Resource Provision in Primary Schools—An Australian Perspective

Abstract

This article gives an Australian perspective on resource provision in primary (elementary) schools. The overall current context is firstly outlined against the background of economic rationalism and devolution in schools. The conclusion reached is that primary schools regard themselves as a disadvantaged group in the area of resourcing, and supports the view that action should be taken to reverse this situation. A framework for conceptualizing resources as a partnership of human and non‐human factors with the supremacy of human resources is advanced. Finally, the notion of equality is explored and suggestions made for future developments, with a view to making resourcing more equitable in schools.     

Opportunity and Risk in Transnational Education—Issues in Planning for International Campus Development: An Australian Perspective

This article, that is based upon the experience of Monash University, identifies a range of opportunities and risks involved in transnational education and addresses a number of key planning issues in establishing an international campus. These include the guiding principles adopted by the university, country selection factors, market research, considerations in developing an appropriate delivery model, and the assurance of the academic quality and educational integrity of the programmes offered. The authors refer to literature in the field concerning corporate risk and identify factors relevant to the higher education sector. The article stresses the need for an appropriate integration of strategic vision, academic priorities, and business considerations to ensure that opportunities offered by transnational education are successfully realized.     

Reading Disabled Students’ Word Recognition Abilities: An Elementary and Secondary Perspective

ABSTRACT

The purpose of this study was to describe and compare three word recognition abilities of reading disabled students. One hundred and fifty (150) reading disabled pupils, 75 elementary and 75 high school, were randomly selected to participate in this study. Correlated t‐test procedures were used to process the data. The dependent variables were the students’ analytical, phonics, and context analysis word recognition abilities as measured by the Wide Range Achievement Test, Stanford Diagnostic Reading Test, and 12 cloze passages. Results indicated that elementary and secondary reading disabled pupils have significant differences in their ability to use the three different word recognition abilities investigated. Implications for minimum competency testing in reading were discussed.     

Are Students Customers in Finnish Higher Education?

This study examines Finnish higher education students’ perceptions of whether students are customers, based on qualitative interview data. The article contributes to the discussion on students as customers by giving attention to students’ own voices from a country where tuition fees are not generally collected. The data are presented and analysed using a matrix of preference and perception of seeing students as customers. While the data contained student voices insisting that it is not appropriate to talk about customers because money is not involved, different orientations showing either a preference or perception of students as customers were also described. It is concluded that seeing a student as a customer might be a solution to various higher education challenges which are not all related to tuition fees.     

An Australian＇ s Perspective of an American Unversity

Since high school I have always wanted to study in a country other than my own. However, my parents always informed me that it was too expensive. This was until luck turned my way one day while I was at university. My advisor called me and asked me to go and see him as soon as possible. I just knew it had to be good news. I could barely stand the suspense and went to his office with a nervous happiness in my tummy （肚子）.     

Personal and Social-Contextual Factors in K–12 Academic Performance: An Integrative Perspective on Student Learning

Our extensive literature review in the fields of educational, social, and cognitive psychology has led us to identify about a dozen variables that demonstrate direct empirical links to academic achievement at the K–12 level. Those variables are grouped into four major categories: student engagement, learning strategies, school climate, and social-familial influences. We then categorize the first two variables as personal factors and the latter two as social-contextual factors. We document empirical findings that have shown particular relationships between the reviewed personal and social-contextual factors and academic achievement, mainly in the areas of reading and mathematics. Based on our conceptualization, we propose an integrated perspective that students’ personal factors in the domains of behavior, affect, attitude, and cognition as well as their social-contextual environment have to work in concert to produce optimal school performance. We conclude with a discussion on educational implications and future research to be addressed.     

