being used, what the students understood and any misconceptions. An unexpected outcome of the study was the number of students who included the labels from the SCF teaching framework in the recording of their thinking without prompting.
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
Policy making and practice for gender in schools is undergoing substantial change as the focus has shifted in recent years from girls to boys. It has been argued that social policy makers in all fields need evidence from a variety of sources to make informed decisions about social policy and program implementation. There should be ways of characterising, comparing and contrasting differing perspectives from the public, the media, practitioners and researchers so that their similarities and differences can be laid open for inspection and therefore provide broad, deep and useful information to policy makers and implementers.
A relatively new approach to reviewing and synthesising literature has been claimed to have the potential to provide more useful information to social policy makers about 'what works' than traditional methods of reviewing literature. It is an 'argument catalogue' developed by the Canadian Network for Knowledge Utilisation.
This paper describes a study examining a sample of submissions to The Parliament of Australia, House of Representatives, Standing Committee on Education and Training Inquiry into the Education of Boys. A comparative analysis of these submissions, which represent views from all interested sectors, including individual parents and teachers, parent bodies, teacher professional bodies and unions, government departments, and researchers, has the potential to significantly inform current discussions of boys' education and attempts to reform gender equity policy.
The paper outlines the methodology of developing an argument catalogue which synthesises and codes the arguments contained in a sample of submissions to the Inquiry into the Education of Boys. It offers the preliminary findings from utilising this approach as one way of dealing with the complexities facing research on policy and practice in this highly contested field.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 55, HAR08543 Have male identities been adequately addressed in the policy and practice of boys' education?
Keyword: Gender and Sexualities
Introduction
Home-based education is the practice where parents educate their children at home, rather than send them to school. Over the past thirty years, home-based education has become a rapidly emerging educational phenomenon throughout the United States, Australia, Great Britain and New Zealand (Barratt-Peacock, 1997; Barson, 2006; Cooper, 2005; Harding, 1997, 2003, 2006; Hunter, 1994; Kerslake et. al. 1997; Lowe & Thomas, 2002; McDowell & Ray, 2000; Meighan, 1984, 1996; New Zealand Ministry of Education, 1998; Ray, 2003; Taylor & Petrie, 2000; UNESCO, 2002).
Home-based education includes the practices of both distance education and home schooling. Two features which distinguish home-based education from traditional schooling are: (i) that the family home is the main pedagogical site rather than the school or traditional classroom; and (ii) that parents perform the major pedagogical function.
Home-Based Education - Background
Not a new phenomenon, home-based education has been the normative educational practice in most cultures for millennia (Eastman, 1971; Parker, 1912; Radin, 1963). Further, home-based education has been the foundation of educational practice in the western world (Good, 1962; Nakosteen, 1965; Wilds & Lottich 1970), including formal education in Australia (Barcan, 1965, 1980; Cleverley, 1971).
Over the past 130 years it has been assumed that the state is responsible for the education of the child, rather than parents. Amid a growing critique of this paradigm (Illich, 1977; Mill in Kemp, 1986; Neill 1960), there has re-emerged a view which supports home-based education as a bona fide pedagogy (Holt, 1972, 1981; Meighan, 1984, 1997, 2001 a & b; Moore 1985; Taylor Gatto 1992, 2000, 2003, 2007 a & b).
Whilst there is extensive research into home-based education in the United States (Ray, 2005), home education research in Australia is in its infancy. Barratt-Peacock (1997) conceptualised the Australian home educating family as a "community of learning practice" (Barrett-Peacock, 1997, p.270), showing that the home educating family provides a sound context for the education of children. In the small but growing corpus of Australian home education literature, there has, up until this project, been no detailed research into the roles of parents who are full-time educators of their own children within the family-based learning community (Dole et al., 2005).
Aim of the Research
This research project is an in-depth study into the roles of parents who educate their children at home. The first of its kind in Australia, this study asks the question: What are the qualitatively different ways in which home educating parents conceive of their roles as home educators?
The Phenomenographic Approach
Phenomenography was chosen as the research approach most suited for this study. Phenomenography allows the researcher to view the way people conceive of themselves in the context of their social setting, and how they relate the two (Ashworth & Lucas, 2000; Marton, 1986, 1996). Ference Marton (1986), a pioneer of this research approach described phenomenography as: "a research method adapted for mapping the qualitatively different ways in which people experience, conceptualise, perceive, and understand various aspects of, and phenomena in, the world around them". (p.31)
A phenomenographic data analysis allocates the different ways in which people experience a phenomenon into categories of description. The composition of these categories is, according to Marton (1994b), synonymous with the phenomenon, and is known as the "outcome space" (Marton, 1994a, p.4425).
The Research Process
The study sought to identify the qualitatively different ways in which home educating parents conceived of their roles as educators of their children. The context of the study was the lived experience of home educators in their everyday lives. A diverse group of home educators in Queensland was interviewed according to phenomenographic methodology (Gerber, 1993; Marton and Booth, 1997), delivering a vast body of data. This body of data was analysed, with constant reference to the original text and to the meaning intended by the subjects. Pools of meaning were collected from the data, which indicated the many different ways in which home educating parents experienced their roles as home educators. Ultimately, these pools of meaning were grouped into sets of similar meaning called categories of description. These categories of description contain the conceptions which home educating parents have of their roles as educators of their own children.
Findings
The findings of the study revealed four categories of description which described the phenomenon of the roles of parent home educators. These parents held the view that they functioned as (i) learners, (ii) partners in education, (iii) teachers of their children and (iv) change agents in their communities. There is a richness of diversity in the conceptions described within these categories, which has never been previously mapped or discussed. This richness provides insight into many facets of pedagogy. The findings of the study revealed the deeply held, collective view, that home educators see themselves as bona fide educators, practicing a new pedagogical lifestyle which is more than merely a relaying of academic subjects. Rather, their roles are viewed as a continuous teaching and personal mentoring process, tailored to the unique needs of the child throughout his or her formative years, which is based upon the parent-child relationship.
Relevance of the research
This research project has already informed the work of four State Governments and the Australian Government, as they have sought to legislate and to create policy for the growing phenomenon of home-based education. In a changing educational climate, the role of the home educator is moving from a being a covert activity (Harding and Farrell, 2003), where an estimated 85% of home educators practiced civil disobedience in order to educate their children (Queensland Government, 2003), to being a role that is recognised and catered for, legislatively.
Hayes (2004) has stated that governments must consult families and quality research when developing policies, which, he believes must be family-centred. This study has provided the first detailed view of this previously unknown and rapidly emerging parental, educational role.
Keyword: Distance Education
Relationships among literacy research, policy and practice continue to constitute a contentious issue in the context of literacy policy reforms in Australia and overseas. Referring to these relationships as the Literacy Nexus, this paper explores the nexus in terms of research/policy relationships; policy/practice relationships; and practice/research relationships. The paper provides a review of related literature on these relationships, based on Australian and U.S. research studies and reports published since 2000; and highlights key issues inherent in these relationships. These issues include ways in which literacy research is used in literacy policy and the consequences of this use for the fields of research and practice; the extent to which literacy policy connects or disconnects with teachers' classrooms realities in the field of practice; and the question of teachers' professional judgment and prerogative as they make informed choices about messages from research and policy in light of what they find works for their students. As this paper considers these issues, it identifies research directions for investigating the literacy nexus further. Ultimately, the purpose of this paper is to engage discussion about the literacy nexus and ways in which it might be strengthened to the betterment of literacy education. In so doing, the paper is framed by the author's engagement as First Chief Investigator in a collaborative ARC Discovery Project on the Literacy nexus.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 41, HAR08818 The literacy nexus: Exploring relationships among literacy research, policy and practice.
Keyword: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE
This paper will undertake a comparative content analysis of two curricula in business education: the Bachelor of Business degree at Swinburne University and the Bachelor of Commerce (Social Sciences) degree at the University of Sydney.
The "Changing Climates" in education are affecting tertiary education too. Swinburne University in Melbourne has just revamped and restructured the curriculum of its Bachelor of Business degree. Despite the glitzy advertising and PR, claims by Swinburne that its degree has been improved are found to be hollow if we measure improvement in terms of critical thinking and imagining, rather than just the acquisition of skills, "graduate attributes" and entrepreneurship. My paper will demonstrate that the new curriculum thwarts critical thinking and stifles development of an understanding of the social and political world in which these Business graduates will work. For example, most graduates will have little or no understanding of an issue as important as global warming and climate change. Yet, climate change threatens their future and that of businesses for which they might work.
Looking at the current world financial crisis, it is apparent that decisions in business must be based on broader social and moral criteria. The last two decades of financial deregulation has exposed the fickleness of market forces and the flimsiness of private enterprise as a basis for modern society. So lateral and critical thinking is more necessary than ever for Business students.
Employing some of the ideas of post colonial theory and critical management education, my paper will argue that the new Bachelor of Business degree could and should open students' minds to a wealth of possibilities for society that go far beyond profit maximisation and globalisation. The homogeneity offered by globalisation limits and obscures so many other social possibilities. My experience is that when the eyes of Business students are opened to these other possibilities and to post modern thinking they respond very positively.
But given the immediate vocational need of students, a compromise between ideals and pragmatics must be struck. The paper will suggest that the University of Sydney has found a fairly satisfactory compromise and balance.
By comparing the curricula at the two universities, including their philosophies, my paper will demonstrate that it is possible to produce graduates that are well rounded in business education, but also able to understand, and think critically about social problems, and thereby to be informed citizens able to participate constructively in our changing society.
Keyword: Economics, Commerce, Management and Services Education
Achieving sustainable development is not an easy task. The international community has been attempting to address global issues such as climate change and poverty, while advancing opportunities for primary education. Setting up the Millennium Development Goals (MDGs), the internationally-agreed set of time binding goals in 2000, reaffirmed commitment by the international community to the issues in developing countries. Hence, the role of evaluation for Official Development Assistance (ODA) enterprises has become more important than ever particularly with limited funds, which in turn has put pressure on effective and efficient implementation of projects including their transparency and accountability. To date, however, monitoring and evaluating outcomes of aid projects during the project duration only have been the main endeavours of international aid agencies. Evaluations gave little attention to aspects of sustainability and educational impact of these projects. Indeed, sustainability of a project after the termination of such interventions was under scrutiny and as a result, there has been consideration of changing from outcome-focused evaluation led by international aid agencies to process evaluation conducted largely by local stakeholders. The study reviewed theoretical and practical issues surrounding the evaluation for educational reform projects, and explored, as a case study, the evaluation process employed by an Egyptian education reform project implemented by United Nations Children's Fund (UNICEF). This study found that process evaluation is a potential alternative evaluation method for educational development projects since it is likely to be locally embedded, which may produce long-term sustainability.
Keyword: Assessment and Evaluation
As society continues to become more dependent on science and technology, the disparity between men and women in the sciences - not only in terms of numbers but also in the upper levels of the professions - represents a waste of human capital and is something that has alarmed policy makers and educators for some time. Yet, despite more than three decades of equal opportunity legislation, and a 'common sense' understanding that 'women can do anything', women remain under-represented in the public sphere and this is particularly evident in the sciences. While the push in the 1980s in Australia to encourage girls into science and technology has been quite successful at the school and even the undergraduate level, it is a curious fact that women continue to remain under-represented in the scientific workplace. At the time it was assumed that once the number of entry-level women increased in the field, male domination of the upper echelons would diminish. The metaphor that was frequently used was that of the 'pipeline effect' which posited that once women had overcome their reluctance to enter the sciences and gained the requisite qualifications, the gender imbalances noted in the field would become a thing of the past. However, this has proved to be a false hope as the pipeline turned out to be very 'leaky' indeed.
Given that the evidence indicates that girls and women have responded to the call to enter the sciences - and are achieving excellent results - it ought to be of some disquiet to educators that women are leaving the sciences in greater numbers than their male counterparts. How then, are we to understand this phenomenon? The prevailing stereotypical explanations for the relatively low proportion of female scientists at all levels of the scientific professions include the idea that women are less career oriented, less productive and/or less assiduous in applying for funding (Wenneras and Wold, 1997). These 'explanations' are grounded in a deficit paradigm that blames women for their own lack of 'success' and is blind to a reality that include the 'boys' club' environment in the science workplace that acts as a deterrent for continuing in the sciences, the implicit biases about the sciences held by both males and females, as well as gender based harassment within a 'masculinized' field. Indeed, these factors create a cumulative effect resulting in the imbalance of males and females in the sciences that have little to do with women's capacity.
This paper builds on earlier research and investigates some of the reasons for the continued gender imbalance in the sciences as more and more women eagerly enter the sciences, achieve academic success but ultimately do not remain in their chosen scientific field. More specifically, we present a case study detailing the stories of several women who have recently completed their PhDs in the sciences in Australian universities. Despite the unambiguously gender based harassment they experienced during the period of their candidature, they completed their research. However, as a direct consequence of their experiences, they left their respective universities upon graduation and moved to another state or left the field altogether. As their stories indicate, these women left their chosen specialization because they felt that they had little or no choice.
Keyword: Social Justice
Too often, we who do empirical research in the name of emancipatory politics fail to connect how we do research to our theoretical and political commitments. Yet if critical inquirers are to develop a 'praxis of the present', we must practice in our empirical endeavours what we preach in our theoretical formulations. Research which encourages self and social understanding and change-enhancing action on the part of 'developing progressive groups' requires research designs that allow us as researchers to reflect on how our value commitments insert themselves into our empirical work. Our own frameworks of understanding need to be critically examined as we look for the tensions and contradictions they might entail. (Lather 1991, p. 80)
It is not the intention of this paper to outline my research project per se, as this has been discussed in past papers (see Author 2007a, 2007b, 2007c). The intention of this paper is to address Patti Lather's concerns and examine my own "frameworks of understanding" (Lather, 1991, p. 80) that underpinned my doctoral research project. Specifically, this paper scrutinises my worldview and the philosophies that complement this worldview. These frameworks helped develop "a praxis of the present" (Lather, 1991, p. 80) for the doctoral project. By examining the frameworks and value commitments that underpinned the research project this paper facilitates an understanding of how these frameworks and value commitments have, to use Lather's (1991) terms, 'inserted themselves into my empirical work'. As Kincheloe (2003, p. 84-85) states "our understanding of an educational situation depends on the context within which we encounter it and the theoretical frames which the researcher brings to the observation. These ideological frames are the glasses through we see the world." Consequently, the lens through which I viewed the world was of paramount importance to my research project. Therefore, this paper firstly discusses a participatory worldview (drawn from Denzin & Lincoln, 2005; Laszlo, 1996, 2003; Reason & Bradbury, 2006) through which I perceive the world and my doctoral study. This worldview emphasises participation, relationships and interrelationships. My participatory worldview complements this research project's methodology of participatory action research and how data was collected and analysed (for extended discussions see Author, 2007a, 2007b). This paper then discusses the philosophical thinking that underpinned this research project. I drew from many philosophical sources to meld together a research philosophy that aligned with my participatory worldview and that supported my research project. This research philosophy values participation, collaboration, respect, caring, empathy, trust and understanding.
