Characterizing undergraduate engineering students' understanding of sustainability

Engineering professionals in Australia and internationally are coming under increased pressure to practise engineering more sustainably. In response to this pressure, the Institution of Engineers, Australia, has updated the procedure for accreditation of the engineering baccalaureate to ensure inclusion of sustainability learning. In order to graduate, Australian engineering students must now 'understand sustainability'. This paper reports on a theoretical synthesis of the literature on sustainability and understanding, and an empirical investigation into sustainability conceptions held by a group of chemical engineering undergraduate students at the University of Sydney. During the theoretical synthesis we examined what it might mean for a student to understand sustainability by deriving a suite of sustainability principles and describing the component parts of an expert-like understanding of sustainability. In the empirical investigation, students' written responses to the question 'In your own words, what is sustainability?' were analysed using a modified version of the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy. The SOLO analysis revealed broad structural variation in the way our students understood sustainability.     

Judging who knows best about yourself: developmental change in citing the self across middle childhood

Rosenberg (1979) reported that children under the age of 11 do not recognize that they are the authority on their own self-knowledge, placing authority instead with adults. However, results from Studies 1 and 2, in which 86 and 47 children, respectively, from predominantly White low- to middle-income communities participated, suggest that the shift from reliance on adults to self occurs between the ages of 5 and 10 years. The studies also demonstrate parallel development in judging own and other people's self-knowledge. Study 3, in which 96 children from predominantly White low- to middle-income communities participated, shows the beginnings of sophisticated understanding in children aged 5 to 7 years, who differentiate between information about the self that is best judged by the self and information that can be judged by others. Suggestions are made as to why this aspect of understanding minds develops later than other aspects of psychological understanding.     

Teaching,learning and the curriculum 1: The influence of content in science

Summary There are already a number of important criteria upon which topics for inclusion in science curricula should be selected and sequenced. We have recommended two additional criteria: the topic's potential for effecting conceptual change, and its potential for generating metacognitive training. Among other things, Science curricula should foster intellectual development. Such development is often a slow process of change, where new experiences, skills and understandings build on, modify and extend existing ones. Thus, topics should be evaluated in terms of their relation to existing Children's Science and to the students' metacognitive abilities. Evaluation of the appropriateness of a particular topic in a curriculum sequence should be based on such factors as its conceptual concreteness, the number and breadth of models which can be invoked, the concreteness of corroboration of results, and its predictive power. Conjointly, evaluation should take into account the nature, scope and complexity of the associated metacognitive demands. If selected carefully, topics in the science curriculum will do more than progressively sample the universe of content areas. They will develop each students ability and desire to engage in effective, independent learning.     

Professional standards for teachers: a case study of professional learning

This paper analyses the current Australian policy and research context in relation to developing quality teachers. Like other countries, many educational authorities in Australia are developing professional standards for teachers and the evaluation of teachers against those standards as a mechanism for ensuring and extending the quality of teaching in schools. A key policy consideration involves the use of professional standards as tools for extending professional learning and/or for credentialing and appraisal. This paper considers these uses of standards by drawing on an evaluation of Education Queensland's Professional Standards for Teachers pilot. The pilot focused on using a set of standards as a framework for professional learning. Teachers' perspectives on the standards and their intended use, their engagement with the standards during the pilot and the nature of professional learning associated with that engagement are discussed in light of current policy debates about professional standards.     

Reported Interpersonal Violence and Disposition Decisions: The Impact of Client and Counselor Variables

Client sex, intake counselor sex, intake counselor experience, and client counseling history significantly predicted disclosure of violence experiences. Counselor sex, counselor experience, and client's experience with counseling predicted intake disposition. Predictors for disposition at termination were number of sessions attended, counselor sex, and counselor experience. Implications for counseling center settings are discussed.     

The Effect of Informational Characteristics and Faculty Knowledge and Beliefs on the Use of Assessment

Increasing the use of learning outcome assessments to inform educational decisions is a major challenge in higher education. For this study we used a sense-making theoretical perspective to guide an analysis of the relationship of information characteristics and faculty assessment knowledge and beliefs with the use of general education assessment information at three research institutions with similar organizational contexts. Study findings indicate that the likelihood of using assessment information increases when assessment evidence is action oriented and viewed as of high quality and when faculty members are knowledgeable, have positive dispositions toward assessment, and have a perception of institutional support for engagement in assessment activities.     

The GLOBE Visualization Project: Using WWW in the Classroom

Though commercial interest in the World Wide Web is growing, the potential uses of the medium as a learning tool are numerous. The GLOBE Visualization Project is one such educational application. We have designed and implemented a WWW-based, user-friendly, language-independent, graphical user interface providing access to visualizations created for GLOBE, a multinational program of education and science. The target users of the system are K–12 students and their teachers from over 1100 schools in 39 countries; other clients include the GLOBE scientific investigators and members of the public internationally. Navigation is intuitive, and employs the metaphors of a Control Panel which changes the image appearing in a Viewscreen. The interface can be learned empirically by persons of all ages regardless of technical expertise or native language; context-sensitive help is provided for users who prefer documentation. The GLOBE Visualization server is on the World Wide Web at URL http://globe.gsfc.nasa.gov/globe/.