Coming of Age? Overview of Career Guidance Policy and Practice in Australia

In recent years significant international focus has highlighted the critical importance of managing life, learning and work in a constantly changing labour market. This changing world and the corresponding need for individuals to engage in repeated decision-making about learning and work has raised the importance of and necessity for the provision of career development services across the lifespan. This challenge is being addressed by many countries across the globe. Within this context, this paper discusses the initiatives enhancing the status of career service provision in Australia.     

Semiotic and discursive variables in cas-based didactical engineering

This paper presents a semiotic analysis of the (often claimed) potential of computer algebra systems (CAS) for enabling mathematical activity on a conceptual level higher than usual. Theoretical points are illustrated by examples from a development project in the context of a first year university course on calculus. We also discuss how they may be used in `a posteriori' didactical analysis and in didactical engineering. This revised version was published online in August 2006 with corrections to the Cover Date.     

Didactical designs for students’ proportional reasoning: an “open approach” lesson and a “fundamental situation”

In this paper, we analyze and compare two didactical designs for introducing primary school pupils to proportional reasoning in the context of plane polygons. One of them is well-documented in the literature; the other one is based on our own data and is accordingly presented and discussed in more detail in this paper. The two designs come from different cultural and intellectual environments: lesson study in Japan (implicitly based on the “open approach method”) and “didactical engineering” in France (based on the theory of didactical situations). The general aim of our paper is to compare these two environments and their approaches to didactical design, basing our discussion on the concrete designs mentioned above. Clear differences among them are presented, while we also identify links which hold potential for integrating research and practice.     

Active Transportation to School

Abstract

Cinematographical analysis was used to compare spatial and temporal relationships of ten skilled and ten non-skilled performances of the standing broad jump. Means of the extent and duration of major joint action for the two levels of skill were represented graphically. Characteristic likenesses appeared in the general patterns of movement of limbs and in proportion of time consumed by the phases of the movement. Characteristic differences were found in angles of take-off and of landing and in extent and duration of specific joint actions. Greater extent of movement occurred in the skilled performances. The latter characteristically used more time in hip flexion and less time in knee extension.