Keyword: History and Philosophy of Education
Literature relating to ability grouping of students is extensive, yet little empirical evidence exists that could provide a greater understanding of the effects of grouping on students specifically engaged in Physical Education (PE) lessons. This study investigated the effect on student attitudes towards PE after being grouped into classes based upon their perceived ability. Following the determination of perceived ability; sixty-seven high school students were placed into one of three PE class groups for a period of six weeks instruction. Following this intervention, semi-structured interviews were conducted, which sought to determine whether any change in attitude could be attributed to the grouping arrangements. A number of participants described a change in attitude, however, other factors that were not given as much emphasis in the research design yielded more descriptive and stronger responses from the participants. As a result of further analysis of the data, there emerged a range of implications for physical education teachers regarding ability grouping, as well as recommendations and considerations for future research in PE.
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
This paper examines theoretical and empirical dimensions of Queensland's Industry School Engagement strategy (QISES), incorporating the Gateway Schools initiative. Proposing that this model of industry school partnership is unique in Australia with respect to its industry focus and intended transition outcomes for young people, the paper examines some implications of the strategy for educational provision in Queensland.
Uncertainties associated with the shift to a global knowledge economy have presented Australia with a number of unprecedented social governance problems. One policy solution to challenges associated with unemployment, community capacity building, democratic participation and social exclusion is that of social partnerships (Seddon, Billett, & Clemans, 2005; Seddon, Clemans, & Billett, 2005). In education in particular, partnerships have been adopted as a means of managing school to work pathways for young people (Caldwell & Keating, 2004) and of addressing Queensland's skill requirements for the global knowledge economy. Partnerships are endorsed by the Federal government (DEEWR, 2008) and all state governments in Australia (Kellock, 2005), but their emergence in Queensland-in the form of the Industry School Engagement Strategy and establishment of the Gateway Schools project-represents a unique approach to the deployment of partnerships in educational governance (Harreveld & Singh, 2007).
The emergence of partnerships on a large scale represents one of the more significant developments in educational governance in Queensland since mass secondary education in Queensland during the first half of the twentieth century (Kapitzke & Hay, 2008). The QISES is distinguished by a number of features. Gateway Schools industry partnerships are brokered at the executive level involving senior officers within Education Queensland and leading industry executives. Furthermore, there has been an explicit strategy to control the dimensions of the partnerships by linking particular schools with participating industries. This approach includes specific requirements which must be met by prospective partner schools prior to engaging in a partnership arrangement. These characteristics distinguish the partnerships from others, which typically have featured a single school and one or a small number of unrelated businesses. They are also different from partnerships that are part of area-based initiatives such as District Youth Achievement Plans in Queensland (Department of Premier and Cabinet, 2002), Education Action Zones in the UK (Power, 2001), and Local Learning and Employment Networks (LLENS) in Victoria (Office for Education Policy and Innovation, 2007; Seddon, Billett, & Clemans, 2005).
The model for these partnerships began with the Gateways to the Aerospace Industry initiative, which now has 17 participating schools throughout Queensland. Within a period of three years, partnerships have been extended to include the Minerals and Energy sector (19 participating schools), Wine and Tourism (7 participating schools), and Information Technology industries. The Queensland Department of Education, Training and the Arts (DETA) is proposing to extend the strategy to the building construction, agriculture, tourism, retail and manufacturing industries (Queensland Government, 2007). Whilst current Gateway Schools projects were modeled on the partnership strategy developed for that of the aerospace industry, all industry partnerships have developed in unique ways and feature distinctive administrative and educational structures.
The stated purpose of these arrangements is to provide 'practical learning outcomes for tomorrow's economy and [to support] expansion in key global industries including minerals and energy, wine tourism, information, communication and technology (ICT) and aerospace' (Queensland Government, 2007). These target sectors are core industries of the Queensland economy and key elements of its Smart State Strategy (Queensland Government, 2005). Furthermore, participating industry partners feature a number of global corporations including Boeing, BHP Billiton Mitsubishi Alliance (BMA), Rio Tinto and Microsoft.
Industry school partnerships in Queensland have emerged within a context of transformations in social governance based on 'third way' or social investment strategies (Lister, 2003). These strategies are, in part, a response to the destabilising effects of globalisation and the hollowing out of the state that is widely assumed to have accompanied the social transformations (Jessop, 2002; Roberts & Devine, 2003). Social investment politics represents the emergence of a new social settlement which has attempted to negotiate a compromise between the Keynesian welfare state and governance strategies based on markets (Giddens, 1998). This new settlement proposes a mix of policies that seek to optimise conditions for the operation of markets whilst also promoting active policy solutions to the problems of social welfare and social exclusion (Machin, 2006). The principal investments in this strategy are in social and human capital. Educational qualifications and skills training are assumed to be a prerequisite for maintaining competitiveness in the global knowledge economy. Furthermore, lifelong learning is considered an effective strategy for maintaining active participation in the labour market and for protecting against the risks of unemployment and social exclusion. Social investment strategies accordingly signal a shift from a remedial approach in social policy to a proactive approach to facilitating young people's integration into the labour market (Machin, 2006; see also Perkins, Nelms, & Smyth, 2004: 4).
This paper argues that the QISES is a way for Queensland state authorities to negotiate and mobilize the potentials of uncertainty from globalisation through local programs of social governance in which schools are located as key elements. It argues that QISES is unique in that it comprises a central element of an explicit and integrated economic strategy (Queensland Government, 2005) marked by an historic shift from a supply-side to a demand-side provision for VET. The paper concludes by examining the consequences of QISES for transforming core elements of state education in Queensland such as school governance, curriculum and pedagogy.
Keyword: Curriculum Theory and Development
This paper examines a model of professional development (PD) provided to support two, year 3 teachers while implementing new content incorporated within the new mathematics syllabus. The findings from this study suggest that the development of a professional learning community (PLC) extended the teachers' Zone of Enactment which inturn lead to teacher agency. Teacher agency was demonstrated by the teachers leading their own learning as well as that of their students.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
According to Education Queensland (2006), 'Inclusive education reflects values, ethos and culture of a state education system committed to enhancing equitable educational opportunities and improved outcomes for all students, recognising the role education can play in redressing social disadvantage and social injustice.' An effective, robust case management system is an indicator of success toward addressing the goals of inclusive education and this is identified in the FCWQ 2008 Regional Operational Plan. It is believed that schools will be more effective managers of diverse students with complex and additional needs when such a system is in place.
Yeppoon State High School is dealing with increasing numbers of at risk students presenting with complex and additional needs. Some students access the schools located in Rockhampton, though the majority of diverse students are serviced by the local State school system. Recently, like many other schools, Yeppoon SHS has grappled with how to effectively manage students with very complex needs and, in so doing, has been reviewing its approach to case management using an action research framework.
Key staff has been involved in the review of the School's Case management approach including the District CEC, Senior Guidance Officer - Behaviour Team, School Guidance Officer, HOSES - Yeppoon SHS, and Senior Education Officer, Student Services. The team have sought leadership from schools and staff within the Townsville district which has proposed a framework for Case management for schools. This paper and presentation will discuss the challenges and positive changes that have arisen for the school, district staff, and for students in reviewing case management. We will provide scenarios of how various incidents were managed prior to the review and changes that have taken place since and share some critical tools that we have developed to support the work of the school case manager.
Keyword: Schools Research Showcase
Self-efficacy beliefs have been shown to influence an individual's choice of activity and the level of effort expended in performing that activity. More particularly, a positive relationship has been demonstrated between self-efficacy and the performance of certain academic or lecturing activities. In light of the reviewed literature, it was determined to examine issues of self-efficacy and research productivity (as measured by publication output) by focusing on neophyte academic publishers and non-publishers.
This examination drew on a sample of Australian academics working at one of two institutions. One institution was a large regional university and the other was based in a state capital city. The sampled lecturers were affiliated with a range of research fields, including medical and health science, education, and information and computing. Participation in the study was voluntary and the lecturers responded anonymously to a questionnaire mailed to all full-time lecturing staff (N=985). A total of 357 useable returns were received and used in subsequent analyses. The questionnaire was divided into three sections. Section 1 was designed to seek information of a background nature. The second section was constructed to ask participants to indicate how confident they were in performing work-related tasks using a 10-point scale ranging from not confident at all to completely confident. The tasks were grouped according to three areas, namely, research, teaching, and other university and external activities (other). The focus of Section 3 was on the level of importance and satisfaction that participants gave to these tasks, as well as the number of refereed publications produced during the participant's academic career.
The three groupings of items in Section 2 of the questionnaire were interrogated separately using a principal components analysis with an oblique rotation. The analysis of the research items identified four factors. Thirty of the 32 items were used to delineate the components. An analysis of the 22 teaching items revealed two factors. Twenty-one of the 22 items were used to delineate the components. The majority of the other items, numbering 13, were aligned with two major factors. The small number of items which did not coalesce in the factor structure tended to be linked to specific information communications technology tasks. Next, eight subscales were derived from a grouping of the items as defined by the major factors. This derivation resulted by adding the raw scores of each item loading on a factor and then dividing by the number of items in the subscale. One other measure integral to this paper was developed from publication output. In this study, lecturers were asked to indicate the number of peer-reviewed publications they had published across their career. In line with current governmental guidelines, each publication received a point with peer-reviewed books being allocated a weighting of five. Lecturers' points were then tallied and divided by the number of years they had served as an academic. From these calculations a five-point scale was constructed to typify low to high publication output. For the purposes of this paper, two categories of publisher were identified. The first category was made up of 47 lecturers who had no publications in their first six years as an academic; whereas, the second category comprised 78 lecturers who had been active publishers in the same time-frame. It needs to be noted, however, that a small number of lecturers fitting this category were excluded because their output was substantial and almost certainly meant that they were not neophyte researchers but held professional research positions before joining their respective institutions.
A correlation analysis was employed to investigate the relationships among the subscales. An inspection of the correlation coefficients revealed that all the subscales were positively and significantly related (p<.01). The inspection also showed that the coefficients of the subscales forming the three groupings were high, whilst the coefficients of the subscales across the groupings tended to be more moderate in magnitude. To illustrate, the coefficients between the two teaching subscales and the four research subscales varied from .216 to .357. The results reported next consider the two groups of neophyte lecturers and the four research subscales, namely, Research Subscale 1 (or skills related to preparing and presenting conference papers and journal articles, plus subsidiary items pertaining to student research), Research Subscale 2 (or skills related to the conduct and management of research), Research Subscale 3 (or writing major works and reviewing articles/books, and Research Subscale 4 (or having a broad view of a research area). Multivariate analyses of variance were used to contrast the two groups of lecturers on the four research subscales as a way of identifying specific tasks where these groups differed. Significant differences were found between the two groups of lecturers on all items for the first two subscales and most items on the remaining two subscales. A review of the univariate test results (p<.001) identified items which differentiated the two groups in terms of research self-efficacy. This testing, using an eta-square measure, permitted a ranking of the discriminative capacity of the items. In relation to Research Subscale 1, submitting and resubmitting papers for publication, and preparing conference papers, were the research tasks that most clearly differentiated lecturers with publications and those without publications. With respect to Research Subscale 2, those lecturers who published were markedly more efficacious in leading research projects and analysing the results of the research. In terms of Research Subscale 3, examining theses and reviewing books and journal articles clearly discriminated the two groups. Interestingly, applying for study leave was a task that did not differentiate the two groups. Finally, when considering Research Subscale 4, reviewing research literature for a research project and generating research ideas were viewed more confidently by those who published compared to those who did not publish. However, keeping up to date with the research literature was a task that did not differentiate the two groups. Taken together, the findings of this study lend support to the claim that self-efficacy beliefs are related to academic activities and performance. Furthermore, these findings demonstrate that research self-efficacy is a construct that can clearly differentiate between neophyte lecturers who publish and those who do not. The implications of these findings are discussed in terms of their relevance for intervention programs aimed to improve self-efficacy with respect to research. Although the bulk of the paper concentrated on research self-efficacy, some attention was paid to a conceptualisation of non-research activities i.e., teaching and other lecturing tasks. Given that the correlations among the various measures were significant, further work is warranted to explore these specific relationships.
Keyword: Higher Education
Chemistry, which involves the study of the nature of materials and the properties and interactions of the substances from which they are composed, is usually taught as a separate discipline in senior secondary schools. In recent years, declining student numbers in the senior physical sciences have been of concern to researchers and educators. Two commonly cited reasons for the decline in student numbers in chemistry are the level of difficulty experienced by students and students' perceived lack of relevance of chemistry to their lives (Department of Education Science and Training, 2006; Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development Global Science Forum, 2006).
Chemistry students encounter complex concepts and entities and phenomena that are abstract and unobservable, which requires chemistry students to understand and be able to use a range of representations to comprehend and communicate about chemistry on three levels: macroscopic, microscopic, and symbolic (Gabel, 1999; Johnstone, 1996; Lemke, 2000). As this poses difficulties for students, researchers have focussed on how chemistry students should be taught and the types of resources, including digital resources, that might scaffold students' development of conceptual understanding and multiliteracies to allow them to interpret and communicate chemistry on multiple levels (e.g., Ben-Zvi, Eylon, & Silberstein, 1986; Kozma & Russell, 1997; Kozma & Russell, 2005; Wu, 2003). Digital technologies have added a new layer of complexity and a new dimension to learning experiences since students must become more proficient in the use and interpretation of visual representations. However, with appropriate scaffolding, they are valuable learning tools that allow students to create macroscopic, microscopic, and symbolic representations and to make multi-level 'explanations' of their results and understanding of underlying phenomena.
