The participation of Australian Indigenous students in higher education: a scoping review of empirical research, 2000–2016

While access to higher education has increased for Indigenous Australians, participation and completion rates remain lower than those of non-Indigenous Australians. A sound evidence base is needed to ground equity initiatives if they are to address the specific needs of Indigenous students. This paper presents the results of a scoping review of empirical research focusing on the participation of Indigenous students in higher education. The purpose of the scoping review was to synthesise empirical research on aspirations for, and barriers and enablers to, higher education that were published between 2000 and 2016 (n = 57), and identify areas where further research is needed. Despite a recent increase in research on this topic, relatively little attention has been paid to Indigenous students’ aspirations while they are at school. We argue that future research should take account of school students’ aspirations for higher education, including primary school students; the similitude of barriers and enablers across the student life cycle; differences within Indigenous community and among Indigenous students; and, the insights emerging from Indigenous methodologies and scholarship.     

Age Differences in the Impact of Employment on Antisocial Behavior

While research suggests that working more than 20 hr weekly is associated with greater antisocial behavior among middle‐ and upper‐class youth, some have argued that employment benefits at‐risk youth and leads to desistance from crime among youthful offenders. This study investigates the relation between hours worked, school attendance, and employment characteristics on antisocial behavior in a sample of approximately 1,300 juvenile offenders (ages 14–17 at baseline) tracked over 5 years. The combinations of high‐intensity employment and irregular school attendance, unemployment and irregular school attendance, and unemployment and not being enrolled in school are associated with significantly greater antisocial behavior, particularly during early adolescence. High‐intensity employment diminishes antisocial behavior only when accompanied by attending school.     

THE GERIATRIC INTERDISCIPLINARY TEAM APPROACH: CHALLENGES AND OPPORTUNITIES IN EDUCATING TRAINEES TOGETHER FROM A VARIETY OF DISCIPLINES

The special health needs of older persons and the organization of managed care systems necessitate interdisciplinary team health care. However, there is a paucity of training or familiarity with team care among most health care professionals. This article describes one nationwide initiative, funded by the John A. Hartford Foundation, in which eight sites trained health care workers from different disciplines to participate as interdisciplinary geriatric health care team members. Although the goal of the initiative was to develop trained interdisciplinary team participants, a major concern of the programs was the initial overcoming of challenges to training professionals from different disciplines together. Both benefits and challenges are identified and several training modalities and techniques to meet the challenges are discussed. These include case studies, standardized patients, cross-discipline role-playing, glossaries, and use of the DISC Personality Profile. The benefits of each of these modalities are examined, and potential pitfalls and perils to be avoided are emphasized.     

Visual input enhancement via essay coding results in deaf learners' long-term retention of improved English grammatical knowledge

This study explored the efficacy of visual input enhancement, specifically essay enhancement, for facilitating deaf college students' improvement in English grammatical knowledge. Results documented students' significant improvement immediately after a 10-week instructional intervention, a replication of recent research. Additionally, the results of delayed assessment documented students' significant retention of that improvement five and a half months beyond the instructional intervention period. Essay enhancement served to highlight, via a coding procedure, students' successful and unsuccessful production of discourse-required target grammatical structures. The procedure converted students' written communicative output into enhanced input for inducing noticing of grammatical form and, through essay revision, establishing form-meaning connections leading to acquisition. With its optimal design characteristics supported by theoretical and empirical research, essay enhancement is a highly effective methodology that can be easily implemented as primary or supplementary English instruction for deaf students. The results of this study hold great promise for facilitating deaf students' English language and literacy development and have broad implications for second-language research, teaching, and learning.     

A pedagogy of belonging: troubling encounters with ethnic and religious difference

Understanding the construction of belonging, and how unbelonging might be troubled, is critical work. For schools in many parts of the world one of the many challenges of globalisation is the task of teaching with, and for, ethnic and cultural diversity. This paper examines the exclusionary practices of teaching that construct ethnic and religious minority students in states of unbelonging. These practices are due, in part, to teachers’ failure to really know their students. Alongside this argument, discourses of belonging in rural schools that speak to possibilities for everyday place-sharing for ethnic and religious minority students are examined. Simple and common moments of mutual recognition and understanding speak to the possibilities for belonging that are opened up in everyday relations of knowing. The implications of these ideas for teachers and teacher education in what is framed as a ‘pedagogy of belonging’ are considered.     

Friendships, Peer Acceptance, and Group Membership: Realtions to Academic Achievement in Middle School

Two samples of sixth-grade students were followed over time to examine relations of number of reciprocated friendships, peer acceptance, and group membership to academic achievement. In both samples, group membership was the most consistent predictor of grades over time. In study 2, prosocial behavior, antisocial behavior, and emotional distress were examined as processes that might explain these significant links between peer relationships and academic achievement. Results of longitudinal analyses support a conclusion that aspects of peer relationships are related to classroom achievement indirectly, by way of significant relations with prosocial behavior. Future research might benefit from more in-depth analyses of the functions of adolescent peer relationships and the processes by which they influence orientations toward social and academic competence at school.     

Elementary Science Education in Classrooms and Outdoors: Stakeholder views,gender, ethnicity,and testing

In this article, we present a mixed-methods study of 2 schools’ elementary science programs including outdoor instruction specific to each school's culture. We explore fifth-grade students in measures of science knowledge, environmental attitudes, and outdoor comfort levels including gender and ethnic differences. We further examine students’ science and outdoor views and activity choices along with those of adults (teachers, parents, and principals). Significant differences were found between pre- and posttest measures along with gender and ethnic differences with respect to students’ science knowledge and environmental attitudes. Interview data exposed limitations of outdoor learning at both schools including standardized test pressures, teachers’ views of science instruction, and desultory connections of alternative learning settings to ‘school' science.     

Subversion or Socialization? Humor and Carnival in Morris Gleitzman’s Texts

Like their counterparts elsewhere, Australian children favour humorous novels; comedic writers consistently dominate the preteen and early teen fiction market in Australia. Regardless of its popularity, however, in comparison to more serious writing, humorous literature has received little critical attention. Of the studies aimed at this area, most have tended to concentrate on the various stages of development in childrens preferences for humor, its strategies, forms and appeal, with very few examining the ideological assumptions informing particular texts. Yet, this article argues, humorous books are no less concerned with culture, value and meaning than any other kind of fiction for children. As Morris Gleitzmans texts illustrate, by highlighting the cultural processes involved in the construction of language and meaning, inviting readers to play with ideas about language, social roles and behaviors, and creating characters who act in ways which are oppositional to usual socializing expectations, humorous literature, especially in carnivalized forms, has the potential to problematize unquestioning acceptance of various ideological para-digms, values, social practices and rules.     

Formative Evaluation of Computer‐Based Training For a University Financial System

This article describes a formative evaluation of a one‐day introductory computer‐based training (CBT) course for a new on‐line financial and purchasing system at a large public university. The purposes of the evaluation were to evaluate the effectiveness of the training and to identify appropriate revisions and incorporate them into the training program. Participants were 78 university employees who were likely future users of the financial and purchasing system. The mean score on an on‐line performance posttest that simulated real‐work tasks was 94%, and the mean on a 40‐item knowledge posttest covering the CBT content was 74%. Learner attitudes toward the course were positive, averaging 4.4 on a 5‐point scale. Formative evaluation of the program resulted in revisions that had the potential to improve its effectiveness and provided evidence of the value of ongoing formative evaluation of workplace training.