Beliefs, practices, and interactions of teachers in a Japanese high school English department

This study reveals the school culture and the teachers' professional development activities in a Japanese high school learning environment. Furthermore, it documents the relationships among the context, teachers' beliefs, practices, and interactions. Using multiple data sources including interviews, observations, and documents of teachers from an English department, this yearlong study revealed these English as a Foreign Language teachers lacked many teacher learning opportunities in their context. The study revealed that teacher collaboration only reinforced existing practices, eroding teachers' motivation to learn to teach in this specific context. The study provides evidence to teacher educators about inservice teachers and their learning environment and the significance of the relationships between the two entities. (C) 2004 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The relationship between extra-role behaviours and job burnout for primary school teachers: A preliminary model and development of an organisational citizenship behaviour scale

Recent research on teacher stress in primary schools (e.g. Leonard, Bourke & Schofield, 1999) has shown that higher levels of teacher exhaustion are associated with higher levels of student satisfaction. This paper seeks to explain this surprising finding by considering a construct discussed widely in the organisational literature known as extra-role or organisational citizenship behaviour (OCB). Teacher OCB may include extra efforts to make lessons enjoyable and interesting, organising extra-curricular activities and spending personal time talking with students. The proposed model of analysis also draws on literature relating to job burnout (Maslach, 1982), which generally suggests that the three components of chronic occupational stress - exhaustion, depersonalisation and reduced accomplishment - occur together. However, this paper proposes that although teachers who engage in more OCB experience more exhaustion, they may simultaneously increase their feelings of personal accomplishment and work identification, which may in turn help to avert burnout. It is argued that only with this particular set of job attitudes are the effects of exhaustion caused by high levels of OCB sufficiently buffered to avoid job burnout, and thus positively affect students' quality of school life. The development and piloting of an instrument to measure teachers' OCB will be discussed. The preliminary findings reported herein are part of a larger ongoing study investigating the consequences of stress and OCB in primary school teachers.

Western Australian primary school teachers knowledge about childhood asthma and its management

A total of 164 primary school teachers from Perth, Western Australia anonymously completed a survey of their knowledge and attitudes about asthma. These teachers were active in assisting children with asthma management but most (91.5%) felt that they did not know enough about asthma. Attitudes toward children with asthma were positive; 97% agreed that such children should be encouraged to participate in sporting activities. Specific knowledge about asthma management and medications was, however, poor. This large sample of Western Australian teachers knew more than their European counterparts but asthma training is needed and should be targeted at improving knowledge of both regular and emergency treatments for asthma.

Teen Triple P: A universal approach to reducing risk factors for behavioural and emotional problems in adolescents at the transition to high school

Teen Triple P is a multilevel system of intervention that is designed to provide parents with specific strategies to promote the positive development of their teenage children as they make the transition into high school and through puberty. The program is based on a combination of education about the developmental needs of adolescents, skills training to improve communication and problem-solving, plus specific modules to deal with common problems encountered by parents and adolescents that can escalate into major conflict and violence. It is designed to increase the engagement of parents of adolescent and pre-adolescent children by providing them with easy access to evidencebased parenting advice and support. This paper presents data collected as part of a survey of over 1400 students in first year high school at 9 Brisbane schools. The survey instrument was constructed to obtain students' reports about behaviour which is known to be associated with their health and wellbeing, and also on the extent to which their parents promoted or discouraged such behaviour at home, at school, and in their social and recreational activities in the wider community. Selected data from the survey were extracted and presented to parents at a series of parenting seminars held at the schools to promote appropriate parenting of teenagers. The objectives were to provide parents with accurate data about teenagers' behaviour, and about teenagers' reports of how they perceived their parents' behaviour. Normative data on parent and teenager behaviour will be presented from the survey as well as psychometric data relating to the reliability and validity of this new measure. Implications of this strategy for increasing parent engagement in parenting programs that aim to reduce behavioural and emotional problems in adolescents will be discussed.

Social competence and peer interactions of students with intellectual disability in an inclusive high school

This paper reports descriptive information on the relationship between social competence and the amount and type of peer interaction for nine adolescents with intellectual disability attending a regular high school. Each adolescent's social competence was assessed using the AAMR Adaptive Behavior Scale-School (2nd edn) (ABS-S:2). Naturalistic observations were conducted to obtain information on the amount and type of peer interaction. Data were analysed to determine the relationship between social competence and peer interactions. Social competence was not consistently correlated with the amount of peer interaction. Results from the naturalistic observations showed individual differences in patterns of peer interaction with a tendency towards more frequent interactions with peers who also had intellectual disabilities. These data suggest that social competence did not significantly influence the amount and type of peer interaction. Implications for facilitating peer interactions between adolescents with and without intellectual disability are discussed.

Stress associated with the transition from high school to university: The effect of social support and self-efficacy

The present study aimed to evaluate the role of social support and self-efficacy on the level of stress associated with the transition from high school to university. One hundred and eight-five university students who had completed high school in the previous year completed a three-part questionnaire designed to gather information on their levels of self-efficacy, social support, and stress associated with their transition. The results showed that self-efficacy was a significant predictor of stress associated with the transition to university in that higher levels of self-efficacy were associated with lower levels of stress while social support was a non-significant predictor of stress. [Author abstract]

Future Engineers Australia Management Project: Turning high school students into engineering entrepreneurs

There has been a strong move towards entrepreneurial education in high schools and at universities over the past few years. This has been echoed by a call from state governments around Australia to promote enterprise thinking and education in high schools. It also parallels the push within engineering to learn across the traditional boundaries , particularly between engineering and business. To meet this call, The Engineering Link Group (TELG) developed the Future Engineers Australia Management Project (FEAMP) in 2003. The project is based around Enterprise Education, and was inspired by the Smallpeice Year 12 Engineering Management course in the UK. The idea was to take high school students in years 11 and 12 and turn them into ‘engineering entrepreneurs’. This paper presents the design, development and evaluation of FEAMP as a five day residential course for year 11 and 12 students who want to learn more about being entrepreneurs and managers. It is a hands-on activity where the students invent, develop and sell an engineering concept to venture capitalists and ultimately to customers at a trade fair. It has been run successfully for two years, going from strength to strength. © 2005, Australasian Association for Engineering Education

A reference architecture for instructional educational software

Our extensive research has indicated that high-school teachers are reluctant to make use of existing instructional educational software (Pollard, 2005). Even software developed in a partnership between a teacher and a software engineer is unlikely to be adopted by teachers outside the partnership (Pollard, 2005). In this paper we address these issues directly by adopting a reusable architectural design for instructional educational software which allows easy customisation of software to meet the specific needs of individual teachers. By doing this we will facilitate more teachers regularly using instructional technology within their classrooms. Our domain-specific software architecture, Interface-Activities-Model, was designed specifically to facilitate individual customisation by redefining and restructuring what constitutes an object so that they can be readily reused or extended as required. The key to this architecture is the way in which the software is broken into small generic encapsulated components with minimal domain specific behaviour. The domain specific behaviour is decoupled from the interface and encapsulated in objects which relate to the instructional material through tasks and activities. The domain model is also broken into two distinct models - Application State Model and Domainspecific Data Model. This decoupling and distribution of control gives the software designer enormous flexibility in modifying components without affecting other sections of the design. This paper sets the context of this architecture, describes it in detail, and applies it to an actual application developed to teach high-school mathematical concepts.