Researchers have argued that students' interest in chemistry should be addressed by making it more meaningful, for example through authentic contexts. Over the past twenty years this has become a dominant trend in chemistry education, which is widely used, particularly at the secondary level, locally and internationally (Bennett & Holman, 2002). Context-based curricula aim to increase the relevance of chemistry by developing chemistry concepts within authentic uses of chemistry including social, economic, technological, and industrial applications. The concepts studied by students are still largely based on the chemistry of the 19th and early 20th centuries, while chemical research is advancing at a rapid pace (Gilbert, De Jong, Justi, Treagust, & Van Driel, 2002) and there is a need to present chemistry through modern contexts. Twenty-first century chemistry such as the synthesis and chemistry of biomaterials, chemical aspects of molecular biology, environmental issues, and renewable resource development, needs to be effectively and appropriately integrated into the curriculum to introduce chemistry students to the implications of emerging chemical technologies.
New pedagogies are needed to improve students' understanding and their interest in studying chemistry. Students should be exposed to varied learning experiences that reflect current trends in chemistry research and which incorporate digital technologies including computer-based simulations and visualisation tools. Taken together, future-focussed curriculum and pedagogy should reflect the current trends in chemistry research and related emerging scientific fields. Advocates of curriculum and pedagogy reform have argued that students should learn chemistry through participation in inquiry, however, debate continues regarding the value of learning in laboratory environments (Nakhleh, Polles, & Malina, 2002).
It appears likely that the nature of the laboratory experiences themselves rather than laboratory learning in general is at the heart of this debate. For example, an inquiry approach in which open-ended exploratory experiences help students to make connections between macroscopic data, chemical concepts, and authentic applications of chemistry is likely to promote knowledge construction more effectively than 'cookbook' experiments with closed outcomes. Developing inquiry experiences can be challenging for teachers since they can sometimes be based on complex problems and consequently may be beyond students' current levels of understanding, however they are significant for many reasons, including their potential for students to learn about emerging chemistry research topics through investigation and active participation.
This paper argues that the use of digital technologies and inquiry-based learning to support students' understanding of chemistry, particularly emerging areas of chemical research is an area of chemistry education that requires further research. We present the results of a study that aimed to investigate the teaching of an emerging area of scientific research, in particular the production and properties of biomaterials, through investigative inquiry. The study focused on strategies for scaffolding and promoting student learning through laboratory inquiry and the use of digital resources such as computer-based simulations and visualisation tools in the process of laboratory reporting. This paper will present findings relating to students' conceptual understanding and use of multiple representations in laboratory reports. It will also describe learning outcomes from the students' perspective, in particular, their motivation, interest, and perceptions of their learning experiences. Research has rarely asked students about their experiences or opinions of laboratory investigations nor has it focussed on students' attitudes or motivational outcomes (Nakhleh et al., 2002).
In the study, two Year 11 chemistry classes were taught using a range of digital technologies, including molecular modelling software, computer-based simulations, and presentations via electronic white board. Following a series of student-centred lessons in which students learned with these tools, they conducted a laboratory inquiry in which they made and analysed the macroscopic properties of two bioplastics. Students in each class were asked to report their findings using two different report genres. To scaffold the inquiry process, students were provided with a range of digital and laboratory resources as well as teacher intervention and peer interaction.
The study applied a mixed methods approach with qualitative data being collected through semi-structured student interviews following the inquiry experiences. Quantitative data were collected through student evaluation surveys to identify themes in student motivation and perceptions of the learning experiences and the value of scaffolding strategies. Pre- and post-tests were used to gain an indication of students' conceptual understanding and use of representations. The data from the study suggest that learning with visualisation tools improves students' understanding about chemical concepts. They underline the importance of scaffolding student learning by providing appropriate resources and modelling of text structures that link multiple advanced visual representations to explain macroscopic phenomena on a microscopic level. Providing students with appropriate scaffolding and learning experiences increases their motivation and interest in chemistry. The results of the study also indicate that some text types are more likely to help students to make links between macroscopic and microscopic levels of chemistry than others. The findings of the study have implications for scaffolding laboratory inquiry learning, particularly scaffolding student learning of new areas of chemistry research and chemical applications through the use of digital technologies.
Keyword: Science and ICT Education
Introduction/Literature Review: When society has a need, schools are often called to address the problem (Cuban, 1992). One of the current needs is related to public health concerns, specifically physical inactivity and weight gain, and there have been increasing calls for schools to address this need.
The negative health effects (i.e., obesity, diabetes) related to inactivity are even worse for minority populations, especially for Indigenous peoples (Salbe et al., 2002). In 2003, 53.7% and 27.3% of Pima Indian boys and girls respectively in the USA were above the 95th percentile for BMI. Similarly, Indigenous Australian populations, specifically Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children suffer a prevalence of overweight and obesity that is double that of non-Indigenous children (Abbott et al., 2005). In both the USA and Australia, unfavourable body composition in youth is likely related to lower physical activity (PA) levels. The inactivity and increased weight trends have long-term significance as children age and face the possible development of serious health problems such as diabetes, heart disease and high blood pressure.
This project followed a one year theory-based curricular change initiative in an Indigenous American community aimed at integrating PA and academic content related to healthy lifestyles across 10 schools. Many teachers want to become more effective and they often define effectiveness in terms of student outcomes. Traditionally, this was thought of in terms of learning outcomes, however, teachers suggest that there are other outcomes that may be even more meaningful (Guskey, 2002), this may include student well being and health. It is important to study change efforts in Indigenous communities in order to develop culturally relevant programs leading to the development of lifelong healthy lifestyle behaviours.
Aims/Research Questions: To determine if PA and Body Mass Index (BMI) changed after a year long, school-based healthy living intervention taught by classroom and physical education teachers in an Indigenous American community. It was hypothesized that through the school-based change efforts, students' PA participation at school would increase while BMI levels decreased.
Methods: Intervention. Grounded in the school change literature, this project required teachers to teach a minimum of 10 lessons that integrated PA and academic content and provide regular activity breaks for students at school, while physical education teachers modified their lesson structure to increase PA participation along with reinforcing concepts taught by classroom teachers. Teachers received: (a) training through a series of workshops, (b) some basic equipment (e.g., pedometers) for use with their classes; and (c) mentor teachers who provided on-site assistance.
Participants. Youth participants were 389 Pima Indian boys (n=173) and girls (n=216) at the elementary (n=253) and secondary (n=136) levels recruited from 10 schools in a single Indigenous American community in the Southwest. Thirty-one classroom teachers and seven physical education teachers also participated. Teachers and their students were either intervention participants (27 classes, n=225) or comparison participants (11 classes, n=100). Students were instructed to wear sealed pedometers (Walk4Life 2505) for four consecutive school days in September and again in May to investigate differences in PA during school. Height and weight data were collected. Data analyses included ANOVAs to investigate pre/post changes in PA and BMI, internal consistency reliability analyses to investigate stability of PA behaviours, and descriptive statistics.
Findings: Both groups (intervention and comparison) became significantly more active over time (F(1, 333) = 20.10, p < .001, partial eta squared = .06). There was no significant group main effect F(1, 333) = 3.10, p < .079). Mean changes were 769 steps/day and 455 steps/day for the intervention and comparison groups, respectively. For BMI, both groups had a slight increase in their BMI with no significant group main effect (F(1, 307) = 1.01, p = .32).
The intervention groups' behaviour was less stable (alpha = .71) over time versus the comparison group (alpha = .86) suggesting positive behaviour changes were occurring. At post-test girls had an average of 4,582 steps/school day (sd=2,575) and boys had 5,524 steps/school day (sd=3,255). Also at posttest, BMI results showed 56% and 53% for girls and boys, respectively, in the "at risk for overweight" or "overweight" categories using the Centers for Disease Control USA classifications.
Contribution to the Field. The increased PA observed over time corresponded to an extra 38 and 22 minutes per week of PA at school for the intervention and comparison groups, respectively. Most of the previous studies looking at school day steps have reported higher levels of PA than were found in the current study (at pre or post test). For example, Cox et al. (2006) reported school day PA for 91 New Zealand children showing 7574 and 6070 steps/school day for boys and girls, respectively.
The extra activity obtained in this change effort is very significant for this Indigenous educational context for a variety of reasons including: (a) high rates of hypokinetic disease in the community; (b) the lack of a conducive physical environment for PA outside school (e.g., no sidewalks or lighting); and (c) sparse availability of PA programs (e.g., a single community centre). The increased physical activity also observed in the comparison group students can be attributed to cross-contamination since both intervention and comparison students were at the same schools. The slight increases over time in BMI may be expected due to maturation changes.
Tracking of behaviours indicated that the comparison students remained stable in their PA behaviour while the intervention students' PA patterns were less stable at posttest, suggesting behavioural change had occurred. Change takes time--the data collected herein provide important benchmark data on an understudied population and can also be used to refine curriculum changes focused on the targeted behaviour and its association with obesity in Indigenous youth in the USA and elsewhere.
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
The centrality of identity in life choices for rural young people cannot be underestimated (Wyn, Stokes, and Stafford, 1998). In any 'choice' young people make about higher education, there is a subtle interplay of individual agency, circumstance and social structure (Thomson et al., 2002). In a four year study of young rural women from small towns in Victoria that moved to Melbourne for tertiary education, I found that 'deciding' to access university education is not one made alone. In this paper, I will demonstrate how the participants drew on their stories of themselves that their teachers and parents, and in some cases, other students, conferred onto them as identity markers. They came to understand that they were the 'smart girls who would leave' as early as grade 5. They understood from their teachers and parents that they would be leaving their small towns, and thus began preparing early for the move. This paper will demonstrate how such preparation over time and the accrual of conferring identity moments built 'emotional capital' (Reay, 2004).
Bourdieu's concept of symbolic power (Bourdieu, 1992) will be reappropriated here and utilised to explain the transferring power of conferred identity and mobility. Within three narratives from my four year study of young rural women who have moved to an elite university from very small towns, I will trace the evidence of the symbolic power of what a call a 'conferred identity' that has built up over time in their identity narratives. Drawing on narratives about themselves moving from the rural to university, the women name the key conferring identity moments that they use as emotional capital to enable them to move against statistical indicators.
Bourdieu (1990, 1992) situates people within what he calls a habitus, the relational space (or space of relations) where we learn to be ourselves. Although admitting his term went 'hand in glove with vagueness and indeterminacy' (Bourdieu, 1990, p. 77), Bourdieu was committed to study the social practices that constitute individuals, their ways of thinking, feeling and acting (Bourdieu, 1992). Bourdieu argues that these 'dispositions' generate our practices, perceptions and attitudes, and are inculcated within us over time through our life history. Our agency then, our ability to act, is informed by a relationship between our incorporated history and our context or circumstances.
For feminist theorists, it was this particular commitment of Bourdieu's to seeing people as complex and relational that enables placing experience at the centre of social analysis without attributing it an essential status (McNay, 2004b, p. 184). In other words, our habitus is not our identity (McLeod, 2005), although it certainly informs the ways we speak about ourselves and how we explain our 'identity' to ourselves and to others. It is durable, but also generative and transposable, depending on our access to capital (Bourdieu, 1992).
My research concern has been at the intersection of habitus, access to capital, identity and mobility, particularly where this complex amalgam of influence interacts with underrepresented young people and their mobility towards higher education opportunities. Within Australian higher education, mobility is an ontological absolute for a rural young person-that is, in order to access it, one has to identify as 'someone who will move.' Kenway's (2006) insightful reading of Australian higher education policy as 'traveller's tales' is very apt for this discussion. Universities in Australia are mostly located in our cities. Rural young people, long recognized as an equity group in Australia, in most cases must move away from home in order to pursue higher education. They must be 'emancipated from space' in order to be 'world citizens' (Kenway, 2006). Mobility and habitus are interconnected and related, indeed, but the young person must also narrate themselves, in identity terms, as one who is 'going somewhere.'
There is little doubt that our habitus plays a crucial role in our ability to move. Personal and family relationships help or hinder our mobility and they work very differently for women and men (Brooks, 2003; Thompson, 1997). For Bourdieu, however, the interplay between habitus and mobility was contingent upon access to capital. Indeed, according to Bourdieu, our social origins give us differing forms of capital that we 'cash in' to become upwardly mobile, and education is the primary vehicle for this to happen.
Opposed to Marx's 'one-dimensional' reading of capital, Bourdieu reappropriates Marx's sense of economic/labour exchange to envelop the word in the variegated sense that capital is lived and embodied. Economic, social, cultural and symbolic capital are Bourdieu's signature concepts and include, among other things, cultural models, our access to and value of language, knowledge about courses and careers, socially conditioned predisposition to adapt oneself to those models, access to the arts, a sense of being 'at home' in school and school settings (Bourdieu et al., 1994). Bourdieu believed that our access to capital depended on a myriad of factors, but was filtered through the structural constraints of class. Reay (2004b) further develops Bourdieu's concept of capital into the emotional realm, arguing for the evidence of 'emotional capital' in the realm of educational achievement.
Bourdieu argued that in order to have symbolic power, a system must contain two vital parts-those that believe in the legitimacy of its power, and those who wield it (Bourdieu, 1992). In schools, the symbolic power is bestowed on teachers who assess students with grades, but also who claim naming rights, labelling students as 'bright' or 'not bright,' as 'good at school' or 'not good at school,' as 'headed for university' or 'staying at home.' It will be argued that the symbolic power of conferred identity status works powerfully in small rural schools not only because of its tighter networks of people, but also because so much is at stake. Further, those who move up to the ranks of 'the top' are imbued with family investment in them as people and their education, which enables a strong presence of emotional capital.
Keyword: Sociology of Education
There is ongoing debate about the research basis of creative industries and, specifically, about what constitutes the doctorate. While there is a desire among the artistic community for creative arts doctorates to be regarded as equivalent to traditional degrees, there is also concern that 'traditional' research methodologies may dominate or influence alternative 'artistic' research practices (Piatanida et al. 2003). An issue within the debate concerns the identification of an agreed research dimension to the exhibition, composition and/or performance components of practice-based research, such that these outcomes can be situated with the written thesis of the traditional research disciplines (Durling 2000; Sullivan 2004).
In response to the needs of a developing research field, this investigation seeks to inform research training by an in-depth study of how Masters and Doctoral research candidates understand and conduct their research in Fine Art Schools with a typical research training programme. It explores candidates' approaches and skills development in Fine Art research, and analyses the issues relating to creative and visual knowledge arising from their research experiences. In particular, this paper reports findings relating to how Masters and Doctoral candidates perceive they develop research understandings during the course of a research degree, and how supervisory and regulatory practices shape their project and their learning.
