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.     

Giving feedback on peers’ concept maps as a learning experience: does quality of reviewed concept maps matter?

Learning Environments Research - Giving feedback to peers can be a powerful learning tool because of the feedback provider’s active cognitive involvement with the products to be reviewed. The...     

III. ATTACHMENT AND EMOTIONAL DEVELOPMENT IN INSTITUTIONAL CARE: CHARACTERISTICS AND CATCH UP

Attachment has been assessed in the extreme environment of orphanages, but an important issue to be addressed in this chapter is whether in addition to standard assessment procedures, such as the Strange Situation, the lack of a specific attachment in some institutionalized children should be taken into account given the limits to the development of stable relationships in institutionalized care. In addition, this chapter discusses disinhibited or indiscriminately friendly behavior that is often seen in institutionalized children. Enhanced caregiving quality alone appears to be insufficient to diminish indiscriminate behavior, at least in some children, as evidenced by the persistence of indiscriminate behavior in children adopted out of institutions into adoptive families. We suggest that the etiology and function of indiscriminate, “friendly” behavior may be different for institutionalized versus not‐institutionalized children. In the first case it may reflect a distortion or disruption of early attachment relationships; in the latter case it is likely to result from the lack of expected input in the form of contingent interactions with a stable caregiver in early life. We try to delineate infant and caregiver characteristics that are associated with secure attachment in institutional settings, given the inevitable fact that large numbers of infants worldwide are being raised, and will be raised, in contexts of institutional care. We conclude that much further study is needed of the development of children's attachments following adoption out of an institutional setting.     

Validity in teachers’ summative assessments

This paper describes some of the findings of a project which set out to explore and develop teachers’ understanding and practices in their summative assessments. The focus was on those summative assessments that are used on a regular basis within schools for guiding the progress of pupils and for internal accountability. The project combined both intervention and research elements. The intervention aimed both to explore how teachers might improve those practices in the light of their re‐examination of their validity, and to engage them in moderation exercises within and between schools to audit examples of students’ work and to discuss their appraisals of these examples. This paper reports findings, arising from this work, of the research that aimed to study how teachers understand validity, and how they formulate their classroom assessment practices in the light of that understanding. The paper also considers how that understanding might be challenged and developed. It was found that teachers’ attention to validity issues had been undermined by the external test regimes, but that teachers could re‐address these issues by reflection on their values and by engagement in a shared development of portfolio assessments.     

Extinction of enhanced latent inhibition

Hungry rats were used in a classical conditioning procedure in which visual stimuli were paired with food. Conditions in which nonreinforced exposure to a nontarget stimulus was followed by exposure to a simultaneous compound nontarget/target stimulus (a blocking procedure) resulted in enhanced latent inhibition to the target relative to exposure to the nontarget, followed by exposure to the target stimulus alone. A third phase of nonreinforced exposure training, in which the target was exposed alone following the compound, reduced levels of latent inhibition relative to results obtained with the blocking procedure. Experiments also suggested that this was not the result of restoration of associability by the omission of an expected presentation of the nontarget stimulus in the final preexposure phase. These results suggest that enhanced latent inhibition is due to summation of a direct-target-no-event association and a second-order association of these elements via target-nontarget and nontarget-no-event association. Exposure to the target after compound exposure extinguished the target-nontarget association and reduced the sources of no-event learning for the target.     

What do medical students learn from dissection?

Dissection has long been the accepted method for teaching anatomy to medical students. More recently, some educators have suggested that easier, cheaper, alternative methods are just as effective. But what do the students think? This paper aimed to identify what undergraduate medical students learn, how they cope, and what effects participating in dissection has on them as individuals. A cohort of 267 second year medical students at Otago Medical School were invited to complete three online surveys; before their first dissection laboratory class, after their first musculoskeletal system dissection and following the last semester of studying anatomy. Open‐ended questions showcasing the attitudes, beliefs, and opinions on what dissection had taught the medical students over years two and three were analyzed. A general inductive approach was used and common emergent themes were identified. In total, 194 students completed the second, and 108 students completed the third questionnaire. Students commonly conveyed dissection as an appropriate and valuable educational tool, useful for teaching and learning anatomical knowledge and relationships, appreciating the body in three‐dimension, teamwork, and how to cope with death/dead bodies. The noted effects of personal growth while participating in dissection were highly varied, but in general, impacted positively on the majority of students. This study shows that at Otago Medical School the students also believe that dissection is not only a useful tool to learn anatomy but also that it fosters teamwork, assists professional development and helps them come to terms with death and dying. Anat Sci Educ 11: 325–335. © 2017 American Association of Anatomists.     

Disrupting the Past to Disrupt the Future: An Antenarrative of Technical Communication

This article presents an antenarrative of the field of technical and professional communication. Part methodology and part practice, an antenarrative allows the work of the field to be reseen, forges new paths forward, and emboldens the field’s objectives to unabashedly embrace social justice and inclusivity as part of its core narrative. The authors present a heuristic that can usefully extend the pursuit of inclusivity in technical and professional communication.     

Convergent and concurrent validity of two measures of phonological processing

The purposes of this study were to determine the degree to which two measures of phonological awareness/ability (Test of Phonological Awareness; Comprehensive Test of Phonological Processing) correlate with each other and with a measure of reading (Letter‐Word Identification), and to determine which of the individual measures of phonological ability best predict early reading skill in kindergarten children. With one exception, all correlations among measures of phonological awareness/ability were significant. In addition, all correlations among the phonological awareness measures and the reading measure were significant. Multiple regression analyses revealed that the combination of all predictor variables accounted for approximately 51% of the variability in scores on the Woodcock Letter‐Word Identification subtest. The Phonological Awareness and the Rapid Naming composites of the CTOPP were the best predictors of performance on the measures of word identification. © 2002 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.     

Validity and feasibility of an obstacle course to assess fundamental movement skills in a pre-school setting

Failure to master age-appropriate fundamental movement skills (FMS) at a young age can limit motor skill competence affecting health. Assessments often have issues with feasibility and implementation in a field setting. As such, the purpose of this study was to investigate the validity and feasibility of the Athletic Skills Track (AST), in a pre-school setting. For the validation study sixty-five 3–6 year old children (25 boys and 40 girls) from five pre-schools across Adelaide, Australia participated. Correlations and linear regression analysis (adjusted for age and gender) were used to investigate the association between the time to complete the AST and the raw score of the Test of Gross Motor Development 2 (TGMD-2). For the feasibility study pre-school staff completed a semi-structured interview regarding the feasibility of the AST. The AST took less than a minute per child and the TGMD-2 around 20 minutes for two children. There was a strong negative correlation (r = ?0.63, p < 0.01) between the AST scores and the TGMD-2 scores. All five staff reported strengths of the AST to be its short administration time, setup and appropriateness. These results suggest that the AST could be a feasible and valid method of FMS assessment in Australian pre-schools.