Peer Tutoring for Anatomy Workshops in Cambodia

Historical loss of staff and teaching resources in Cambodia has resulted in significant challenges to anatomy education. Small group anatomy teaching opportunities are limited. A visit to Cambodia by a teaching team from the University of Melbourne in 2010 demonstrated it was possible to implement well-resourced anatomy workshops for this purpose. However, continuation of the workshop program was inhibited by the limited number of local teaching staff. In 2015, another team from the University of Melbourne returned to Cambodia to implement anatomy workshops that incorporated peer tutoring. The objective was to improve teacher-to-student ratios and to demonstrate that interactive anatomy workshops could be delivered successfully despite low staff numbers. The anatomy workshops were attended by 404 students of Medicine, Dentistry, Nursing, and Midwifery at the University of Puthisastra. Medical students were invited to act as peer tutors for nursing students. A five-point Likert scale questionnaire was used to determine student satisfaction with both the workshops and peer tutoring. The overwhelming majority were positive about the workshops and keen for them to continue. Almost all medical students who acted as peer tutors agreed or strongly agreed that this role increased their anatomical knowledge (98%) and confidence (94%). Most nursing students agreed or strongly agreed with statements that they would like peer tutoring to continue (94%) and that they would like to be peer tutors themselves (88%). This report demonstrates that peer tutoring could be an effective tool in educational settings where poor staff-to-student ratios limit delivery of interactive workshops.     

Overcoming barriers to using precision teaching with a web-based programme

Precision Teaching (PT) is an evidence-based intervention, which research indicates is frequently not implemented following training, with few teachers using it in schools after training events. The web-based programme in this research focuses on word-level reading skills and targets blending and segmenting skills rather than whole word reading. This research, undertaken with 10 schools, explored whether a web-based PT programme would provide favourable implementation rates, and support the fidelity of the programme delivery. The study also measured the impact of the PT programme on word decoding and sight word reading using the Test of Word Reading Efficiency. Results suggest favourable implementation rates with 7 of the 10 schools implementing the programme. Full impact data for 34 children suggest that the programme has a positive impact on decoding (effect size 0.7) and sight word reading skills (effect size 0.6). A timed assessment provides evidence that fluency improved as well as accuracy. Gains were sustained at two-month follow-up.     

Psychosocial Aspects of the Development of Gifted Underachievers: Review and Implications

Gifted underachievers are children who display a discrepancy between expected high achievement and actual performance. Focussing on gifted children with a long‐standing pattern of underachievement not explicable in terms of learning disability, this paper adopts a developmental perspective to the problem of gifted underachievement. Literature is reviewed on the affective development of gifted underachievers and the environmental factors which may foster or diminish success in school. It is argued that cognitive and affective variables do not operate independently and should not be considered in isolation from the environmental context of development. Further, gifted underachievers are not a homogeneous group, and some influences on achievement are situation‐specific and highly variable. Finally, implications for intervention are discussed in light of the need to view children's development not as a dichotomy of cognitive and affective change but holistically, as a complex interaction of child and environment.     

The value of learning English in Thailand and its impact on Thai: perspectives from university students

English is widely regarded as an essential skill for the globalized economy by governments around the world which devote considerable resources to its teaching in formal education, though often with limited success in terms of achievement levels. Thailand is a case in point. Set against the putative benefits of acquiring proficiency in English, concerns have been raised that the spread of English has a negative impact, threatening the vitality of the first languages and cultures of its learners. Examining whether these concerns are valid in Thailand, this article reports on a study amongst Thai university students which investigated their perceptions of English alongside their first language, Thai. Results indicate that these Thai students subscribe to the notion of English as a tool for personal economic advancement but that the position of Thai as the language of national identity remains unchallenged.     

Approaches to learning by undergraduate students: A longitudinal study

The purpose of this study was to determine if the success of students at a highly selective combined baccalaureate/MD degree program is affected by their different approaches to learning. One hundred freshmen students at the University of Missouri-Kansas City School of Medicine (UMKC) were surveyed using the Lancaster Approaches to Studying Inventory (short survey by Entwistle, 1981). Analysis of the data indicates that the learning styles of students from this combined-degree school tend to be similar to the learning styles of students from other baccalaureate-degree programs in medicine. It appears there are some relationships between approaches to learning and success in the program. This association between learning styles and success also appears to be related to gender differences.Presented at the Annual Forum of the Association for Institutional Research, Louisville, KY, May 13–16, 1990.     

Making all the flashy stuff work: the role of the principal in ICT integration

The pervasiveness of new technologies and their rapid spread around the globe belie the fact that educational leaders still struggle with how to integrate information and communication technologies (ICT) in schools. This article describes the form of these struggles for a small group of Australian principals. Their stories emerged from a set of five longitudinal case studies of ICT integration in a range of Government schools in the state of New South Wales. During the three years over which the study was conducted, the difficulties associated with leading the integration of educational technologies in schools were common and recurring themes that emerged in interviews with principals. These cases reveal the local variations and specificities of ICT integration through a range of issues including infrastructure development, human resource development, curriculum design, pedagogical practices and futures oriented planning. In describing these issues, many of the effects of ICT integration in schools are discussed. One such effect is the requirement for principals to develop the skills of new knowledge workers, in particular they require access to knowledge and support that is sufficiently flexible to deal with immediate and practical problems.     

Excluded from school: getting a second chance at a ‘meaningful’ education

In this paper, we draw upon the experiences of a group of young people who have been excluded from mainstream schools in two Australian states to provide an account of the ways in which they have found their way to education in educational sites that are variously referred to as ‘flexible learning centres', ‘second chance schools' and ‘alternative schools'. Whilst often clashing with school authorities in their original schools, these young people described how, when given the opportunity, they were able to engage in more meaningful learning in environments that recognised and accommodated their personal circumstances, and avoided authoritarian rule. A question we address is: What kinds of educational experiences facilitate ‘meaningful learning’ for these students?     

Category-use effects in children

Three experiments examined the changes in category representation that take place when children use exemplars for tasks other than classification. In Experiments 1 and 2, 6- and 10-year-old children learned to classify exemplars of a novel category and then used the same exemplars in an inferential prediction task. In a subsequent classification task, features that were predictive for both classification and inference were classified more accurately than features that were predictive only of category membership. Experiment 3 showed that features with multiple uses were also more likely to be retrieved in feature listing. The findings show that children's category representations are affected by the way exemplars are used after they have been categorized.