Approach
This qualitative study involved 30 respondents (at three stages of candidature) from two national Australian institutions of Fine Art. Each respondent participated in an hour-long semi-structured telephone interview. The interview data were transcribed, entered into QSR NVivo 2.0 software, and analysed by sub-questions and emerging themes. The sub-questions included:
Findings
There was silence from respondents to some questions, despite the semi-structured nature of the interviews, the ample opportunities for elaboration and the in-built flexibility in the interview structure. One of these was in response to the question about the specific role of the supervisor. If there was no prompting from interviewers, the students rarely 'offered' information about supervision in terms of their art-making. The authors hypothesise that this may relate to the highly individualised identity of the artist and the importance they attribute to the art-making, i.e., their language is not typically inclusive of 'others'. In relation to the exegesis their concerns about guidance were evidenced by intense frustration and conflict (as also identified by Hockey & Allen-Collinson, 2005). One of the main sources of tension was the role of the supervisor with respect to the exegesis, a tension heightened by perceived inadequacies and lack of experience on both sides. Candidates and supervisors are often co-learners in matters of academic scholarship.
One consistent theme in the data was the candidates' view that research in Fine Art was ill-defined by institutions. Candidates were challenged to complete research in a field where guidelines were often veiled or controversial. Critical issues concerning research guidelines and traditions of writing in art tested candidates' personal drive and intellectual creativity. These same issues, however, were found to contribute to their personal artistic development and to the intellectual scope and coherence of their contributions to knowledge.
Before candidates could choose methods or form, they were required to come to terms with their own understandings of the nature of research in the Fine Art. There was considerable variation in candidates' conceptions of research, from approaching art research as artwork and textual explanation, to conceptions of artwork and exegesis reflecting a symbiotic relationship which offered new knowledge on an 'evidential base'. There was an underlying tension about the preferred 'reading' of both the exegesis and the artwork. Artists typically do not expect to work with a fixed reading of their work, they seek multiple readings, and the exegesis was perceived to undermine this. It was a dilemma that permeated supervisory relationships and is a theme that emerges in interviews with examiners (Dally et al 2004).
Many candidates expressed their desire to be challenged. Many entered a research degree eager to obtain a new perspective, and also to try new things, including new media, and their observations indicate they may have perceived 'cutting edge' research to be cutting edge for them personally (rather than to perceive it in terms of the discipline). What they were often confronted with was the need to keep the artwork inside research goals (perceived as an 'obligation') and as a consequence discipline became synonymous with restriction. However, as candidature progressed this changed, and as one candidate put it 'the artist becomes refined'. The difficulty in articulating the connection between exegesis and exhibition, artist and scholar, was a common theme. Those who had made the transition and learned from it provide useful messages for supervisors, and these lessons form a key strand in the discussion.
Keyword: Doctoral Education Research
Lieblich (2006) contends that transcription of interviews is the 'best way to listen carefully to the interview and learn its content and form' (p. 65). In a four year study of young rural women from under-represented areas who had accessed an elite university, I was trying to better understand the complex amalgam of agency, imagination, and personal experience that took these women from small towns to a city-based university. Alongside the 200 digital photographs the participants took to explain their move and the transcripted interviews I had based around those photographs, I felt that to 'listen carefully' to them and their stories, I needed to also present what they saw when they were speaking . Experimenting with the two texts of my own research, one of words-the transcript-and one without words-the photographs, I began to juxtapose photographs I was using for analysis with the transcripts that went with it. Shirato and Webb (2004) call this 'intertextuality,' which they define as 'the process of making sense of texts by reference to other texts, or to meanings that have already been made in other texts' (p. 28). First motivated by Gee's (1985; 1991) insistence that language has poetic features coupled with inspiration from St. Pierre's (2000d; 2002a) model of writing as a way of analysis, I began placing transcripted words into poetic stanzas, noting changes of tone and repetition of certain words and phrases as I heard them on the tape. Working with the two forms of data as interdependent, I discovered an evocative and powerful form of data presentation while trying to write about it, a 'radically interpretive form of representation' (Richardson & St. Pierre, 2005, p. 964). By this time, I was not looking for 'true' or 'valid' interpretations, but useful interpretations (Crotty, 1998, p. 47). The photographs paired with the poetic transcripts as an interdependent visual text offered more robust and complex ways to both interpret and to represent the young women's knowledge and experience. Placing the photographs and transcripts side by side, I found a profound visual representation of subjectivities, complex and differentiated as they are represented in the words and images the participants use to describe themselves. I call these interpretive visual texts and will demonstrate their power of performing identity stories.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 25 MOS08274 Visual methods in educational research: performances of identity making and schooling.
Keyword: Social Sciences, Humanities and Arts Education
Students' motivation in reading at a young age may have significant influence on later learning outcomes. However, there is a dearth of instruments that measure elementary students' reading motivation, making it difficult for research advancement in the study of reading motivation. A multidimensional Reading Motivation Questionnaire (RMQ) was developed to investigate the reading goal orientations of students from Kindergarten to 6th grade (N = 275 from an independent girls' school). Confirmatory factor analysis found five clearly distinguishable factors: Mastery, Intrinsic, Cooperative, Individual, and Competition. The youngest students (K-2nd grade) were less able to differentiate the factors than older students (3rd-6th grade). The oldest students showed the greatest differentiation between the Individual and Cooperative factors. There was a decline found in four of the factors with age. The exception was the Individual factor, which was lowest for the youngest students. The instrument provides researchers and educators with a valid instrument to assess the motivational goals of elementary students, examine their development, and devise teaching and learning strategies based on theory and evidence.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 85 MAG08733 Cross-cultural motivational research within education
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
Australia faces teaching shortages in rural schools. Indeed, preservice teachers may be reluctant to apply for rural teaching positions, particularly as most have had no rural teaching experiences. What may motivate non-rural preservice teachers to seek employment in rural schools? This study investigates 17 preservice teachers' first experiences of teaching and living in rural areas. These second and third-year preservice teachers were involved in a five-day rural experience, which included interacting with local communities, living with host families, observing teaching practices, and teaching rural middle-school students. These self-nominated preservice teachers were placed in a variety of rural schools centred around a feeder high school. Data from written transcripts before their rural placements and reflections on their teaching and rural experiences indicated very significant attitudinal changes for teaching in rural areas and dispelled misconceptions about rural living and teaching. Non-rural universities can contribute towards motivating their preservice teachers to seek employment in rural areas. Providing these preservice teachers with a rural experience can create attitudinal changes for teaching and living in rural areas.
Keyword: Rural Education
Preservice teachers learning to teach English as a Foreign Language (EFL) require mentoring within the profession. EFL speakers learning to teach EFL may require particular attributes and practices from their mentors to advance their professional school experiences. What do EFL preservice teachers expect from their mentors? This study involved a written survey administered to 91 Vietnamese preservice teachers involved in an EFL degree. Results indicated that these preservice EFL teachers had specific needs when considering mentors' personal attributes. These included a mentor who is enthusiastic (57%), helpful (27%), friendly (25%), and knowledgeable (20%) with communicative competence (18%). It was also claimed that desirable mentoring practices should involve constructive guidance, especially sharing experiences (32%), checking lesson plans before teaching an EFL lesson (21%) and providing more opportunities for EFL teaching (12%). In addition, these preservice teachers (n=91) required a mentor who could provide an understanding of the system requirements (e.g., curriculum 38%, school policies 32%, and assessment 18%), model EFL teaching (e.g., method and manner of delivery 52%, pronunciation 25%, and writing lesson plans 15%), articulate pedagogical knowledge (such as teaching strategies 37%, classroom management 34%, motivating students 17%, and dealing with unexpected situations 13%), and provide direct and detailed feedback about EFL teaching performance (56%) and English content knowledge (23%). Preservice teachers have particular mentoring requirements that may assist their development as EFL teachers. These attributes and practices include developing personal inter-relationships and directing mentors to provide system requirements, specific pedagogical knowledge, modelling EFL teaching practices, and articulating feedback on such practices. However, further research is required to bridge the gap between mentors' practices and mentees' needs towards guiding such practices through university programs.
Keyword: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE and ESL
Introduction
In 2005 a traditional, independent girls' school in Sydney offered the senior students the International Baccalaureate Diploma (IBD) as an alternative curriculum to the Higher School Certificate (HSC). This paper will examine some of the issues involved with the implementation of science curricula for two groups of Year 11/12 students; one group, who chose to study science within the established HSC curriculum and a similar group, at the same school, who chose the new IBD programme. Science is a compulsory element within this new programme. The systems of delivery and assessment of science within the two programmes were investigated and compared. The process by which the school coped with the management of change was also examined. This study sought to provide information and understanding from which to reflect and improve aspects of both science courses in the future and to share the experience more widely.
Rationale
In the northern suburbs of Sydney education is an important commodity. Within a 10 kilometre stretch of highway there are four, high fee private girls' schools of excellent academic standing. In recent years the schools have assumed the role of the business culture, and marketing has become of paramount importance. Quite simply, more students provide more finance which in turn leads to even better facilities and resources. Concurrently, many more relatively affluent and internationally mobile Australian parents wish to use their spending power to gain more control over their children's education. A simple curriculum model includes four components - objectives, knowledge, learning experiences and evaluation. (Kerr,1968). In a fast changing global environment it is important that the objectives are meaningful to the consumers, the knowledge is current and learning experiences are transferable, and that the evaluation of achievement is internationally exchangeable. The International Baccalaureate Organisation (IBO) provides such a programme. It is an internationally accepted curriculum with high academic standards. This case is instructive, because it shows it is possible for schools to offer more than one curriculum. It also shows that schools can use curriculum to attract parents and maintain a reputation for quality.
In the area of science education one issue to be addressed is the concern in both Australia and much of the western world that students, particularly girls, are still not choosing careers in science. Consequently there is a lack not only of scientists and engineers, but also science teachers, which exacerbates the problem for the future. Both curricula and teaching approaches have been varied over the past 20 years to try and attract more students into this field, with only some success (Howes, 2002). Would the introduction of the IBD, in which the study of one science subject is compulsory as part of the 'holistic education of each student', encourage more girls into a scientific career?
Context
The school under study was a 100 year old, well established, non-selective, K-12 girls school with a secondary school of 750 students. Over 200 of these are in the senior 11-12 Years. At the time of the study, 2005-6, 100 girls boarded, these students were mostly from amongst the senior students and the majority of these students were from overseas.
In 2002 the school sought to extend its appeal to meet the increasing international nature of families, migrating, moving inter-state (Kemp, 2006), traveling short and long term and overseas students. After some research overseas in the UK, and discussions with the school council, the IBO was approached. The International Baccalaureate Organisation is based in Wales and has a worldwide network. It governs all aspects of the programmes. In 2003 the school received approval from the IBO to run the IBD programme from January 2004. This development thus provided the basis for examining the integration of two systems into one school. In the area of interest to this study, Group 4, three sciences were originally offered, biology, chemistry and physics.
Study
This study investigates the progress of two cohorts of senior science students following parallel curricula routes over a two year programme designed primarily for entry into tertiary education. It follows the preparation and training of the teachers, their perceptions and the management of change within the school. The study also compares the content, structure and assessment of the two programmes via the physics courses offered, and the preparedness of students by the NSW School Certificate for both of the science courses.
Methodology
The longitudinal study commenced in February 2005 with the start of the first IB programme at the school. Two student groups to be studied were identified, one from each programme.
Both quantitative and qualitative data were collected from the students throughout the two years of the study. Quantitatively, an initial questionnaire sought the students' attitudes to their chosen programmes. A corresponding final questionnaire was administered at the end of the two year course to collect the students' final impressions. Formal and informal interviews were held during the period of the study, and as the researcher was a member of the school science staff classroom observations and field notes were also collected. Teaching staff were interviewed along with the IBD coordinator and school Principal for a management perspective and allowing triangulation to take place.
Conclusion
This project has investigated the experience of both cohorts of staff and students within the parallel programmes. These findings will be discussed alongside many issues concerning the practicalities of implementing an alternative programme of study in science within a school.
Keyword: Science and ICT Education
In this paper the nature of science is examined through the narrative of unconventional scientist Barbara McClintock. Her initial groundbreaking work in maize cytogenetics earned her a place among the leaders in genetics and she was elected to the prestigious National Academy of Sciences in 1944 and became the first woman President of the Genetics Society of America in 1945. Despite such recognition, her classic paper detailing the function of the nucleolar organizer region was in the main not registered by the biological community. For several reasons, as Barbara's discoveries became more complex, the scientific community lost interest in her papers. The reasons for her ineffectiveness at getting her new findings accepted by the scientific community are discussed. Though her research was often dismissed as wildly unorthodox, she pursued it, making discoveries that changed the map of modern genetics. In 1983 she was awarded the individual Nobel Prize in Physiology/Medicine. As a scientist Barbara treated the organisms she studied as her friends and she felt a connectedness to nature. She appreciated a naturalist's approach to research and predicted a paradigm shift that would emphasise relationship and connectedness. This paper was informed by socio-cultural-historical theory with the narrative of Barbara McClintock being generated by using Rogoff's three planes of analysis. On the individual plane, the personal lens enabled a description of the influences that shaped her personality in the early years, including interactions with family members. The interpersonal lens revealed her relationships with her peers in various institutions where she carried out her scientific endeavours. The community lens identified how the scientific community reacted to her scientific discoveries and radical theories. This narrative of Barbara, as a non-stereotypical scientist, is useful in the classroom because it helps students to understand that doing science is far more than an objective, dispassionate and disconnected process.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 32, PEE08359 Communicating communities: Sustaining effective futures.
Keyword: Sociocultural and Activity Theory
This paper describes how complexity theory principles relating to self-emergence and connectivity have been employed to inform our recent developmental work in Scottish physical education. We suggest that these complexity principles have purchase in postmodern times characterised by uncertainty, multiplicity, and contradiction (Fernandez-Balboa, 1997). We cite examples from the development and delivery of a Developmental Physical Education Programme in Scotland to assert that complex learning principles (Light, 2008; Morrison, 2008) can be employed to structure curriculum and pedagogy endeavours. These examples from practice highlight the ways in which a complexity-oriented learning approach provides a challenge to hierarchical, reductionist, and behaviourist notions of learning which have long held a strong foothold in the field of physical education (Light, 2008). At the same time, we pay attention to critical questions which have been raised regarding the practicality of structuring educational practice with emerging theories such as complexity theory (Davis & Sumara, 2006).
