Reflective Teachers and Teacher Educators in the Pacific Region: Conversations with us not about us

This article reports on a study of Pacific primary school teachers’ and university lecturers’ reflections on their involvement in the in-service Bachelor of Education degree programme offered at the regional University of the South Pacific (USP) in Fiji. Two rich sets of data have emerged from this study. Firstly, there are a number of critical reflections by ourselves as teacher educators concerning levels of equitable student access and participation in our degree as it is reconceptualised for distance and flexible delivery to increase levels of teacher professionalism across the Pacific region. Secondly, there has emerged a set of statements from teachers themselves about: teaching and learning; professional development opportunities; and what it means to be a professional educator in the Pacific region. This later data suggests an alternative set of voices in what has largely been a “conversation between us about them” conducted by Ministries of Education, Curriculum Development Units, USP, other educational bodies and the media in the Pacific, but particularly Fiji, about teachers and teachers’ work. Critical reflection upon our own practice as teacher educators and the voices of experienced teachers are particularly pertinent not only as we seek to reshape a degree programme to suit the needs of the region’s primary school teachers but also as “rethinking” debates about the purposes of education in the Pacific region are on-going yet exclusive.     

Flexible use of lexical and sublexical information in word recognition

Within the dual‐route framework it is hypothesised that readers exhibit flexibility in their use of lexical and non‐lexical information in word naming. In the present study, participants named high‐ and low‐frequency regular one‐syllable English words embedded within lists of regular or irregular one‐ or two‐syllable English words. A large number of irregular words should bias the reader toward the lexical route, whereas a list consisting exclusively of regular words should allow more efficient use of sublexical information present in the word. Word frequency effects were obtained when the list was dominated by either regular or irregular two‐syllable filler words. Furthermore, there was an interaction between frequency and regularity for the one‐syllable words, indicating that the frequency effect was significantly larger when the fillers were one‐syllable irregular words relative to one‐syllable regular words. These results extend those reported for a shallow orthography, and indicate strategic control over the use of phonological and lexical information in English word recognition.     

Inequalities and Agencies in Workplace Learning Experiences: International Student Perspectives

National systems of vocational education and training around the globe are facing reform driven by quality, international mobility, and equity. Evidence suggests that there are qualitatively distinctive challenges in providing and sustaining workplace learning experiences to international students. However, despite growing conceptual and empirical work, there is little evidence of the experiences of these students undertaking workplace learning opportunities as part of vocational education courses. This paper draws on a four-year study funded by the Australian Research Council that involved 105 in depth interviews with international students undertaking work integrated learning placements as part of vocational education courses in Australia. The results indicate that international students can experience different forms of discrimination and deskilling, and that these were legitimised by students in relation to their understanding of themselves as being an ‘international student’ (with fewer rights). However, the results also demonstrated the ways in which international students exercised their agency towards navigating or even disrupting these circumstances, which often included developing their social and cultural capital. This study, therefore, calls for more proactively inclusive induction and support practices that promote reciprocal understandings and navigational capacities for all involved in the provision of work integrated learning. This, it is argued, would not only expand and enrich the learning opportunities for international students, their tutors, employers, and employees involved in the provision of workplace learning opportunities, but it could also be a catalyst to promote greater mutual appreciation of diversity in the workplace.     

Understanding and Controlling Learning Operations in Special Education

Developments arising from recent theory‐directed attempts to understand learning are exposing weaknesses in the monopoly position attained by the operant model in special education. These new developments attest to the importance, the primacy and the functional significance of learning to use and to relate events (stimuli) in the environment. They also highlight the way in which the operant model excludes important learning details from consideration, not because they are intrinsically unmeasurable, but because measurable manifestations of them are not available at the time learning is taking place. Instructional technology, when updated to take into account these new developments, should be able to provide more reliable and more successful acquision, more precision in task analyses and, especially, more success in complex, longitudinal learning domains. Developing new technologies to supplement the successful operant ones should enable us to set higher expectations for success with, for example, intellectually disabled people in those domains in which they traditionally fail.     

Modeling the impacts of child care quality on children's preschool cognitive development

The National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care compared 3 statistical methods that adjust for family selection bias to test whether child care type and quality relate to cognitive and academic skills. The methods included: multiple regression models of 54-month outcomes, change models of differences in 24- and 54-month outcomes, and residualized change models of 54-month outcomes adjusting for the 24-month outcome. The study was unable to establish empirically which model best adjusted for selection and omitted-variable bias. Nevertheless, results suggested that child care quality predicted cognitive outcomes at 54 months, with effect sizes of .04 to .08 for both infant and preschool ages. Center care during preschool years also predicted outcomes across all models.     

混合结构中连续墙梁的设计计算

在混合结构中常会遇到多跨连续墙梁的设计问题,用传统的设计方法来求解其结果往往离散性较大.以有限元计算结果为依据,提出了混合结构中连续墙梁的设计计算方法.     

Perceptions and experiences of annual report preparers

Between 1986 and 1993, tertiary education institutions, [TEIs] in New Zealand have transformed their annual reports from being uninformative, untimely and unobtainable documents, to ones that are well-presented, comprehensive and readily available in a timely fashion (Coy, Tower & Dixon, 1994). This paper reports a study of the events and experiences according to report preparers in bringing about this change, including the incentives and difficulties that they have been facing.The study uses data collected from 48 staff involved in report preparation at 15 of the 37 TEIs that are in New Zealand. These data are qualitative, and are analysed from a realist perspective mixing causal analysis and interpretive understanding (Silverman 1985).The study suggests that the mandated changes to reporting are seen as one facet of several recent public sector reforms in New Zealand. Interviewees felt that the changes to reporting were driven externally by legislation, and internally by the stances taken by some chief executive officers and by the professional ardour of some accountants. Moreover, the Audit Office was seen as a prominent agent of change.The general reactions of preparers of reports to the reforms range from strong support to resentment and scepticism. A major concern voiced was the potential for data reported by TEIs to be used for political purposes. On the other hand, improved staff motivation was noted in many institutions as well as greater cost consciousness and awareness of student, needs. However, these positive attributes were probably derived from the reforms in general, and not just from the changes to reporting.     

The Structure of Achievement and Behavior across Middle Childhood

This research used data from the National Longitudinal Survey of Youth (NLSY) to describe and model developmental trajectories across middle childhood. Our sample consisted of approximately 1,000 children of NLSY women who were aged 6 to 7 years in either 1986 or 1988. Assessments of PIAT math and reading scores and the mother-reported Behavior Problem Index in 1986, 1988, 1990, and 1992 provided data for middle-child trajectories of children aged 6 to 7 in 1986. Assessments in 1988, 1990, 1992, and 1994 provided data for children aged 6 to 7 in 1988. We used the raw score form of these data to estimate LISREL-based models of their autoregressive structure. As with other samples, average math and reading achievement trajectories were parabolic for NLSY children, with scores increasing at a decreasing rate over this period. Average behavior-problem trajectories were flat. Behind these average shapes was extreme diversity in level (and in some cases, slopes), of individual trajectories and a pronounced tendency for above average changes between two adjacent assessments to be followed by opposite-signed changes in the subsequent period. Estimates from our structural models showed great heterogeneity in the average level of achievement and behavior for all three outcomes and heterogeneous slopes for reading scores as well. Boys but not girls were found to have heterogeneous slopes for math and behavior problems, whereas girls but not boys showed a significantly higher degree of persistence if "shocked" off of their expected trajectories.