The course planning and monitoring activities of a university teacher

A de-briefing techique was used to conduct weekly interviews with a university teacher in order to collect information on course planning and monitoring activities. A content analysis of the data showed that most attention was given to talking about students, teaching methods and role, and the process and content of class meetings. The variations in the content of the interviews are discussed in terms of the interaction between the concerns of the teacher and the progress of the course. Applications of the methodology to staff development and further research are outlined.     

The Facilitation of Thinking Skills in Preschool Children using Computer Presented Activities

Summary Thirty six four‐year‐old children were given the Raven's Coloured Progressive Matrices and were then randomly divided within sexes into two groups. A treatment group worked through sixteen computer presented problem‐solving activities while the second was a controlled group and did not do the activities. All the children were then re‐tested on Raven's Matrices. The results showed a significantly greater improvement between the pre‐ and post‐test for the treatment group than for the control group. The results are discussed in terms of the development of thinking skills.     

Universities as social critics

Should universities concern themselves with social criticism or should their intellectual role be conceived solely in terms of the preservation and extension of knowledge? It is argued that the claim that universities should act as centres of social criticism can be justified on two grounds: the nature of intellectual inquiry and the concept of higher education. Several current sources of opposition to this view are then examined and ways in which they might be resisted are outlined.

     

How academics view their work

Twenty-four members of the academic staff of an Australian university were interviewed in 1979 in order to seek their views on the ways in which their professional lives were being affected by the current recession in higher education. Their responses have been drawn upon to construct a picture of how this group of university teachers perceive their working environment and their own place within it. The comments cluster around seven topics: teaching, students, research, colleagues, career prospects, the university, and the quality of academic life. It is concluded that the responses suggest that there is a widening gap between academic ideals and institutional realities and that this will have a strongly negative effect upon the morale of the profession.     

Wellbeing in schools: Examining the policy–practice nexus

National concern regarding the social and emotional wellbeing of children and young people is now strongly reflected in a wide range of Australian policy initiatives. A considerable number of these target schools and point firmly to the role education is perceived to play in promoting student wellbeing. Given that wellbeing can be difficult to define and complex to measure, closer attention needs to be paid to whether and how the current wellbeing policy environment provides conceptual clarity and intelligible implementation pathways. This article explores some of the current policy ambiguity by drawing on findings from a large-scale, mixed methods study exploring student wellbeing at school. These findings emerged from an extensive analysis of wellbeing-related policy, together with policy-related data from in-depth interviews with teachers and principals. They suggest that approaches to supporting student wellbeing are constrained by an ad hoc policy environment characterised by competing discourses and a consequential lack of clarity regarding how wellbeing is understood and best facilitated within the context of schools. The implications of these findings are discussed with particular attention to the interface between policy and practice with regard to student wellbeing in schools in Australia.     

Examining fourth-grade mathematics writing: features of organization,mathematics vocabulary,and mathematical representations

Increasingly, students are expected to write about mathematics. Mathematics writing may be informal (e.g., journals, exit slips) or formal (e.g., writing prompts on high-stakes mathematics assessments). In order to develop an effective mathematics-writing intervention, research needs to be conducted on how students organize mathematics writing and use writing features to convey mathematics knowledge. We collected mathematics-writing samples from 155 4th-grade students in 2 states. Each student wrote about a computation word problem and fraction representations. We compared mathematics-writing samples to a norm-referenced measure of essay writing to examine similarities in how students use writing features such as introductions, conclusions, paragraphs, and transition words. We also analyzed the mathematics vocabulary terms that students incorporated within their writing and whether mathematics computation skills were related to the mathematics vocabulary students used in writing. Finally, we coded and described how students used mathematics representations in their writing. Findings indicate that students use organizational features of writing differently across the norm-referenced measure of essay writing and their mathematics writing. Students also use mathematics vocabulary and representations with different levels of success. Implications for assessment, practice, and intervention development are discussed.     

Grades,learning, and student evaluation of instruction

In the first experiment, the author employed three different grading standards, identified as stringent, moderate, and lenient, in separate sections of the course Psychology of Learning. Other aspects of the course were the same for each section. The different grading standards resulted in substantially different grade distributions in the anticipated direction. Evaluations of both the instructor's performance and the couse decreased as the stringency of the grading criteria increased. Every item on the evaluation questionnaire was systematically influenced by the grading criteria. The amount learned, as measured by performance on the objective part of the final test, increased as the stringency of the grading criteria increased. In the second experiment, the subjects were the students in two sections of the course Introductory Psychology, taught by the author during the same term. The same textbook, course notes, and grading criteria were employed. The manipulated variable was test frequency, with the two sections receiving either weekly or biweekly tests. Students in the section receiving weekly tests scored 11.9% higher, on the average, over all tests. This resulted in a substantial difference in grade distributions. The ratings of the section receiving lower grades were substantially lower on every item of the rating form. Students appear to rate instructors on the basis of a global impression (liking) which they form, which is strongly influenced by the grade the student receives.