Beyond the middle: A report about literacy and numeracy development of target group students in the middle years of schooling: Volume 1

The report was commissioned by the Department of Education, Science and Training to investigate the perceived efficacy of middle years programmes in all States and Territories in improving the quality of teaching, learning and student outcomes, especially in literacy and numeracy and for student members of particular target groups. These target groups included students from lower socio-economic communities, Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander communities, students with a language background other than English, rural and remote students, and students struggling with the transition from middle/upper primary to the junior secondary years. The project involved large scale national and international literature reviews on Australian and international middle years approaches as well as an analysis of key literacy and numeracy teaching and learning strategies being used. In the report, there is emergent evidence of the relative efficacy of a combination of explicit state policy, dedicated funding and curriculum and professional development frameworks that are focused on the improvement of classroom pedagogy in the middle years. The programs that evidenced the greatest current and potential value for target group students tended to have developed in state policy environments that encouraged a structural rather than adjunct approach to middle years innovations. The authors conclude that in order to translate the gains made into sustainable improvement of educational results in literacy and numeracy for target groups, there is a need for a second generation of middle years theorising, research, development and practice.

Semantic priming in Alzheimer's dementia: Evidence for dissociation of automatic and attentional processes

The nature of the semantic memory deficit in dementia of the Alzheimer's type (DAT) was investigated in a semantic priming task which was designed to assess both automatic and attention-induced priming effects. Ten DAT patients and 10 age-matched control subjects completed a word naming semantic priming task in which both relatedness proportion (RP) and stimulus-onset asynchrony (SOA) were varied. A clear dissociation between automatic and attentional priming effects in both groups was demonstrated; however, the DAT subjects pattern of priming deviated significantly from that of the normal controls. The DAT patients failed to produce any priming under conditions which encouraged automatic semantic processing and produced facilitation only when the RP was high. In addition, the DAT group produced hyperpriming, with significantly larger facilitation effects than the control group. These results suggest an impairment of automatic spreading activation in DAT and have implications for theories of semantic memory impairment in DAT as well as models of normal priming. (C) 2001 Academic Press.

Extending Learning Opportunities through a virtual faculty

This paper presents the notion of a virtual faculty as a viable alternative to extending and maintaining learner opportunities for students in regional universities or at universities where specialisations in which they are interested may not be offered. Staff from a number of Australian Universities participated in a CUTSD project to explore the viability of establishing a virtual faculty using videoconferencing as the medium of delivery. The success of this project was the result of close collaboration at a number of levels within the participating institutions and a willingness to explore effective approaches to teaching and learning for a videoconference environment.