Unpacking the career aspirations of Australian school students: towards an evidence base for university equity initiatives in schools

Demand for higher education in Australia has doubled since 1989, increasing the number of students from diverse social, economic and academic backgrounds. Equity targets have seen a proliferation of programs and interventions aimed at encouraging school students, particularly those from low socio-economic status backgrounds, to participate in higher education. However, little is known about the specific occupational interests of school students upon which targeted strategies might effectively be designed and implemented. This paper examines school students’ aspirations for specific careers that require a university education, in relation to student background and school-related variables. The analysis draws from a study of 6492 students from Years 3 to 12 in 64 New South Wales public schools. We found a complex array of factors relating to interest in different careers. Year level at school, gender and prior achievement were stronger predictors across many careers than factors such as SES, Indigenous status and school location. We argue that rather than taking a one-size-fits-all approach to encouraging participation in higher education, outreach activities should be targeted to take account of student diversity and inequalities that foster differing aspirations.     

Coherence and the Sharing of Meaning: Supporting Underachieving Readers

Readers may experience difficulty because they lack sociocultural experiences assumed by authors of texts. Such difficulty lies not with decoding print but with constructing cohesive representations of the meaning of text. Paradigmatic and syntagmatic codes for signifying meaning are briefly reviewed, and data are presented from a study of students at three age levels (10, 12 and 14 years). Both syntagmatic and paradigmatic aspects were important for creating coherent text representations. Underlying comprehension problems was a lack of prior experience of text topics. Ways are suggested in which teachers can prepare students through developing shared meanings in various classroom activities.     

A theory-driven approach to assessing the cognitive effects of PBL

Medical schools are increasingly looking to case-based formats such as problem-based learning (PBL) for their medical students. However, the effects of PBL have not been adequately assessed for an informed decision. An approach to assessment should consider not just the knowledge outcomes expected of all students, but should be tailored to the theoretical goals of PBL: clinical reasoning, integration of scientific and clinical knowledge, and lifelong learning skills. This means that problem-solving processes as well as products need to be measured. In addition, cognitive measures associated with expert performance can be used to assess the extent to which PBL affects the development of expertise. In this study, students taking an elective in PBL were compared with students taking other electives on a realistic pathophysiological explanation task. The problem-solving protocols were examined for coherence, use of science concepts, strategy use, and self-directed learning. The results indicate that cognitive measures can be used to distinguish students who have participated in PBL from their counterparts in terms of knowledge, reasoning, and learning strategies. This suggests that such measures may play a meaningful role in assessment of student learning.     

Delivering Advanced Technical Education Using Online,Immersive Classroom Technology

ABSTRACT

Vacuum and thin film technologies are critical to advanced manufacturing industries. With a grant from the National Science Foundation (DUE #14004080), Normandale Community College has developed courses that are delivered online and via telepresence to provide a formal education to vacuum technician students around the country. Telepresence technology supports real-time interactions, which are crucial for instructors to help students understand this complicated topic. Designing the courses with active learning and flipped classroom principles encourages students to be prepared and to use class time for resolving questions. An unanticipated project outcome is that it has proven easier to partner with industry than with other educational institutions.     

Competition between ethanol-induced reward and aversion in place conditioning

Previous place conditioning studies in mice have shown that injection of ethanol immediately before a conditioned stimulus (CS+) produces conditioned preference, whereas injection of ethanol immediately after CS+ produces conditioned aversion. In the present experiments, we examined the learning that occurs when ethanol is injected in “ambiguous“ procedures that provide the opportunity for both types of conditioning. When ethanol was given midway through the CS (Experiments 1 and 2) or both before and after the CS (Experiment 3), the direction of place conditioning was the same as when mice were exposed only to whichever contingency occurred first (a primacy effect). That is, injection of ethanol in the middle of the CS conditioned aversion, whereas injection both before and after the CS conditioned preference. Because these results support the idea that ethanol elicits both aversive and rewarding effects, they are most consistent with conditioning theories that conceptualize unconditioned stimuli (USs) as events that can activate multiple representational components.     

Pressing Issues in College Counseling: A Survey of American College Counseling Association Members

The authors conducted a survey of members of the American College Counseling Association to ascertain the experiences and opinions of college counselors on several pressing issues within the college counseling profession. Survey results from 133 respondents indicated that counseling centers may benefit from increasing the number of group counseling interventions by increasing the multicultural competence of services provided, by implementing crisis/disaster mental health initiatives, and by more effectively consulting with other professionals on campus.