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
My research formed part of a three year doctoral study that explored the processes and practices of two eco-schools engaging in education for sustainable development in England and South Africa. This paper presents the research methodology used in 'unpacking' one emerging theme, 'pupil self-esteem'. Whilst I used an interpretive framework for presenting each case story to demonstrate how this might help in writing for generalisation, this paper aimed to draw the reader down into the critically interpretive research methodology to demonstrate how I explored 'pupil self-esteem'. Critical realism and cultural historical activity theory provided the tools for the analysis of the (empirical) data. This was to help reveal the underpinning values that related to the practices that lay beneath the surface of what was seen and experienced by exploring the 'empirical' in relation to the 'real' and 'actual'. The real were the structures and mechanisms in relation to the empirical (based on the observations), the actual is the vision or the reality in terms of what was happening or experienced and what could happen or be experienced in relation to this empirical data. These insights were drawn from the data collected to gain a deeper understanding of the processes and practices in these two case study eco-schools. It must be remembered that these case stories represented one moment in time, seen through the eyes of one researcher and represented by those interviewed (Smyth & Hattam 2002) and what they said at that time.
Keywords: Sociocultural and Activity Theory
In this paper we report on collaboration between researchers and teachers from a university school of education and the education department at a children's hospital to assist students who miss extended periods of schooling as a result of serious illness through novel applications of information and communication technologies (ICT).
A considerable number of Australian students are absent from school for extended periods of time as a result of hospitalisation, convalescence, rehabilitation or chronic illness. Predictably this disrupts students' academic work as well as presenting them with an array of complex social challenges. A team comprising staff from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education (MGSE) and the Education Institute of the Royal Children's Hospital in Melbourne (RCH-EI) have been investigating ways in which ICT can be used to connect such students with school and their studies.
We know from previous research that technology makes it possible to take learning beyond classrooms and timetabled periods, and Passey (2000) noted that establishing ICT links between home and school enabled autonomy and individualised learning for students and encouraged parental involvement in the student's education. The establishment of such links are considered to have special value for pupils who are unable to attend school on a regular basis (Dfes/Becta 2001). ICT can enable absent students to communicate with their peers and teachers (Detheridge 1997, Waddell 2000), improve independent access to people and learning materials (Moore and Taylor 2000), and increase the learners' technological confidence, which can motivate them to use online technology for both educational and leisure purposes (Waddell 2000).
Pre-service teacher education students from the Melbourne Graduate School of Education began working online with school students having a chronic illness in the Back on Track program in 2006. Back on Track was a pilot study that involved using ICT to link chronically ill students with teachers. The first group of participating teacher education students were preparing to become secondary teachers of Information Technology and one other subject, and provided online support in this second subject area. In July 2007 researchers from the MGSE and the RCH-EI commenced a three year research project funded by a grant from the Australian Research Council, extending the work done in previous years. This paper reviews the concepts behind these projects, with an emphasis on their implications for teacher education.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
This paper explores membership within a Research Higher Degree community designed to develop expertise in the field of managing athlete behaviour in a novice coaching context. Employing literature, methodologies and data analysis techniques associated with postmodern ethnography the author provides insights into a journey from novice to expert within a research community of practice. Through relating the dissertation process with professional experience a narrative is presented that captures the tensions, ambiguities and potentialities associated with occupying different forms of membership within a research community of practice. Conclusions are drawn relating to how the structured nature of authoring a dissertation can be informed by the dynamic, sometimes unstructured and unpredictable forms of participation experienced.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 14, FIN08175 Multiple ways of becoming: Journeying the RHD Programs within a University.
Keyword: Higher Education
This paper reports my reflections of a school and university partnership carried out in Semester One 2008 by the Bachelor of Teaching (Primary/Secondary) music education specialist at a University in Melbourne. As students have a specific 'situated learning' experience at a primary school, their five-week visit during the ten-week semester acts as onsite professional development by both the music teacher and myself. Here students are able to reflect and discuss both content and pedagogical knowledge. They are also given the opportunity to teach small groups whilst being mentored by the music teacher and myself. I contend that by universities providing such opportunities as good exemplars of best practice in music education as a form of professional development students can only improve teaching and learning and be better prepared when entering the teaching profession.
In this paper I report on my pre-service music education students' experience as school based music teaching and learning as an effective form of professional development. My reflections are supported by my observational notes are informed by self study methodology I consider the link between tertiary and school partnership as a way forward to improve both the teaching and learning of music education. Universities in Australia are increasingly encouraged to forge pathways with schools where students and teacher educators have the opportunity to observe best practice, engage in teaching and learning onsite and reflect on both content and pedagogical knowledge. Such practice promotes educational praxis for a sustainable future.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
For scientists and governments, it is important to understand the mechanisms by which the scientific literacy of the populace can be raised, in the case of this project regarding biotechnologies, and to enable effective public discourse on the issue. Current science education reform documents emphasise this need (Goodrum & Rennie, 2007) and that the key role of science education is to raise the scientific literacy of students who in turn become citizens themselves. For an individual to become scientifically literate they must possess the knowledge, skills and attitudes to be able to make informed decisions on scientific matters that affect their personal, work and civic lives (Hurd, 1991). A unit has been designed to bring students to a personal, evidence based, stance on the question "Should Australia grow GM crops?" As the unit is refined through the design-based research methodology, the most effective pedagogical, curriculum and assessment practices that have the greatest effect upon improving the scientific literacy, in particular attitudes, of students will be determined. This paper argues that a biotechnology unit, which follows a discipline-integrated, inquiry-based approach, and incorporates activities which require students to access and evaluate their attitudes towards biotechnologies, and activities which explicitly require students to interact with their parents, are able to impact on the scientific literacy of the students.
Low or declining levels of scientific literacy is a concern in many Western countries. Public Understanding of Science schemes such as those reviewed by the Bodmer Report (1985 cited in Miller, 2001) in the UK, and the American Academy for the Advancement of Science have proven fruitless in their ability to raise the scientific literacy of their respective populations (Durant, Evans, & Thomas, 1989; Shamos, 1995). Attempts such as these rely on the deficit model, and assume the public simply need to know more science to become more sympathetic towards science. The assumed link between knowledge and attitudes these programs rely upon may be at fault. The problem however, may actually live within the education system, as it is the education system that is charged with developing the scientific literacy of the citizens within its population.
A reconceptualisation of scientific literacy has been developed for a number of reasons. Firstly, new technologies require citizens to consider their use and their impact on society and the environment. Narrow conceptions of scientific literacy which only consider the cognitive domain of scientific literacy fail to address the need of citizens to develop attitudes (affective domain) and behaviours (behavioural domain) in relation to these new technologies. Not only does it provide a useful lens with which to re-examine the corpus of knowledge regarding the scientific literacy of biotechnology but it also provides new insights which this project aims to examine.
Rather than viewing the various definitions as competitors within a theoretical arena, it has been possible to categorise the aspects of the various definitions into three domains: the affective, behavioural and cognitive domains. The cognitive domain is the traditional concern of science education which is the acquisition of knowledge, mental abilities and cognitive schemata used within the sciences. The affective domain refers to concepts such as attitudes to science, whether it be science as a human endeavour, as a school subject or as a future career. The behavioural domain refers to individuals utilising science in their personal (e.g., making choices regarding health and wellbeing or engaging in online scientific debate), work (e.g., entering a scientific career or choosing science subjects in the non-compulsory years) or civic lives (e.g., supporting a piece of legislation). This will be referred to as the Affective, Behavioural and Cognitive (AB&C) model of Scientific Literacy.
Research methodology and design
The scientific literacy, as defined by the AB&C model of Scientific Literacy, of year 9 students in two Queensland schools (one metropolitan (n=63) and one regional (n=40)) was measured pre and post the teaching of an integrated unit of work entitled "Should Australia grow GM crops?" The study used a design-based research methodology which meant the unit was not only tailored to each context but was also refined before the commencement of the next iteration. The affective, behavioural and cognitive domains were measured using a biotechnology questionnaire developed by drawing upon items and instruments developed by previous researchers (e.g., Dawson & Schibeci, 2003; Gunter, Kinderlerer & Beyleveld, 1998; Jallinoja & Aro, 2000; Klop & Severiens, 2007).
Research findings
Preliminary analyses of the data reveal significant changes, on all measures, within the cognitive domain. Students in both settings were able to provide definitions of key terms when previously they had failed or were able to provide greater depth in their definitions. Students in both settings showed increased knowledge in various genetic concepts and were able to recall more examples of biotechnology and GM crops, though these were restricted to examples discussed in the unit. Within the affective domain, attitudes in the metropolitan private school became more polarised towards various biotechnology applications while in the regional state school attitudes became more positive. Within the behavioural domain, a similar pattern to the affective domain was observed. Students from the metropolitan school were only more likely to exhibit certain behaviours, while students from the regional school became more likely to exhibit behaviours across the broad range of biotechnology applications.
Contribution to the field
This study provides proof of concept that it is possible to change attitudes but in order to do so you must provide students with the necessary thinking tools which require them to access their attitudes and analyse incoming information according to costs and benefits.
Keyword: Education in the middle years and the middle years of schooling
Ernest Boyer's (1990) paper "Scholarship Reconsidered" sparked widespread discussion of the role of academics and broadened the notion of academic work by defining four "Scholarships": Discovery (Research), Application, Integration and Teaching.
Since the publication of the Boyer paper, higher education in Australia has undergone significant change and is operating in a global, market-driven economic environment. There have been significant changes in the universities due to new technology and management practices. These changes described have put considerable pressures on academics and teachers in universities and has had an impact on their roles.
This paper re-considers the role of academics in this new environment and explores whether the four 'Boyer' scholarships are sufficient to define academic work in this different environment. A fifth scholarship is proposed which aims to restore the voice of academics as key stakeholders in the formation of effective educational policy and decision making.
Keyword: Educational Policy
When teaching Indigenous students science it is important to appreciate their culture and understand an Indigenous perspective (Christie, 1997; Harrison, 2004). Nevertheless, in order to provide a culturally safe learning environment it is equally important to understand one's own culture and the potential impact that it can have on Indigenous students (Papps, 2005; Wepa, 2005). The non-Indigenous teacher who teaches Indigenous students needs to appreciate that science is a subculture of western society (Aikenhead, 1999, 2001; Lederman, 2000). Teachers' beliefs of science (Brickhouse, 1990) and how it should be taught will influence how science is taught and learned (Keys, 2005, 2007; Munby, Russell & Martin 2001; Shulman, 1987). These are two critical issues that need to be considered.
To understand an Indigenous perspective of science it is first necessary to have a clear understanding of ones own perspective of what is science. Science is generally seen as the foundation of modern western thought and the means or process in which western knowledge is generated and sometimes viewed as the only valid way of knowing (Lee, 2000). Science deals with only the physical observable world or phenomena and the metaphysical--spiritual world is not within its domain of knowledge (Lee, 2000). Science is viewed and taught in schools as the way of understanding and explaining the world or the unknown (e.g., Northern Territory curriculum framework 2002). Unfortunately, many teachers do not closely examine or understand their own views of the nature of science--NOS (Mc Comas 2000; Lederman, 2000) and curriculum documents in Australia do not make it explicitly clear what science does not investigate. We unwittingly isolate Indigenous students or any other cultural group from science who hold a dualist view of the world and as a result create culturally unsafe learning environments (Papps, 2005). Teachers' beliefs of the NOS and practices of teaching science are therefore critically important in the development of a culturally safe classrooms. There is little evidence of research--particularly in Australia (e.g., Christie, 1997; Chireza, 2007)--that has specifically examined teachers' beliefs and practices when teaching science to Indigenous students.
The purpose of this study was to investigate a teacher's beliefs and practices when teaching science to Indigenous students. In particular the study sought to understand what craft knowledge the science teacher found useful in making the science lessons more meaningful and how this is underpinned by the teacher's beliefs in the teaching of science? The research was funded by the Science Information and Communication Technology and Mathematics Education for Rural and Regional Australia--SIMERR program. The participants of the study included a non-government school situated in Darwin, the science teacher and her year eight indigenous science class. The students boarded at the school and represented a cross section of multiple Indigenous language families in the Northern Territory.
The research was designed as a case study (Creswell, 1998) framed in a self-study research methodology (Loughran, 2004). The lessons were collaboratively planned and taught by the teacher and researcher. A teacher knowledge filter (Keys, 2003, 2005, 2007) provided them the framework to analyse their beliefs and practices. Confidence in the validity of the findings was achieved through the triangulation of data taken from three main sources: the video taped lessons and the analysis of the transcripts; the ongoing critical reflections of the teacher and researcher; and the students' participation in the lessons and focus group sessions. A research assistant verified the findings by a constant comparative analysis of the data--identifying common themes and critical video incidents that illustrated the themes. The critical incidents identified in the video footage were coded and professional edited together to create 3-5 min video segments of the phases of teaching the science unit--introduction through to the assessment. The video clips were presented to two groups of experienced teachers who had taught Indigenous students. The teachers were asked to view the video footage and to comment on the teaching. These sessions were audio-recorded and fully transcribed. Feedback provided at these sessions confirmed the issues and experiences that emerged from the data analysis.
Four themes emerged from the findings that challenge teachers' practice; facilitating the students' understanding of scientific concepts; engaging Indigenous students; group work and the role of the teacher aid:
The outcomes of this study have implication for teaching Indigenous students across other curriculum areas. In order to create culturally safe learning environments teachers need to examine their beliefs regarding their subject in this case science; and their teaching and learning beliefs and practices.
Keyword: Indigenous Education
With the global shift towards standards-driven reform, tied to reporting, assessment issues related to public and teacher accountability take prominence. In an accountability context standards are used as a lever to improve the reliability and consistency of teacher judgement and classroom evidence is used by education systems for reporting and tracking achievement over time. Assessment is inseparable from curriculum and has become a powerful driver for change. It is central to good education and is at the heart of the teaching-learning dynamic. The relationship between the learner, learning and assessment, however, needs to be kept central and teacher assessment at the local, professional level remains fundamental.
This paper will outline the changing demands of assessment policy and associated practices for achieving accountability in the global context of standards-based reform in different education systems. What is apparent in this analysis is the central role of teacher empowerment at the local, cultural level in the case for 'intelligent accountability' (O'Neill, 2002) and more generative and educative forms of assessment, pedagogy and curriculum to enhance quality and to improve equity of educational provision. This paper argues for a central place for teacher assessment in the changing climate of assessment policy. Teacher assessment is defined as:
Teacher professionalism, through educative forms of school-based and teacher-led evaluation and assessment, remains vital.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 13, KLE08151 The changing climate of assessment: Implications for policy and teachers' practice.
Keyword: Assessment and Evaluation
Introduction
In Singapore, although there is a well-established education system, there arose a new challenge at the turn of the century, to "ensure that our young can think for themselves, so that the next generation can find their own solutions to whatever new problems they may face" (Goh, 1997). To promote thinking and innovation, the Ministry of Education initiated new strategies and changes in classroom practices and assessment procedures.