An Exploratory Study of Teachers’ and Students’ Use of Multi‐modal Representations of Concepts in Primary Science

As part of a long‐term research study to enhance science learning, this paper reports on an exploratory study aimed at identifying initial beliefs and practices of a group of teachers and students (Years 4–6) in Australia when the students engaged with multiple representations of the same science concepts. There is growing recognition in science education research that students need to understand and link different representational modes, such as graphic and verbal modes, in learning to think and act scientifically. This exploratory study used a multi‐site case‐study approach employing qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings indicated that while teachers used various modes to engage students and assess learning, they were not systematic in their focus on student integration and translation across modes. The study found that various factors affected students’ understanding of different modes, and that students who recognised relationships between modes demonstrated better conceptual understandings than students who lacked this knowledge.     

First-Year College Students’ Conflict with Religion and Science

This study took place during a First Year Seminar course where 20 incoming college freshmen studied the central topic of the nature of science within the context of biological evolution. The instructor researched students’ understandings in the nature of science as they progressed through the course by examining a variety of qualitative and quantitative data including class writings, pre- and post-test selected items from the VOSTS (Views on Science-Technology-Society), and interviews. The intended outcomes of the course were to reduce the number of student misconceptions in the nature of science and to ease student apprehension when learning about evolution. Data were analyzed to determine whether students were moving toward a more generally accepted idea of the nature of science or toward another type of misconception.     

An Integrative Perspective on Students’ Proportional Reasoning in High School Physics in a West African Context

This study examines students’ use of proportional reasoning in high school physics problem‐solving in a West African school setting. An in‐depth, constructivist, and interpretive case study was carried out with six physics students from a co‐educational senior secondary school in Nigeria over a period of five months. The study aimed to elicit students’ meanings, claims, concerns, constructions, and interpretations of their difficulty with proportional reasoning as they worked on a series of 18 high school physics tasks. Multiple qualitative research techniques were employed to generate, analyse, and interpret data. Results indicated that several socio‐cultural, psychosocial, cognitive, and mathematical issues were associated with students’ use of proportional reasoning in physics. Students’ capacity to reason proportionally was not only linked to their difficulty with the concept, structure, and strategies of proportional reasoning as a learning and problem‐solving skill, but was also embedded in the social, cultural, cognitive, and contextual elements involved in the learning of physics. The study concludes with a discussion of the implications for teaching high school physics.     

Father Involvement and Father–Child Relationship Quality: An Intergenerational Perspective

Objective. The present study looks at predictors that may be associated with father–child relationship quality and whether relationship quality appears to be transmitted across generations. Design. This study includes 2,970 U.S. families who participated in the Fragile Families and Child Well-Being Study. Structural equation modeling was used to assess associations between fathers’ relationship with paternal grandfathers (PGF) during their own childhood and when their own children are 1 year old, father involvement at age 1, and child reports of father-child relationship quality at age 9. Results. Paternal grandfathers involvement with fathers during childhood was positively associated with the father-paternal grandfathers relationship at child age 1, which in turn was associated with greater father involvement at age 1. More father involvement at age 1 was associated with child reports of better father-child relationships at age 9. The pathways from paternal grandfathers involvement during fathers’ childhood and father–paternal grandfathers relationships at age 1 to father–child relationship quality at age 9 were fully mediated by father involvement at age 1. Conclusions. Patterns of father involvement and the quality of father–child relationships tend to be passed down across generations. To ensure an active, positive father involvement and its associated benefits for children, parenting interventions should focus promoting positive fathering behaviors to promote positive relationships with children in their own and future generations.     

Students’ experiences of supervision in academic and industry settings: results of an Australian study

The joint supervision of Research Higher Degree (RHD) students by an industry and university supervisor is likely to increase in forthcoming years with a rise in the number of university–industry collaborations. Research students may become involved in these collaborative arrangements for a variety of reasons and may launch into their RHD without considering how they will serve two masters, and how this complex relationship will affect their RHD experience. Moreover, little research has been conducted to assess the impact of these arrangements on current RHD students’ experiences. The experiences of students with academic and industry supervisors were, therefore, explored in a survey of confirmed RHD students at an Australian research‐intensive university. This paper investigates whether RHD students conducting research in traditional academic settings have a different experience to students working on industry‐related projects in industry settings, specifically in regards to supervision and institutional access and engagement.     

