RECENT DOCTORAL THESES IN EDUCATION (October 2002)

Dr Glenda Boyd (PhD), Edith Cowan University,
Early childhood teachers' perceptions of their leadership roles.

Early Childhood Educators need to exercise leadership skills in advocating for appropriate programs and curriculum for young children. A new model of Early Childhood Teacher Leadership was created to measure leadership skills, including leadership in advocating for young children, and tested in Phase One of the study. The model involved General Leadership, Communication, and Influences. Data was collected from 270 Early Childhood Teachers in Western Australia, using self-reports on ideal and real aspects of leadership obtained through a questionnaire. A Rasch measurement model computer program was used to create an interval level Scale of Early Childhood Teacher Leadership. The Rasch analysis supported the structure of the leadership model and indicated some improvements could be made. In Phase Two of the study, twenty early childhood teachers were interviewed for approximately one hour in regard to how they conceptualised their leadership roles, what factors enhanced or constrained their leadership, and what strategies they used to communicate their philosophy and pedagogy. The findings indicate that, as expected, teachers found it easier to hold higher ideal self-views for most aspects of leadership than to hold high real self-views. Teachers recognised the importance of leadership skills but experienced difficulty in enacting them. The Early Childhood Teachers reported various factors that helped or hindered them in fulfilling their leadership roles. The four global factors reported were 1) intrapersonal and interpersonal skills; 2) professional confidence; 3) others' understanding of and respect for early childhood education; and 4) time. The Early Childhood Teachers suggested strategies that could help them develop stronger leadership skills. The four main strategies suggested were 1) professional development addressing leadership and interpersonal and intrapersonal skills training; 2) inclusion of leadership skills training at pre-service levels of teacher education; 3) opportunities to collaborate with other staff; and 4) public promotion of early childhood education. The findings have implications for Early Childhood Teachers, administrators, teacher educators and for future research.

Dr Robin Hall (PhD), University of Technology, Sydney,
Technological capability at an early age.

This thesis investigated early development of technological capability, not by exploring children's responses to teacher-led curriculum but by examining children's own technological narratives. This shift stemmed from three sources: culture's valuing of technological capability, and criticalness of early years in its establishment; education systems' struggle to nurture children's technological knowledge and skills and accumulating reports of children's technological capability. A two-part investigation evolved. Study One explored six children's responses to a question about audio-recorders posed by another child (Dean). Findings showed these children had little difficulty finding and pursuing personally and culturally significant questions. It also highlighted the difficulty of tracking individual children's ideas, constraints associated with school environments and the study's short duration. So, it was not able to judge conclusively whether learning had occurred. Dean's continuing interest in audio-recorders, and his mother's fortuitous phone call, provoked Study Two, exploring whether Dean could learn by pursuing his question at home, over a two-year period. Findings showed this child's ability to drive his own complex inquiry into information systems. Reporting findings as historical narrative and using Plato's Meno as analytical framework, I concluded: Dean's subject choice were attuned to current technological advance; his inquiry methods were diverse (exploring, designing, making, operating, explaining and understanding); and he had empirical, analogical and philosophical ways of knowing. Consideration of three issues hedged my account's integrity: the study's particular circumstances, my part in Dean's inquiry, Dean and his family's views of my interpretations. Furthermore, features of Dean's technological narrative resonated with the other six children's narratives. In our information age, such sustained single case study illuminates the feasibility and worth of giving children greater control of curriculum and locating learning close to families in real technological worlds. This investigation contributes an analytical framework for considering the educational significance of children's technological narratives and suggests ways teachers might nurture children's technological capability.

Dr Cathrine Neilsen-Hewett (PhD), Macquarie University,
Children's peer relationships and school adjustment: Looking beyond the classroom walls.

In examining links between children's peer relationships and school adjustment, researchers have focused on the classroom context as the main source of social influence. By comparison, only a handful of studies have investigated children's relationships in contexts beyond the school. While the significance of positive in-school peer relations for school adjustment has been well established in the research literature, the links between children's out-of-school experiences and their adjustment at school are mostly unknown. The goal of the present study was to provide a more comprehensive view of children's relationships and to explore links between in-school and out-of-school peer processes and children's adjustment at school. The study addresses four central research questions: 1) What are the relational and structural characteristics of children's in-school and out-of-school networks and how do these relate to children's perceptions and satisfaction with their network? 2) What are the characteristics of in-school and out-of-school best friendships, and how do they differ in relation to friendship closeness and context? 3) How are in-class peer acceptance, in-school and out-of-school best friendship closeness and in-school and out-of-school network size related to one another? and 4) What is the relationship between peer group acceptance, best friendship closeness, network size and school adjustment, and in particular, what aspects of out-of-school relationships have predictive links with children's adjustment at school? Participants were 728 third- through sixth-grade children from a relatively self-contained coastal community in New South Wales, Australia. A newly developed measure of children's friendships, The Friendship Network Activity (FNCA), was used to identify children's in-school and out-of-school networks, while in-class sociometric status was assessed through a peer rating scale. Measures of in-school and out-of-school best friendship closeness (i.e., very best, close, and peripheral) were determined through the FNCA. Children's perceptions of their network were examined through ratings of contextual importance and network satisfaction.

Dr Maureen Owen (PhD), Macquarie University,
Children's pedestrian risk and opportunity in a disadvantaged community

This thesis presents an exploratory investigation of family-based risk and protective factors that are associated with childhood pedestrian injury. Its heuristic nature resulted from the finding at the beginning of the project that family risk factors associated with elevated rates of childhood pedestrian injury were readily identifiable but that an interpretation of how these risk factors led to injury outcomes had not been well explored. Three related aims guided the thesis. The first was to investigate within families protective and educational roadside processes that mediate injury risk. The second was to identify ways in which family support networks contributed to children's roadside protection and opportunity. The third was to address the implication of the findings for road safety interventions and to consider how well current initiatives fit the needs of children and families. Statistical data relating to childhood pedestrian shows that the rate of traffic-related injury among child pedestrians makes this the second leading cause of injury death in Australia and New South Wales. (This information is presented early in the study as justification for the general focus of the study, and has provided the rationale both for road safety research and for road safety education programs and engineering interventions as discussed in Chapter 1). An ecological framework was developed for the study and it is this approach that allowed the social contexts of pedestrian risk and opportunity to be explored, providing a richer understanding of the characteristics that have been typically associated with injury risk. The literature on pathways and support networks is also drawn upon in this study to give additional insights into ways in which the concept of injury risk can be explored (see Chapter 2). The paired-neighbourhood design that was used in the current study required that two adjoining neighbourhoods be identified that had experienced contrasting rates of childhood pedestrian injury over the last five years but that shared similar social and economic risk characteristics for pedestrian injury.