In an attempt to move away from conventional assessment methods towards performance-based assessment, the Project Work (PW) initiative was introduced in Singapore schools in the late nineties to enhance creative and critical thinking, problem solving, collaboration and communication skills. The approaches adopted for PW tend to vary from school to school, although common practices can be identified. In most instances, students are first taught project skills such as planning, research and data collection, report writing and oral presentation. The students then form groups of five to six members to work on their project tasks. In most schools, PW is carried out within curriculum time and on a weekly basis. However, aside the planned PW sessions, students often spend time on their projects outside school hours. The teacher's role in PW is usually that of a facilitator, providing guidance and feedback to students. Some teachers also assume the roles of PW instructors in their schools, and yet others are PW coordinators or members of the PW committee, whose tasks include preparing PW resource materials and managing the implementation of PW in their schools
The benefits of group work and cooperative learning have been extolled by a large number of researchers. For instance, Johnson and Johnson (1989) postulated that cooperation amongst students working in groups enhanced productivity, achievement, social interaction and psychological health. Team members benefited from constructive feedback on their work, the recognition of their contributions, the enhancement of their effort and the promotion of interpersonal trust within the group. In addition, improved psychological well being, reduced anxiety and stress levels and enhanced motivation towards goal achievement were observed in cooperative groups. That learning in groups promoted students' academic and social skills was supported by Burron, James and Ambrosio (1993) and Ossont (1993). In the Singapore context, a number of researchers have focused their attention on the implications of PW on learning (Chua, 2004), communication and teamwork (Tan, 2002), motivation (Liu, Tan, Wang, Koh, & Ee, 2007) and students' perceptions (Chang & Chang, 2003; Koh, Tan, Wang, Ee, & Liu, 2007). Generally, their findings showed that PW had a positive effect on students.
In most of the studies cited above, findings were derived from either self-report instruments or conventional face-to-face interviews or both. In recent years, there has been a growing interest in the influence of students' discourse in promoting the effectiveness of cooperative learning strategies such as group work. For instance, Mercer, Wegerif and Dawes (1999) found that developing children's awareness of language use and adherence to basic guidelines for group discourse improved the quality of collaborative activity and reasoning skills. Postholm (2005) found that teachers play an important role in creating conducive learning environments to enhance the quality of students' dialogues in project work. Although there is an increasing pool of western literature on the role of discourse in improving the effectiveness of cooperative strategies, no such study has yet been undertaken in Asian learning contexts. Furthermore, it would benefit researchers and classroom practitioners to be aware of any relationship between the effectiveness of team dialogue and other factors contributing to the success of PW.
Aims of the project
This study attempts to fill the gaps in the aforementioned areas firstly by investigating aspects of students' perceived motivation in undertaking project work, and secondly by exploring the link between perceived motivation and the quality of students' discourse during group activities. Our investigation on students' motivation in project work is based on the tenets of the self determination theory (SDT), which stipulates that for personal development and well-being, individuals require the fulfilment of their three basic psychological needs (Deci, Vallerand, Pelletier, & Ryan, 1991), namely that of autonomy (volition and self-initiation), competence (aptitude and effectiveness in performing a task) and relatedness (sense of familiarity and belonging to a social group). According to the SDT, the satisfaction of these three needs will promote intrinsic motivation (Deci & Ryan, 2000). The aim of this study is to provide answers for the following questions:
Research methods
Survey procedure
588 Secondary 2 (8th Grade) students from the five selected secondary schools took part in the survey. This sample consisted of 335 male and 253 female students, aged between 12 to 15 years (mean = 13.43, SD= 0.49).
The survey items were adapted from a number of established instruments used and validated by other researchers. Thus the Academic Self-Regulation Questionnaire (SRQ-A, Ryan & Connell, 1989) and the Academic Motivation Scale (Vallerand et al., 1992) provided items for the assessment of motivation. The Learning Climate Questionnaire (LCQ, Williams & Deci, 1996) and the Intrinsic Motivation Inventory (IMI, McAuley, Duncan, & Tammen, 1989) provided items used for perceived needs satisfaction. Items for perceived outcomes of participation were adapted partly from the IMI and partly from the Motivated Strategies for Learning Questionnaire (MSLQ, Pintrich, Smith, Garcia & McKeachie, 1991). A seven-point scale, ranging from 1 (not true at all) to 7 (very true) was used for the scoring process. The internal consistency coefficients were calculated for each of the subscales and all were found to be satisfactory (.64
Keyword; Motivation and Learning.
Internationally and nationally there is an established discourse particularly in policy literature in which links between teaching standards and teacher learning are commonly taken to be generative for teacher learning. Standards are often seen as providing a framework for guiding the learning of teachers. Many teacher certification procedures use standards together with processes aimed to produce professional learning so that measures of professional learning may well result from the processes independent of any role that the standards might play. This small review aims to provide insight into the nature of the potential relationships between teaching standards and teacher learning through an examination of policy literature and empirical research. Although I find no absolute link between teaching standards and teacher professional learning, there is evidence of potentially complementary and catalytic possibilities between these two constructs.
Keyword: Sociology of Education
The current worldwide shortage of teachers has serious implications for nations attempting to implement education for sustainability. The inclusion of universal primary education as the second of the UN Millennium Goals was a recognition that education plays a crucial role in the alleviation of poverty, the promotion of peace and security and environmental protection. The projected shortage means that programs aimed at improving knowledge of sustainable practices such as the Australian Sustainable Schools Program, the British Sustainable Development Action Plan for Schools or the Nepal Sustainable Community Development Program will be undermined as the teachers required to deliver them may not be available.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
Transition from primary school to high school represents a major change in the way that students' school lives are organized. The differences in ways that primary and high schools are organized might be expected to be associated with anxieties in students who move from the senior year of one school to the most junior level of the other. Yet there is wide variation in the findings of research on the experiences of students around this period of transition. In this project we followed a group of students across the period of transition, gathering data on their lives at school. The first occasion for data gathering occurred at the end of the students' final year in primary school. We surveyed the same students after one term in high school. The surveys focused on different components of the students' school lives including, general satisfaction with school; degree of coping with school and with school work; sense of belonging to the school community; prevalence of bullying and harassment; coping with bullying and harassment; friendship and the sources of friends; knowledge of strategies for learning; and worries associated with transition. In this paper we report on the relationships between the students' views on these diverse components at the two time points; the profiles of views reported by boys and girls; and the extent to which the students' anticipated concerns were realized during the first term at school. The broad picture emerging from our qualitative and quantitative analyses is of a group of students whose transition experience had been generally positive, though specific areas of the students' academic and social lives diverged from this broad pattern.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 72, ASK08645 Building wellbeing in school communities.
Keyword: Educational Psychology and Learning Sciences
Professional experience in initial teacher education continues to be a very challenging area in which to work in Australian universities, given the multiplicity of political, professional, economic and pragmatic issues that surround professional placements. The last decades have seen a myriad of responses to these issues and resulted in changes in how professional experiences are conceptualized, structured and supervised. Such changes have had implications for the roles of the various participants and the corresponding nomenclature used to describe the roles. This paper focuses on the role of the 'student teacher'. The paper draws on the literature and a small investigative study into a group of graduate Bachelor of Education primary students enrolled in a professional experience program framed around the notion of learning communities. This particular model of professional experience incorporates a range of structured opportunities for student teachers to work collaboratively with each other. Based on a post-practicum evaluation administered to a cohort of fifty two student teachers, the paper presents early findings about student teachers' perceptions of the increased peer support in which they were involved, together with their views on their own attitudes towards their professional experience. It will be seen that peer support and resilience emerged as two important concepts associated with this model of professional experience. These concepts are discussed in the paper, together with the implications for those of us responsible for implementing the model.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
Every country in the world has some form of an educational system leading to a Vocational Education and Training system. Vocational training is normally post secondary education but in some countries it is initiated during the schooling years. Other developed countries such as the United Kingdom have similarities in their competency based education system to that of Australia (Gunning, 1993). The challenges facing vocational education and training in the United States of America from the mid to the late 1990's had parallel's with those changes occurring in New Zealand at that time, these challenges are now being confronted by the Australian Vocational Education System (O'Connor, 1993).
Technical Education in New South Wales (NSW) evolved from the privately funded Sydney Mechanic's School of Arts in 1833. The NSW State Government assumed control of this institution in 1883 resulting in the expansion of the Technical Education at a rapid rate, and has developed into what is now called a Vocational Education and Training (VET) system (Goozee, 1995).
This comparative study of the MF&W trade course in 2001 and the newly introduced MF&W trade courses in 2004, focuses on the data from the exit tests. The discussions and recommendations also focus on types of benefits or deficiencies this major change has had in the knowledge base of the current apprentices from the trade course.
From 1972 to 1990 the MF&W trade course had not changed a great deal in its delivery mode or subject matter. The introduction of the Competency Based Training (CBT) format into the MF&W area of training in 1991 changed it from a lock step method of delivery. Lock step method underpinned the knowledge of the task step by step form whereas the modular based delivery contains the competency required for the task. During the decade that followed, there have been three major reviews of the MF&W (Heavy) trade, which have impacted on delivery, what is taught and how it is taught.
Keyword: Vocational Education and Training
According to theory and research social aspects like friendship and sense of relatedness are fundamental in the development of children's cultural identity and achievement outcomes (Deci & Ryan, 1995; Maehr & Midgley, 1999; Wentzel, 2005; Ladd, 2007). It is argued that this is a motivational aspect often neglected in research studies focusing students' motivation and learning. Theory and research on motivation and learning show interesting relations exist between students' self-concept, motivation and preference of learning (McInerney, 2003; Maehr & McInerney, 2004; Reeve, Deci & Ryan, 2004). In any culture, motivation and preference of learning are founded in values and sets of knowledge. For Indigenous people in particular, cultural values, sense of relatedness and self-determination are important elements in school motivation (Duncan & Greymorning, 1999; The Sami, 2000; McCathy, 2002).
In this paper we discuss results from two comparative cross-cultural studies within the research project "The Socio-Cultural Perspective on Play and Learning". The aim was to compare attitudes and beliefs among Indigenous students of Aboriginal Australian, Navajo Indian, and Norwegian S?mi descent as opposed to students of Anglo Australian, Anglo American and Ethnic Norwegian background. Methodological issues of importance in cross-cultural research studies like this are discussed. Our research indicates friendship and sense of competence are important to students' motivation to participate and achieve in school, partly confirming results from other research studies (Craven 1999; Hirvonen, 2004; Wentzel 2005; Ladd, 2007). Results regarding interests in play, preference of learning, self-concept aspects and school motivation are also presented and discussed.
We find sense of relatedness to be a quintessence in this concern, for which reason social learning through social motivation (cf. Lillemyr, 2007) has to be taken more seriously than often is done, in preschool and school alike. In these matters we think different cultures may be inspired by each other.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 85, MAG08733 Cross-cultural motivational research within education.
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
The middle years of schooling has emerged as an important focus in Australian education. Student disengagement and alienation, the negative effects of non-completion of the senior years of schooling and underachievement have raised concerns about the quality of education during the middle years. For many schools, reshaping the middle years has involved incorporating Information and Communication Technologies (ICT) to motivate students. However, simultaneously there is a need to ensure that programs are academically rigorous. There is little doubt that there are potential benefits to integrating ICT into programs for middle years' students. However, little is known about how middle years' teachers perceive higher order thinking, which is a component of academic rigour. This paper investigates the question of What are teachers' perceptions of higher order thinking in an ICT environment? The study is underpinned by socio-cultural theory which is based on the belief that learning occurs through social interaction and that individuals are shaped by the social and cultural tools and instruments they engage with. This investigation used a collective case study design. Two methods were used for data collection. These methods are semi-structured interviews with individual teachers and a class and a focus group discussion with teachers. Findings indicate that teachers hold various perceptions of higher order thinking that lead to productive approaches to integrating ICT in middle years' classrooms. The paper highlights that there may be a continuum of perceptions of higher order thinking with ICT. This continuum may inform professional developers who are guiding and supporting teachers to integrate ICT into middle years' classrooms.
Keyword: Education in the middle years and the middle years of schooling.
Online curriculum projects are ideally suited to provide spaces for learners to discuss construction activities and contemporary web tools allow the enactment of theories offered in the late 20th Century, particularly those relating to distributed constructionism and the potential of the Internet to enhance teaching and learning. This paper presents a post hoc analysis, using five participating schools as a theoretical sample, of a 2007 online curriculum project, Land Yachts, which involved 142 pre-service students (in 48 teams), 477 primary school students (in 143 teams) and 18 classroom teachers from locations as diverse as Far North Queensland and Western Australia. The analysis will outline the online discussing, sharing and collaborating on constructions that students undertook in order to enhance and extend their knowledge. The paper will conclude that distributed constructionism has much to offer as a framework for designing online curriculum projects but that changes in technology have afforded differing and much interactive connections between learners.
Keyword: Information and Communication Technology
Introduction
Research into the practice of achievement grouping for learning in a variety of contexts has been common since the 1920s (Slavin, 1987). This paper looks at one current achievement grouping practice in primary schools, both in Australia and overseas. A study comparing two groups of schools using different grouping practices is presented, with a focus on student academic achievement. Results are compared with earlier findings in the literature.
Background
Streaming (allocating students to homogenous ability classes based on some measure of each student's overall academic potential) became popular in larger schools after standardised testing became available (Slavin, 1987). The incarnation of achievement grouping in the form of streaming was discredited by researchers such as Jackson (1964) in the 1960s, and the practice was thought to have been largely discontinued in the 1970s (MacIntyre & Ireson, 2002). Streaming was found to be fraught with academic and social inequalities, providing some advantages for a select few at the expense of the majority of students (Jackson, 1964). After the general demise of streaming, other achievement grouping practices remained.
Slavin's (1987) oft cited review of achievement grouping research in the form of a best-evidence synthesis relates specifically to primary level education and including studies on both between- and within-class achievement grouping. He found no overall academic benefit from achievement grouping, but did note some specific grouping techniques which were exceptions. He found positive effects from within-class grouping for mathematics, and from between-class grouping if done for reading and/or mathematics, with students in mixed achievement classes for most of the day. These particular results came from "Joplin plan" studies (Slavin, 1987, p. 295) which took place in the 1950s and 1960s in the United States, and which have similarities with the regrouping practice currently seen in some primary schools here and overseas, on which this paper will focus. A meta-analysis conducted by Kulik and Kulik (1982) on achievement grouping in secondary schools similarly found no significant difference in academic achievement overall.
