Distance education in Australian higher education — a history

Distance education, usually described in Australia as ‘external studies’ has a long history in Australian universities, although the situation since about 1965 has been marked by very considerable new development in all tertiary institutions. No longer is external study the very courageous innovation it was when the University of Queensland established a Department of Correspondence Studies in 1911; indeed it has become a very significant feature of Australian higher education generally. Reasons behind the introduction and expansion of external study extend beyond simply meeting the needs of people in rural areas, though these were important in the early stages. This article considers the wider policy issues affecting developments in Australian states, while also drawing attention to previously undocumented proposals in the nineteen thirties that established a base from which post‐World War II policy has been derived.     

Making the right connections: Differential effects of reading intervention for subgroups of comprehenders

The purpose of this study was to compare the effects of different types of questioning interventions on students' reading comprehension. Fourth-grade students (n = 246) were identified as struggling, average, or good readers and assigned randomly within school to one of three questioning interventions: two inferential conditions (Causal or General) or one literal condition (“Who, What, Where, When” or W-questioning). Teachers delivered the interventions for 20–30 min, 2–4 times per week, for 8–10 weeks. All readers made reliable pre- to posttest comprehension gains as measured by story recall (ps < .001 to .04). Differential effects for intervention were found between two subgroups of struggling comprehenders—elaborators and paraphrasers. Elaborators benefited more than paraphrasers from Causal questioning (d = .86) whereas paraphrasers benefited more than elaborators from General questioning (d = 1.46). These findings suggest that identifying subgroups is important in developing and evaluating the effectiveness of reading comprehension interventions.     

Correlations among the WISC-R,PIAT, and DAM

The WISC-R, PIAT, and DAM were examined to ascertain relationships among the three instruments. Moderate to high correlations were found when PIAT scores were compared to WISC-Rg iqs, while DAM standard scores correlated moderately with PIAT and WISC-R scores. Correlations indicate that information yielded by the PIAT may be obtained through WISC-R results, while the DAM may be tapping other abilities not adequately assessed by either of the other two measures.