Students’ Overuse of Linearity: An Exploration in Physics

In mathematics education, a vast amount of research has shown that students of different ages have a strong tendency to apply linear or proportional models anywhere, even in situations where they are not applicable. For example, in geometry it is known that many students believe that if the sides of a figure are doubled, the area is doubled too. However, also history of science provides several cases of thinkers who inadequately postulated linear relations to describe situations. This article focuses on secondary school students’ over-reliance on linearity in physics. Now and then, science educators report students’ tendency to assume and impose linear relations in physics, but—as far as we know—no substantial efforts were undertaken to study this phenomenon systematically. We conducted an empirical investigation aimed at identifying the competence of 8th- and 11th-graders—before and after being taught the relevant physical topics—to qualitatively grasp various situations in physics, as well as their tendency to quantify that qualitative insight linearly. The results provide an ambivalent picture of students’ overuse of linearity in physics: Although linear reasoning is sometimes used as a default strategy, even after instruction that addresses the relevant physical contents, this study also indicates that context is taken into account more often than is suggested by research on mathematical problem solving.     

Competency Standards – a Help or a Hindrance? An Australian Perspective

Abstract

The mere existence of competency standards for an occupation is not, in itself, enough to tell us whether they will be a help or a hindrance for education and training providers. Instead, that will depend on what sort of competency standards they are and how they are being used by the education and training providers. This paper will describe, firstly, the types of competency standards that would be a hindrance for vocational education and training providers and those that would be a help. Secondly, assuming that competency standards of the helpful type are available, the paper will outline the ways of using them that would still be detrimental to vocational education and training, and contrast this with ways of using them so as to improve the provision of vocational education and training. As against the widely held belief that competency standards require a totally new approach to vocational education and training, this paper argues that this is true only of the type of competency standards that are a hindrance. The type of competency standards that are helpful to vocational education and training provide a powerful means of improving what has always been best practice in the design, delivery and assessment of vocational education and training courses.     

Workshop on Friction: Understanding and Addressing Students’ Difficulties in Learning Science Through a Hermeneutical Perspective

Hermeneutics is useful in science and science education by emphasizing the process of understanding. The purpose of this study was to construct a workshop based upon hermeneutical principles and to interpret students’ learning in the workshop through a hermeneutical perspective. When considering the history of Newtonian mechanics, it could be considered that there are two methods of approaching Newtonian mechanics. One method is called the ‘prediction approach’, and the other is called the ‘explanation approach’. The ‘prediction approach’ refers to the application of the principles of Newtonian mechanics. We commonly use the prediction approach because its logical process is natural to us. However, its use is correct only when a force, such as gravitation, is exactly known. On the other hand, the ‘explanation approach’ could be used when the nature of a force is not exactly known. In the workshop, students read a short text offering contradicting ideas about whether to analyze a friction situation using the explanation approach or the prediction approach. Twenty-two college students taking an upper-level mechanics course wrote their ideas about the text. The participants then discussed their ideas within six groups, each composed of three or four students. Through the group discussion, students were able to clarify their preconceptions about friction, and they responded to the group discussion positively. Students started to think about their learning from a holistic perspective. As students thought and discussed the friction problems in the manner of hermeneutical circles, they moved toward a better understanding of friction.     

Students’ characteristics and teacher–child relationships in instruction: A meta-analysis

This article suggests that students’ characteristics play a more important role in classrooms than has previously been thought. To investigate this, a computerized literacy search was conducted, finding 19 studies that focused on the topic. On the basis of these studies a meta-analysis was carried out in which 23 effect size estimates were computed. The results showed that teachers reported more conflict and child dependency, and less closeness in teacher–child relationships when interacting with students who exhibited either a high level of external or a high level of internal problem behavior. In contrast, teachers reported less conflict and more closeness in teacher–child relationships when interacting with students exhibiting high levels of motivation and engagement as compared to other children. Furthermore, teachers reported less conflict, less child dependency and more closeness in teacher–child relationships when interacting with students showing a high level of academic performance.     