One common contemporary use of achievement grouping is between-class achievement grouping, implemented by individual subject area (a practice known as "setting" in the United Kingdom [UK]). Whilst widely instituted in secondary schooling, particularly for the subject areas of English and mathematics, the practice is also employed by a considerable number of primary schools, both in Australia and overseas. In the UK, increased use of the practice has been encouraged since the 1990s by a number of governmental initiatives associated with the literacy and numeracy hours for the expected benefit of student attainment (Hallam, Ireson, Lister, Andon Chaudhury, & Davies, 2003; MacIntyre & Ireson, 2002).
The impact of this regrouping practice on academic outcomes is of particular interest, as this is often cited as the premise for its implementation. Whilst much research has been completed on the topic of achievement grouping overall, little of this in recent years has focused on regrouping in primary schools. An exception to this has been a body of work completed by a group of researchers in the UK (for example, Davies, Hallam, & Ireson, 2003; Hallam, Ireson, & Davies, 2004; Hallam, et al., 2003). Results from these studies state that the processes involved in effectively implementing achievement grouping are "complex and time consuming" (Davies, et al., 2003, p. 57) and that many of the problems found with streaming also occur in setting (regrouping) (MacIntyre & Ireson, 2002; Hallam & Ireson, 2006, 2007). Achievement grouping was most often employed for mathematics and English, and occurred with increasing frequency as students progressed through school (Hallam, et al., 2003). Primary students were aware of the grouping structures used (Hallam, et al., 2004), but not all were happy with their group placements (MacIntyre & Ireson, 2002). These recent primary school based studies report little as to academic outcomes. A study completed on UK secondary mathematics classes suggest benefits for high achieving students, but disadvantages for their low achieving counterparts (Wiliam & Bartholomew, 2004).
Aims
The current study focuses on the academic outcomes of regrouping for literacy and numeracy in Australian primary schools. The aim of the study was to investigate the practice of regrouping primary students by achievement for literacy and numeracy. Specific areas of investigation included the impact of the practice on academic achievement, student attitudes towards school, and teaching practices. This paper will present results related to the effects on academic achievement.
Method
Two groups of primary schools (four in each group) were included in the study. One group of schools regrouped students (at least in Years 3-6) by achievement for literacy and numeracy sessions, whilst the other group maintained mixed achievement classes for all subject areas. Interviews about the regrouping strategy and its effects on teachers, students and teaching practices were conducted with principals and teachers, and some classroom observations were completed. Quantitative data from Stage 3 (Years 5 and 6) students were also collected, in the form of Basic Skills Test (BST) growth results and Quality of School Life survey responses. BST growth results allow for prior learning, as they measure a student's academic growth between Years 3 and 5 in literacy, mathematics and writing. This paper focuses on aspects of the study relating to academic achievement, with results determined through statistical analyses of the BST growth data.
Findings
Results from the current study suggest that academic achievement is not raised by regrouping students by achievement for instruction. No significant difference in BST growth results was found between the two school groups studied. This was consistent, regardless of student gender or achievement level. These results support findings by earlier researchers including Slavin (1987) that achievement grouping does not affect academic achievement, but does not support his claims that regrouping for one or two subject areas is effective. It may be that the way in which the practice currently operates is not optimal. In conclusion, it is suggested that schools implementing the regrouping practice should reassess how and why they do so, as there may be more effective ways of supporting their students' academic growth.
Keyword: Primary Education
The purpose of the current research was to evaluate the psychometric properties of two motivational measures in domain-general and domain-specific contexts. A total of 476 secondary students completed self-report motivational measures. Reliability and confirmatory factor analyses demonstrated support for the domain specificity of motivational goals and demonstrated that both motivational measures were psychometrically sound for assessing academic motivation across different subject areas and toward school in general. It was concluded that in order to capture the true complexity of how student goals operate in specific subjects, it may be more appropriate to use domain-specific motivational measures. Theoretical and practical implications, potential limitations, and directions for future research are also discussed.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 85, MAG08733 Cross-cultural motivational research within education.
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
In multicultural societies such as Australia, examining the potential similarities and differences of students' motivational profiles cross-culturally is an important topic for research. For the most part, goal theory research has been conducted using Caucasian samples and the potential differences between cultural groups have remained relatively unexplored until recently (Urdan & Giancarlo, 2000). The purpose of the current research was to explore cross-cultural similarities and differences in the motivational profiles of Indigenous Papua New Guinean (PNG) and Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australian students. A total of 1792 secondary students, across the three cultures, completed self-report motivational measures. Invariance testing demonstrated that the Inventory of School Motivation (ISM - McInerney, Yeung & McInerney, 2001) measure was invariant across cultural groups. The current findings highlight the strength of the ISM and the importance of assessing invariance testing over diverse cultural groups.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 85, MAG08733 Cross-cultural motivational research within education.
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
This paper aims to identify aspects of students' attitude and engagement in mathematics across twelve middle-upper primary classrooms in a suburban government school in Queensland, four of which had been involved in teaching mathematics through inquiry. Using a framework and survey developed by Kong, Wong & Lam (2003), the paper discusses students' reports of their affective, behavioural, and cognitive engagement with mathematics through a 58-item Likert-type survey. Open-response comments provided further information about their attitudes towards mathematics.
Keyword: Mathematics Education and Numeracy
This study, conducted as partial fulfilment of the requirements for the degree of Master of Education, has confirmed previous research that most primary students look forward to the new experiences and challenges of secondary school, make the transition from primary to secondary school with a minimum of fuss and thrive in this new context. However, some students may approach this time with apprehension and do not make the transition easily. Transition programs, of different formats and complexities, based on both Australian and international research, have been introduced in some schools to facilitate transition. The aims of this research were to investigate and compare the perceptions of students, parents and teachers involved in several of these programs and to examine the extent to which transition programs can alleviate issues associated with transition between primary and secondary schools. Although executive staff and teachers also provided valuable information and perceptions this paper only addresses the perceptions of students and parents. Surveys which included scale items and open-ended questions were completed by students, parents and teachers in each school and interviews conducted with executive or nominated staff members. The responses from each school were compared to each other and to previous research. The results of the study raised questions about the issues that need to be addressed in transition programs, the effect of different programs on transition and a gender difference in the pre and post conceptions of students and parents about transition.
Keyword: Education in the middle years and the middle years of schooling
The aim of this study was to examine aspects of teacher socialisation that occur in schools, but outside the classroom, and their effects on early career teachers' induction experiences, professional growth and retention. Institutional aspects of socialisation such as organisational, school and community culture and induction practices as well as personal and social-professional factors were investigated and the impact of power relations in these situations analysed.
The study involved a sample of 27 teachers who were in their first three years of teaching and working in a range of school contexts in the state of New South Wales, Australia. The study utilised questionnaires and interviews to gather data which were coded and analysed for common themes in terms of the project's main aim and research questions. Foucault's techniques of power, as adapted by Gore (1995), were used as a framework to analyse the micro-level functioning of power relations in the socialisation and professional growth of these early career teachers through categorising as well as contextualising the interview data.
The results from this study highlighted the underlying role that power plays in the induction of early career teachers. The need to conform to the school culture in terms of pedagogy and social-professional relationships (Kelchtermans & Ballet, 2002), presented major challenges to these teachers as they sought to achieve self confidence, respect, and recognition whilst negotiating micro-level power relations.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 16, KEA08211 Power relations in teacher induction.
Keyword: Teacher Education and Professional Development of Teachers
This paper considers the aspect of 'trying hard', or effort, a characteristic of a positive orientation towards learning, and a key element in student self-regulation. We have taken 'trying hard' to include interrelated factors such as persistence, effort, control over learning and dealing with distraction, essentially the processes of motivation and volition. In this paper we examine the notion of 'trying hard' or trying one's best. This study focuses on mainly on students' perspectives on trying hard, as it is commonly referred to in school settings.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 46, SUL08488 Interventions to support student self-regulation in the middle years.
Keyword: Education in the middle years and the middle years of schooling
Increasingly the literature concerning change to schooling systems tends to use language more readily associated with that of business. Several researchers (Vinson, 2001; Hargreaves & Fullan, 1998; Fullan, 1999) warn of the shift from earlier views of education, towards a more recent perception that appears to consider education as a type of marketable commodity. Increasingly we are moving into a climate where schools are compared to business organizations, where the language of business and terms like 'knowledge economy' (DEST, 2003:1) and 'middle managers' (Fullan, 1999:16) are becoming more commonplace to describe the role of the modern school in society. This paper presents a literature review that briefly explores aspects of the field of organisational learning. Broadly speaking, this is a field concerned with the study of organizations and, within this setting, the role played by culture and change as they impact upon both individual and group dynamics. In more depth, this paper discusses how the literature that has grown up concerning 'sensemaking' (Weick, 1995, 2001, 2005; Mills, 2003; Vaughan, 1996) may be used to identify the connections between policy and practice in this type of organisational environment. The exploration of these types of connections forms part of the purview of the ARC Discovery Project: The Literacy Nexus (Harris, Derewianka, Chen, Fitzsimmons, Kervin, Turbill, Cruickshank, McKenzie & Konza, 2006) that is the subject of this symposium.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 41, HAR08818 The literacy nexus: Exploring relationships among literacy research, policy and practice.
Keyword: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE
This paper will present some methodologies of research that I am currently employing to undertake my PhD study at the University of Western Sydney. My approach is based on having certain pre knowledge of Aboriginal community by virtue of the fact that I am an Aboriginal person born in an Aboriginal community. It is my observations at tertiary research level, that certain surface levels are usually achieved by non-Aboriginal researchers in their endeavours, which quite often conflict with the reality of the research topic. This state of inaccuracy, I believe, is often the direct result of some researchers' unfortunate inability to either get the trust or respect of their Aboriginal informants. This could also apply to some Aboriginal researchers who are just as unfamiliar with the community or individuals from which the research information needs to be extracted. This paper hopes to discuss these issues from an Aboriginal researchers' viewpoint.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 82, MAG08729 A synergy of Indigenous Australian education and Indigenous history.
Keyword: Indigenous Education
This paper explores the status and implications of poststructural feminist studies of gender in education, addressing the contemporary state of play by initially considering some of its antecedents. In a somewhat quizzical and historical mood, I ask 'what was poststructural feminism in education?' I attempt to interpret these ideas not only as a group of theories that challenged thinking and research practice, but as a kind of historical phenomenon that has represented a particular zeitgeist about 'theory', about feminism, and about educational reform. These observations are developed via two main routes: first, in relation to emphasised themes and ambitions in the recent history of poststructural feminist thinking in education; and second in response to contemporary re-assessments of the purpose, legacy and history of 'Theory' in the post 1960s humanities and social sciences. Within an overall view that looks historically at the formation and characteristics of the field, I draw out two significant features. First, I explore some of the effects of poststructural feminism's attention to subjectivity, examining how an emphasis on identity construction and de/re-construction has played out in gender equity reform and policy. Second, I document influential 'founding' debates about definitions and the proper purposes of poststructural feminism, marking out the major points of disagreement and convergence. I show how such debates constituted the field along polarised lines of 'good' or 'bad' and note some of the sticking points in these disputes. In my final comments, I compare these earlier debates with more recent discussions regarding the purposes and 'future' of feminist theory in the wake of poststructural interrogations of the subject and a sense of a radically disrupted present.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 68, MCL08604 Reconsidering 'gender and education': Questions from and about the field.
Keyword: Gender and Sexualities
This paper maps the background to a cultural history of adolescence in Australia in the period 1930s-1970. The larger project examines the education of the adolescent, debates about the personal and civic values young people should embody, and the citizenship and social knowledge that schools should foster. These are matters that command considerable public and policy attention today, and are commonly aligned with concerns about students' wellbeing, which is part of personal development curriculum but also tied to whole-school and system agendas, supported by extensive policy frameworks and service provision. The following paper develops three main types of discussion. First, it outlines some of the ways in which our study is examining antecedents to contemporary concerns about social values and wellbeing, and the kind of policy and curriculum responses they have generated in earlier times. Second, in order to understand these matters and the education of the adolescent we propose to bring together the study of school curriculum and the study of student guidance and counselling, arguing that this allows for a more complex view of the formation of the 'personal' and of social knowledge and dispositions and the relationship between the two. Third, we outline the rationale for our decision to focus on the decades of the 1930s, 50s and 70s, and show why we are exploring the history of adolescence via an examination of school curriculum (policy reforms, knowledge areas, materials and texts) and student psychological guidance. Finally, much recent discussion about citizenship and school values has tended to be dominated by polemic and polarised positions, when their significance warrants responses from a variety of research-based perspectives. Historical studies provide valuable vantage points from which to assess the purposes and values of secondary schooling and its role in fostering young peoples' wellbeing and educating them towards citizenship.
Keyword: History and Philosophy of Education
By focusing on my bodily experiences as an Australian elite swimmer using an autoethnographic framework, this paper contributes to work on sociology and the body. It specifically focuses on the relationship between the regulatory practices of others on my body and my development of self-regulatory practices. I named these regulatory practices as 'ethnophysiological' as they were triggered in the specific social context of Australian swimming and were legitimated through "values packaged in a scientific wrapping" (Vertinsky, 1985, p. 73). Autoethnography, an "autobiographical genre of writing" (Ellis & Bochner, 2000, p. 739) has been utilized as it enables the reader to vicariously share my athletic experiences in particular my bodily experiences, bestowing a voice of authority to my body to reveal personal experiences, voices and feelings. Within this paper, I will re-tell my stories of being an elite swimmer. I will detail stories of enaction, coach and peer regulation and self-regulation occurring within the elite culture persisting my career over a nine-year period. I use Sparkes's (2004, p. 159) question in regard to embodiment to reflexively shape my analysis; "what do my memories reveal about the socialisation of my body" and draw on literature relevant to sociology and the body.
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
In this paper, we draw on accounts from students to inform a Middle Schooling movement that has been variously described as "arrested", "unfinished" and "exhausted". We propose that if the Middle Schooling movement is to understand the changing worlds of students and develop new approaches in the middle years of schooling, then it is important to draw on the insights that individual students can provide by conducting research with "students-as-informants". The early adolescent informants to this paper report high hopes for their futures (despite their lower socio-economic surroundings), which reinforces the importance of supporting successful learner identities and highlights the role of schooling in the decline of adolescent student aspirations. However, their insights did not stop at the individual learner, with students also identifying cultural and structural constraints to reform. As such, we argue that students may be both an important resource for inquiry into individual school reform and for the Middle Schooling movement internationally.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 87, HUN08787 Young people, research, and education: Intersection tensions.
