Encouraging Professional Reflection in Early Education

This article examines the use of the Repertory Grid technique derived from personal construct theory as a tool to aid the reflection of teachers and other professional working in Early Education. The main focus of the article is a study of the constructs used to describe children, elicited at the start and again at the end of a module ‘Children's Development and Learning’, which formed part of a continuing professional development postgraduate award in Early Education. Completed grids provided a focus for reflective written commentary and informal group discussion by practitioners. Additional information was obtained by interviews with practitioners after the module had been completed. The approach was evaluated by quantitative and qualitative analysis of the participants' grids using the Rep Grid 2 package and by evaluation of the end of module interviews. The potential of the personal construct approach for supporting professional reflection in general and its particular application in Early Education is then explored.     

An associative account of Orthographic Satiation in Chinese characters

Prolonged inspection of a Chinese character induces a feeling of uncertainty of the character, a phenomenon named as Orthographic Satiation. However, there has not been direct evidence showing that such satiation does occur at the orthographic level. To investigate whether Chinese satiation occurs at the orthographic level or at other levels, the present study applies a speeded repetition priming paradigm to Chinese, which has been successfully used to examine Semantic Satiation in English. When judging whether a category name matched an exemplar word, participants showed gradually slower responses as the character standing for the category name was repeated, indicating the occurrence of satiation. However, repetition of a character without accessing its meaning, or repeated access to its meaning without repeating the character itself, did not elicit satiation. The results suggest Orthographic Satiation occurs not at the orthographic level, but at a level associating orthography and meaning during Chinese character reading.     

Non-traditional students in tertiary education: inter-disciplinary collaboration in curriculum and pedagogy in community services education in Australia

Education policy in Australia has accelerated its aim to increase participation of under-represented groups in tertiary education including students who are culturally and linguistically diverse and have low socio-economic status. These students generally have not had prior access to privileged academic discourse, which can further disadvantage them in their participation and progress in tertiary education. In this article, we outline a cross-discipline curriculum initiative and pedagogy that draws on critical literacy and the metaphor of discourse community to integrate language and academic skills into community services qualifications. We argue that this – supports the genuine participation of under-represented (non-traditional) students. It aspires to not only support students’ entry into the new academic terrain, but to enable students to adopt a critical stance to the discourses in which they are learning to participate. This we argue is crucial, when expertise is not just a way of meeting its ostensible purposes, but is also a way of exercising power. Although we report on the application of this initiative to entry level curricula (Diploma), we suggest that it has relevance and application to Bachelor levels in a range of disciplines, both in supporting pedagogy and for transition to Bachelor level study.     

Learning theories and environments: A student-initiated intelligent computer-assisted environment

Intelligent computer-assisted instructional systems have been constructed and applied within a wide range of fields. Very few of these systems make explicit a central or set of core learning theories or learning environments upon which a system is based. However, many of these systems have implicitly employed learning theories and environments. This paper looks at a variety of intelligent computer-assisted systems with a view towards uncovering the latent learning theories they employ. The interplay of the various learning theories needed to realise a student-initiated learning environment are discussed. The central features required for such an environment to function and the limitations of realising such a learning environment due to the state of the art of present day systems are also discussed. Specializations: physics education; computer education; intelligent computer-assisted instructional systems; physics problem solving. Specializations: chemical education, technology education, history and philosophy of science, learning theories.