An Exploratory Study of Minority Students’ Technology Usage and Perceptions of Technology: Nontraditional Adult Students in Technology-Based Environments

Abstract

The study examines nontraditional, African-American adult students’ use of technologies and their perceptions toward this in technology-based environments. Technology perceptions included computer self-efficacy, Internet self-efficacy, user attitude, and computer anxiety. The effects of student characteristics on these factors and the relationships between these factors were examined throughout this study. Participants included minority students who participated in face-to-face or online undergraduate courses offered in continuing education. A quantitative approach was undertaken to analyze the collected data. Results indicated that nontraditional minority students utilized basic software tools more frequently than the advanced ones, suggesting that many of them may lack the knowledge or skills for advanced technologies. Age, hours spent online, and previous online course experiences influenced students’ technology perceptions. Gender did not have an impact on technology perceptions. Internet self-efficacy was affected by most of the student characteristics variables. Computer self-efficacy was found to be a good predictor for both user attitude and computer anxiety. (Keywords: technology usage, technology perceptions, student characteristics, computer and Internet self-efficacy, minority students)     

Evaluation of Students’ Understanding of Thermal Concepts in Everyday Contexts

The aims of this study were to determine the underlying conceptual structure of the thermal concept evaluation (TCE) questionnaire, a pencil-and-paper instrument about everyday contexts of heat, temperature, and heat transfer, to investigate students’ conceptual understanding of thermal concepts in everyday contexts across several school years and to analyse the variables—school year, science subjects currently being studied, and science subjects previously studied in thermal energy—that influence students’ thermal conceptual understanding. The TCE, which was administered to 515 Korean students from years 10–12, was developed in Australia, using students’ alternative conceptions derived from the research literature. The conceptual structure comprised four groups—heat transfer and temperature changes, boiling, heat conductivity and equilibrium, and freezing and melting—using 19 of the 26 items in the original questionnaire. Depending on the year group, 25–55% of students experienced difficulties in applying scientific concepts in everyday contexts. Years of schooling, science subjects currently studied and physics topics previously studied correlated with development of students’ conceptual understanding, especially in topics relating to heat transfer, temperature scales, specific heat capacity, homeostasis, and thermodynamics. Although students did improve their conceptual understandings in later years of schooling, they still had difficulties in relating the scientific concepts to their experiences in everyday contexts. The study illustrates the utility of using a pencil-and-paper questionnaire to identify students’ understanding of thermal concepts in everyday situations and provides a baseline for Korean students’ achievement in terms of physics in everyday contexts, one of the objectives of the Korean national curriculum reforms.     

Temperature in Science Textbooks: Changes and Trends in Cross-National Perspective (1950–2000)

This study explores the way the concept of temperature was presented in lower-secondary science textbooks in France, Poland and England at the end of the 1950s and in the 2000s. I draw on history of science, history of education and book history to analyze different treatments of an apparently-similar scientific concept with regard to national contexts and diachronic change. Thus I include a presentation of the contexts in which the textbooks I study are published, and I analyse textbooks content revealing different approaches to present the notion of temperature. I argue that these results show that textbooks are valuable sources to investigate public representations of science and their shift over time, and I conclude by stressing the parallel of this evolution with change in everyday relationship with science and scientific instruments.     

An Examination of Late-Registering Students’ Success in Online and On-Campus Classes

ABSTRACT

Late registration is a common practice in community colleges, but the evidence-based argument for the presumed deleterious effects of late registration on student success is weaker than is commonly believed, and there has been no published research on how success rates may differ for late registrants in online and on-campus classes, and for students who complete a college success skills course. Using nearly 100,000 matched enrollment cases from Virginia’s Community Colleges, we predict the effect of late registration on student success for first-time-in-college students. The statistically significant results indicate late registration is negatively related to student success, especially for students with other success risk factors. Attending face-to-face classes as well as completing a college skills course were independently and positively related to course success. Interestingly, late registration interacted with both course delivery mode and college skills course completion indicating that late registration does not impact students equally.