Keyword: Social Justice
The paper is about leadership but with a particular emphasis upon leadership in schools facing challenging circumstances. The research reported in the paper presents a picture of successful principals in challenging urban contexts. The findings are obtained from the Polish part of the Leading Schools Successfully in Challenging Urban Context: Strategies for Improvement project, which involves a nine country partnership between higher education institutions and thirty six schools in disadvantaged urban contexts. The paper focuses on issues connected with the transformation process, especially concerning the school leadership and leadership strategies, so that others might gain deeper understanding of how a school begins, maintains and sustains the journey toward excellence for all students. Special attention is paid not only on what leadership strategies were used by Principal but also why they were used. Case studies demonstrate how leadership capacity can be built and sustained in high poverty urban schools.
Keyword: Educational Leadership and Management
This paper interrogates letters written and sent from Wellington in the early 1840s by a group of seven 'emigrants of the labouring classes'. Written as private letters 'Home', the texts considered here were appropriated and published in the New Zealand Journal, a London-based newspaper allied with the New Zealand Company and its projects of 'systematic colonisation.' As performative texts these published letters spoke the Company's language, enacted its scripts, and were participants in its projects. Penned by semi-literate labourers as personal communications, when located in the context of the New Zealand Journal, the letters transformed into textual stagings of scientific, political, commercial, and ethnological discourses of their time, but expressed in the everyday language of people of humble origins, but 'desirable qualities,' in the English social order. They spoke at once with the voices of capital and labour. While these letter-writers' schooling in England had been designed to "keep them in their place", their repositioning in the imperial project opened spaces for social critique. With reference to the sparse archival resources remaining from the first years of commercially-driven settlement in Wellington, before there was an apparatus of state, I consider how changing material conditions in the settlement enabled and constrained learning opportunities for these labourers' children.
Keyword: History and Philosophy of Education
Place-based education is education that is "grounded in the resources, issues, and values of the local community and focuses on using the local community as an integrating context for learning at all levels" (Powers, 2004, p. 17). The purpose for becoming conscious of places in education is to extend "notions of pedagogy and accountability outward, toward places" making learning more relevant to "the lived experiences of students and teachers... so that places matter to educators, students and citizens in tangible ways" (Gruenewald, 2003b, p. 620). Although place-based education is often used interchangeably with a number of terms - community based learning, rural education, project-based learning, service-learning, sustainability education - it encompasses a broad hope by educators to; 'tear down' school walls so that the community becomes integral to all facets of student learning - that is, that the school is open and inviting to the community and the community welcomes student learning occurring in many dimensions (Powers, 2004, p. 18).
Situated within this partnership between school and community fostered through place-based education is the opportunity for rural-regional sustainability. Using case study methodology, this paper takes an in-depth look at a community enacting rural-regional, and environmental, sustainability through place-based education. In particular, the paper showcases how school and community have used a degraded community stock reserve to 'tear down' the school walls (fences) and perform place through the (co)creation of the Willaroo nature reserve as a place of protection, regeneration and environmentally sustainable practices. This place and its varied uses and users is an example of place being relationally performed in regards to the "flows, mobility and hybridity of meaning" that occurs through and in places (Watson, 2003, p. 145). Furthermore, the story of the Willaroo nature reserve shows that "place is not only local, specific and static" but can be seen as "an emergent effect of globally distributed relationships, and as an actor in those relationships" (Watson, 2003, p. 157). This 'revitalizing of the commons' (Bowers, 2005) has (co-)created a place of bio-diversity, regeneration and environmental education fostering rural-regional sustainability.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 59, GRE08563 Education and rural-regional sustainability.
Keyword: Rural Education
Children identified through the results of the McCarron Assessment of Neuromuscular Development (MAND) as requiring remediation for movement difficulties were provided with an intensive teaching program of fine and gross motor skills. Ten children aged from 6 to 9 years, were selected for the intensive program, based on their Neuromuscular Development Index (NDI) within the moderately disabled category. The intervention was provided by pre-service teachers and comprised a one-hour lesson per week for six weeks. Following the intervention a repeat measure of the MAND was undertaken and the children's NDI was assessed for change. As a group, the children had a positive shift in NDI scores and the effect of the program is examined in terms of the age and gender of the ten primary school-aged children.
Keyword: Health and Physical Education
Globalised communication in society today is characterised by multimodal forms of meaning making in a context of increased cultural and linguistic diversity, calling for the teaching of multiliteracies. This transformation requires the development of a new metalanguage or language of description for the burgeoning and hybridised variety of text forms associated with information and multimedia technologies. To continue to teach to a narrow band of print-based genres, grammars, and skills is to ignore the reality of textual practices outside of schools. This paper draws from classroom research in a multiliteracies classroom to provide a multimodal analysis of a claymation movie. The significance of the paper is the synthesis of a multimodal metalanguage for teachers and students to describe the features of work in the kineikonic (moving image) mode.
Keyword: English Education, Literacy and languages including TESOL, LOTE and ESL
Adapting a behaviour management program from another culture requires concerted efforts in the local school community to add in features that are specific to the local school environment. Since the Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) initiative of the NSW Department of Education and Training Western Sydney Region (DET WSR) was derived from the Positive Behaviour Interventions and Support (PBIS) program developed in the US, for local WSR schools to implement such a program, local adaptation would be expected. Fieldwork with three schools that had implemented the program for over 1 year found 3 common features and 3 differences in the implementation. The common features were (a) consistency, especially with regard to language and expectations, (b) the inclusion of local examples in the training, and (c) the critical interaction of coaches and PBL teams especially in regards evidence (data) about changed behaviour. The differences were (a) involvement of students in decision making, (b) clustering between primary and high schools, and (c) staff ownership of the PBL process. Both common features and differences were found to be distinctive in the implementation of PBL in the region. For sustainability of outcomes, PBL may be further improved on the basis of the strengths elucidated from the common features and differences.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 2, YEU08054 Positive behaviour for learning: Changing student behaviours for sustainable educational outcomes.
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
Positive Behaviour for Learning (PBL) is an initiative of the New South Wales Department of Education and Training Western Sydney Region (NSW DET WSR) that has been progressively introduced into schools. In adapting the US model of Positive Behaviour Interventions and Support (PBIS) program, DET WSR changed more than the name of the Australian model of the intervention The original model was extended beyond behaviour management to emphasise the facilitation of learning outcomes. As a result of local adaptations, various changes occurred at both the school level and regional level. From fieldwork data comprising focus group discussions and individual interviews with stakeholders, the reasons for these changes and their effects, expected or unexpected, provided rich information that may facilitate further improvement of the intervention. Distinctive features of the WSR schools' adaptation of PBL were observed in terms of cultural and contextual factors.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 2, YEU08054 Positive behaviour for learning: Changing student behaviours for sustainable educational outcomes.
Keyword: Motivation and Learning
The paper focuses on the relationship between Australia's first University and Indigenous Australian people and begins by highlighting a training program for Aboriginal teacher's assistants. This unique training program for teacher aides saw a group of Aboriginal students break the stronghold of white education in Australia's first University; the University of Sydney. The paper then examines the creation of the University's Aboriginal Education Centre, later to be known as, the Koori Centre. The paper throws light on the University's response to equity issues and the expansion of educational opportunities for Aboriginal people and the establishment of Aboriginal education and Aboriginal studies in the longer term. While the paper is in part an historical account, and the author has an association with the University, it suggests that Aboriginal education and studies should not merely be dealt with on the sidelines of university learning and teaching, but celebrated equally in mainstream educational programs.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 82, MAG08729 A synergy of Indigenous Australian education and Indigenous history.
Keyword: Indigenous Education
In this report the focus is the student's beliefs and understandings of their capacity to withstand setbacks and form positive goals for the future. The purpose was to investigate the beliefs of adolescents.
An area of self-regulation that was explored in detail was that of possible selves. Possible selves has been described as "the future-oriented component of self-concept" (Oyserman, Terry, & Bybee, 2002, p. 313). Various researchers have agreed that possible selves are critical for motivating action (Strauman & Higgins, 1987; Oyserman & Markus, 1990). By connecting current learning in middle school to future goals and aspirations, this project seeks to gather insights into whether students will be encouraged to develop mastery goals and move to incremental views of intelligence.
The project took a longitudinal case study approach with 10 students from regional Victoria. Five students were from a Catholic secondary school and five were from a government secondary school. There were six males and four female students in the project. Students were interviewed individually every four weeks and observed in the classrooms over a period of nine months.
The year 8 students participated in structured interviews questions that enquired into their family backgrounds, extra-curricula activities, peer-relationships, school environments, affects of learning, motivations and aspirations for their future. Instruments sought to discover any connections between resilience, academic resilience, self-regulation, motivation, goal setting and the future possible selves. Students also participated in activities that looked at specific classes, for example, Mathematics, Science and English, and how they learnt in each subject. They also completed drawing activities that focused on their career aspirations and abilities to set goals.
It was found that Year 8 students were articulate and keen to express their views on learning and their futures. It was also discovered that students had different ideas of what affected their learning in the classroom. Because of the range of differences among the attitudes of the students one implication for schools may be that teachers need to be more conscious of the individual in the classroom rather than approaching the students as a "group".
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 46, SUL08488 Interventions to support student self-regulation in the middle years.
Keywords: Education in the Middle Years and the Middle Years of Schooling
This paper will report on the progress of a large three year Australian Research Council (ARC) grant awarded to a multidisciplinary team of researchers in Victoria, Australia. The research, A multi-disciplinary investigation of how trauma and chronic illness impact on schooling, identity and social connectivity commenced in 2007 and is known as Keeping Connected (2007). The research is a collaborative grant in partnership with the Royal Children's Hospital Education Institute, in association with the Melbourne Graduate School of Education, University of Melbourne and the Centre for Adolescent Health, Royal Children's Hospital. The research aims to investigate qualitatively, longitudinally and through multiple perspectives how young people construct/reconstruct identity and relationships with schooling following disruption associated with chronic illness. Using a mixed methodology, but with a central focus on longitudinal qualitative studies from the perspective of the young people, the study aims to identify key elements of disruption or continued connection, and will illuminate identity issues of people facing this disruption at different age and schooling points. The research outcomes will support education and health practices and provide a differently focused empirical contribution to the literature on education and social connection. The paper works at mixing methods qualitatively through assemblages of social capital theory and sociomateriality may be a useful standpoint for the development of our empirical contribution.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 20, MOS08236 Schooling, identity and social connectivity: Sustainable futures for young people with chronic health conditions.
Keyword: Social Justice
What does 'public school education' mean in Australia in the 21st century, with its past tradition of free, compulsory and secular schooling, and the present school sector policies urging the widespread use of digital technologies? This paper starts from the premise that histories and traditions underpin the provision of public school education in Australia. It is argued that the recognition of the nature of these histories and traditions is important to acknowledge for their sustainability: so they are not taken for granted; are subjected to investigation and are debated; and where appropriate can be maintained. In addition, acknowledging the role of certain traditions in public schooling enables us to ask questions about the taken-for-granted assumptions embedded within school education at a time when digital technologies are being advocated as a core policy requirement in the provision of universal schooling in Australia. The aims of this paper are to firstly, reflect on the sustainability of selected traditions in public school education by asking what does public schooling mean in Australia in the 21st century; and secondly, to contribute to the development of a stock of Australian literature based within and pertinent to the public schooling sector. This paper argues that the meaning of the phrase 'public school education' has altered over time, and that some traditions underpinning public school education are being lost and others are being reauthored. The paper concludes that with the ongoing inclusion of digital technologies into school education, interpretations of the meanings of 'public school education' ought to be reconsidered.
Keyword: Educational Policy
Introduction
Senior School Mathematics is often perceived as too dry, too theoretical and too difficult. A Tablet PC, used with an understanding of Cognitive Load Theory can address some of these concerns and lead to better learning outcomes and more positive and optimistic tackling of difficult mathematical concepts (Sweller et al, 1998).
Aims of the project
The research has three clear stages:
Associated issues being investigated include gender and student learning style differences.
Research Framework
The participating students, in the initial study group, were from a year 11 Maths C class in an independent school in Queensland. A Design Experiment approach included a term of teaching without the Tablet PC followed by a term of teaching with the Tablet PC. Where possible, other factors were held constant. The same teacher, class group, setting and general teaching methodology were maintained over the duration of the study period.
Student surveys and questionnaires were used to establish differences in students' perceptions about their learning. Where data was available, direct comparisons were made between results on identical test items from previous years.
Research Findings
This is an ongoing research project. Preliminary findings show a high level of enthusiasm and involvement. The use of worked examples and minimising split attention effects allowed for more immediate success in the solution of more difficult problems. The ability to capture a lesson in progress and the inking ability of the Tablet PC were significant positives mentioned by the students (Twining and Evans, 2005). Students soon showed an interest in contributing ideas, simulation software, real world examples and images in addition to the teacher input. An interesting unplanned consequence was a higher degree of student ownership of the teaching/learning process. Future directions for the research will include extension to other Senior School classes and trialling with Middle School Mathematics students. An interesting early modification suggested by the students, would be to add a second portable Tablet PC, student operated, to maximize interactivity in the classroom while maintaining the dynamics of the instructional aspects of the teaching model.
This paper will be presented as part of Symposium 76, TUO08686 Addressing students' perceptions that physics and maths are too hard.
Keyword: Science and ICT Education
Professional teaching standards are consequential for a range of stakeholders and central to a program of education reform which has been active in a range of countries for almost two decades. This paper explores the extent to which these standards can capture the actualities of teaching practice and thus become not only compelling representations of teachers' work but also resources that can sustain this work. Adopting a practice-based perspective on teachers' work and using concepts drawn from actor-network theory, it is argued that standards are primarily to be seen not in terms of the intrinsic capabilities or potentialities of teaching professionals but rather performances of teaching and learning in networks of practice. Concerned with answering normative questions, standards are also a fruitful site for exploring issues of sustainability in teaching and responsibility in research. Utilising video case data collected over the course of 'capturing' accomplished geography teaching, the practice of teachers as they go about their everyday work in classrooms is juxtaposed with accounts of this practice by classroom participants, as well as with published standards statements. The claim is made that juxtapositionary practices afford a glimpse of the conditions of possibility of a new approach to developing and using professional teaching standards. This is an approach that inhabits tense spaces of precarious categories, spaces from which learning that sustains teaching can emerge. These spaces provide for the recognition of radical difference and propel a politics that seeks to make use of this difference. Implications for the field of standards research are discussed.
Keyword: Sociology of Education