Originally funded by an ARC grant, the project involved seven Australian university libraries: those of ANU, Curtain and Griffith universities, and the universities of Melbourne, New South Wales (the leading partner), Queensland and Sydney. In brief, the project sought to establish a full-text electronic database of Australian research theses and to make these available via the Web to contributing institutions. The database is now managed by the Council of Australian University Librarians (CAUL) and is more widely accessible (see http://adt.caul.edu.au/).
The CAUL website provides the search engine and summary data on theses, as well as links to member library databases that provide full-text access via Acrobat Reader, although full access to University of Queensland theses currently remains restricted. Users are able to search by institution (restricted to those involved in the project), title, author, subject, school or department, and date. However, information on whether the text is a masters or doctoral theses is not available in the summary data and users need to navigate their way to the databases of member institutions in order to ascertain this distinction.
The project really is in its infancy. The details of only 101 theses have been recorded to date (from 1998 to August, 2000), eight of which are from education schools or departments and not all of these are doctoral theses (the focus of this column). By institution, the following details have been recorded in relation to education research theses (compared with all disciplines): ANU, 0 from a total of 0; Curtain, 3 from a total of 8; Griffith, 3 from a total of 15; Melbourne, 1 from a total of 5; UNSW, 0 from a total of 18; UQ, 1 from a total of 19; and Sydney, 0 from a total of 35. To put these figures in context, 203 education doctorates (ie, excluding masters theses) were recorded by ACER's Bibliography of Education Theses in Australia as being awarded by Australian universities during 1998 alone. Even the pages of this year's AARE NEWS have contained more than double the ADT project's current information on education theses.
Nevertheless, electronic access to such material would seem a good thing, even though the project will require an expanding commitment of library resources. And, of course, the project needs to be widened to include more university libraries, perhaps even libraries outside the university system such as ACER's Cunningham Library. If these two commitments are made and maintained, then researchers around the world can look forward to an excellent and freely accessible source of current and quality research, to complement, of course, AARE's own archive of past conference papers! It also opens the way for related information to be more readily drawn to users' attention. See, for example, UNSW's page of the ADT project, which has links to its Thesis Writing Guide.
Six titles and two abbreviated abstracts of recently awarded doctoral theses in Australia are included below. I have taken the liberty of including the one education thesis recorded by the ADT project from the University of Melbourne; to promote the author's self-concept! I stumbled on Ken's thesis by chance. It does not register if you simply search the database by education in the school/department category, even though the thesis itself attributes its origins to Melbourne's Faculty of Education. Maybe there are more out there to find. Congratulations to the researchers whose theses are listed below and thanks to those who supplied their details. The invitation is still open for others to supply similar information of recently awarded doctoral theses from your respective institutions. Just email the details to me at t.gale@cqu.edu.au
Trevor Gale
Executive Member
Dr Ken Darvall (EdD), Charles Sturt University, Outcomes of School Quality Assurance Reviews: A New South Wales Case Study.
Dr L Turner (PhD) Monash University, Use of the logo programming language as software to support constructivist learning within a post-primary school mathematics environment: a techne-action research study.
Dr J Newton (EdD), Monash University, Way of knowing: Student nurses' perspectives.
Dr M Gillis (EdD), Monash University, Hermeneutics and Jewish education: the case of rabbinic texts.
Dr T Thong (PhD), Monash University, Education, values and the management of Conflict in Cambodia.
Dr Michelle Wallace (PhD), Deakin University, Women and workplace training: An analysis of policy and practice.
Dr Filocha Haslam (PhD), Monash University, Observations in science classes: Student's beliefs about its nature and purpose.
This thesis records a journey into a relatively unexplored area of science education, that of secondary students' ideas and beliefs about the nature and purpose of observation during science experiments. This area appears to have been ignored in laboratory teaching contexts despite being universally accepted as central to the learning of science. Despite the central importance of the observation skill to laboratory work, explicit development of an understanding of the observational skills is rarely a focus of science education. (Gunstone and Champagne 1990, p. 174) The core of this thesis is a study conducted with Year 10 science students and their science teachers in a typical secondary school in Victoria (Australia). The views of Russell et al. (1993) about what they term "scientific observation", views that are clearly consistent with the views of other authors (for example: Driver, 1983; Gunstone, 1991) were used in the conceptualising of this study. ..notions of perception, purpose, knowledge and relevance are seen as interacting in the process of observation ... 'Observation is theory-laden'. In scientific contexts observation is never unbiased since it is derived from the observer's knowledge of that particular field. (Russell et al. 1993, p.5) Six pilot studies preceded this study. They included: interviews using a variety of stimuli and protocols with very young, adolescent students and adults in out-of-school settings; informal interviews during laboratory classes with first year university students; observation including video tape of final year high school science student teachers undertaking a series of observation tasks, and questionnaires completed by these student teachers about the experience. The results from these pilot studies and the views of Russell et al. (1993) about scientific observation were taken as a strong guide to the approaches used for collecting data for this study. Data obtained from this study are rich and extensive. One of the clear trends in this data is a teacher effect.
Dr Ken Smith (PhD), University of Melbourne, The self-concept and verbal academic achievement of primary and secondary student teachers.
Theoretical models, based on cognitive-behavioural and perceptual psychology tenets, were proposed in an attempt to understand direct and indirect effects of Self-Concept, Test Anxiety, and Family Social Status on the Verbal Academic Achievement of 260 primary student teachers and 159 secondary student teachers. Multiple analysis of variance (MANOVA) results identified significant differences between the two cohorts of student teachers on the self-reported measures of self-concept (Self-Description Questionnaire III) and test anxiety (Test Anxiety Inventory). Chi-square and t-test analyses indicated no significant differences between the two cohorts of student teachers on the Family Social Status measurement indicators (parents' educational level and family occupational level as measured by the ANU3 Occupational Status Scale). Confirmatory Factor Analyses (CFA) supported the invariance of the congeneric measurement model; however, the variance of the Verbal Academic Self-Concept latent construct was not equivalent between the two groups of student teachers. Structural equation modelling (SEM) of the relations between measured and latent variables indicated that Verbal Academic Self-Concept has a significant and positive direct effect on Verbal Academic Achievement. The indirect effect of Verbal Academic Self-Concept, mediated by the Worry component of Test Anxiety, was found to be significant for secondary student teachers but not for the primary student teachers. Results supported the proposition that an individual's self-concept has a major direct influence on the Worry component of test anxiety and, in addition, a more dominant direct effect on Verbal Academic Achievement than Test Worry. Family Social Status was found to have a significant influence on test anxiety (Worry component) for secondary student teachers but not for the primary student teachers. This study has given support to the idea that a balance of academic and personal development (non-cognitive development) units is needed in teacher education programs --- pre-service and in-service. The education of teachers should be viewed developmentally, both from the perspective of the development of relevant knowledge and skills, and from the perspective of the concept of self as a teacher. Future self-concept studies would advance knowledge of this construct's influence in an educational setting by striving to describe and understand the stability and changing characteristics of the self-concept for student teachers during pre-service teacher training. While it has been demonstrated that self-reported self-concept does indeed influence academic achievement, further research is required to determine if this influence extends to the actual practice of teaching.