Unemployment: the final inequality

The reality of long term mass youth unemployment has produced a ‘new social condition’ for many young people—especially when the concentrations of class, race, geography and qualification are taken into account.

This ‘condition’ shifts the grounds upon which our theoretical debates have stood and must renew the questioning of certain fundamentals. It also places or replaces on the agenda just what is supposed to be the working class interest in state education.     

Looking for leadership: the potential of dialogic reflexivity with rural early-career teachers

Many early-career teachers (ECTs) begin their teaching careers in rural and remote schools in Australia, and do not stay long, with consequences for their own lives, and for their students, schools and communities. By understanding how first-year ECTs navigate personal (subjective) and contextual (objective) conditions, opportunities to disrupt patterns of ECT attrition may be found. This paper explores the online longitudinal reflections from two rural ECTs. Margaret Archer’s three dimensions of reflexivity were used to analyse what personal, structural and cultural resources were activated by ECTs as they discerned and deliberated the costs of being a rural ECT. The potential for school leaders and mentors to support rural ECTs through dialogic reflexivity, that is the opportunity to discern and deliberate priorities with others, is identified as a role that is significant for ECT support but not straightforward. Prompts for dialogic reflexivity are proposed.     

Identification-Based Multiple-Choice Assessments in Anatomy can be as Reliable and Challenging as Their Free-Response Equivalents

Multiple-choice (MC) anatomy “spot-tests” (identification-based assessments on tagged cadaveric specimens) offer a practical alternative to traditional free-response (FR) spot-tests. Conversion of the two spot-tests in an upper limb musculoskeletal anatomy unit of study from FR to a novel MC format, where one of five tagged structures on a specimen was the answer to each question, provided a unique opportunity to assess the comparative validity and reliability of FR- and MC-formatted spot-tests and the impact on student performance following the change of test format to MC. Three successive year cohorts of health science students (n = 1,442) were each assessed by spot-tests formatted as FR (first cohort) or MC (following two cohorts). Comparative question difficulty was assessed independently by three examiners. There were more higher-order cognitive skill questions and more of the course objectives tested in the MC-formatted tests. Spot-test reliability was maintained with Cronbach’s alpha reliability coefficients ≥ 0.80 and 80% of the MC items of high quality (having point-biserial correlation coefficients > 0.25). These results also demonstrated guessing was not an issue. The mean final score for the MC-formatted cohorts increased by 4.9%, but did not change for the final theory examination that was common to all three cohorts. Subgroup analysis revealed that the greatest change in spot-test marks was for the lower-performing students. In conclusion, our results indicate spot-tests formatted as MC are suitable alternatives to FR tests. The increase in mean scores for the MC-formatted spot-tests was attributed to the lower demand of the MC format.     

The Umanities in an Age of Science

Many persons today question the meaningfulness of the traditional formulations of some of the basic questions which have been asked in the humanities, and also the validity of the introspective means by which answers have been sought. These challengers often appear to have behind them the great weight of the scientific progress of recent centuries. The basic issue on which the behavioral scientist and the scientific humanist appear to differ so from the poet, the artist, or the religious philosopher has to do with the physical and the spiritual aspects of reality. Predominately, the scientist tends to operate on the implicit assumption that only the physical or sense-perceived world has reality; the poet and the mystic live in both worlds. The behavioral scientist tends to see values as culturally generated and acquired, the poet, as inherent in the structure of things. Questions about the nature of reality are not to be decided by disputation among ourselves, but by conducting such experiments as will enable us to discern what that nature really is. The nature of such experiments and suggestions for the possible resolution of this basic issue form the subject matter of this paper.     

The role of institutional learning and teaching grants in developing academic capacity to engage successfully in the scholarship of teaching and learning

The current focus on identifying criteria for academic teaching practice is influencing performance goals for teaching academics. This has produced a strong imperative to engage with the scholarship of teaching and learning; however, it is not always clear how teaching academics continue to build capacity to do this during their academic career. Drawing on the literature, this paper analyses the outcomes from two years of faculty and institutional teaching grants to gauge their role in generating effective engagement in the scholarship of teaching and learning. The paper identifies some improvements to the grants programs which have contributed to quality outcomes.     

Adjacency,animacy, and intensionality as cues to oral and written sentence comprehension

Subjects of verbs in English sentences may be indicated by any one of a number of cues. In some cases, the subject of the verb is determined by semantic constraints, as when the verb requires an animate noun phrase as subject; in other cases the subject is determined by syntactic factors, as in the case of third person singular verb markers; and, as is commonly the case in informal language, the most immediately preceding noun phrase is the subject of the verb. These three types of cues, semantic (here described as extensional), syntactic (here labeled intensional), and adjacency are investigated in a series of tests of sentence comprehension using university undergraduates as subjects.The results of these experiments show that when the adjacency strategy does not apply, even these highly literate native speakers have great difficulty in correctly comprehending subject-verb correspondences.These results are discussed in the context of the relationship between intensional linguistic processing and literacy.