Class size and its effect on learning in business education

This thesis explores the multi-dimensional nature of class size and how educational processes are shaped by different class size environments in four undergraduate business courses. Class size significantly influenced how curricula were structured and designed for learning and consequently students' course expectations and learning experiences in large and small classes.

IT-assisted music composition education in Hong Kong primary schools

"Pedagogical framework for music composition with Information Technology" was devised to assist primary school music teachers to carry out composition activities through the application of IT. PFMCIT offers directions for developing in-depth teacher training programs, and establishing process-oriented curriculum guidelines to promote effective teaching and learning of music composition.

An impact study of the United Education Initiative Professional Development Programme

The implemented cirriculum of the UEI-PDP with regular follow-up and feedback enabled personal and professional growth of participants. This led to institutional capaciey building and transfer of learning into the classrooms. Collaboration, open communication, persistence and accountability facilitated the transfer of learning.

Evidence-based development of school-based and family-involved prevention of overweight across Europe : the ENERGY-project's design and conceptual framework

Background
There is an urgent need for more carefully developed public health measures in order to curb the obesity epidemic among youth. The overall aim of the "EuropeaN Energy balance Research to prevent excessive weight Gain among Youth" (ENERGY)-project is the development and formative evaluation of a theory-informed and evidence-based multi-component school-based and family-involved intervention program ready to be implemented and evaluated for effectiveness across Europe. This program aims at promoting the adoption or continuation of health behaviors that contribute to a healthy energy balance among school-aged children. Earlier studies have indicated that school and family environments are key determinants of energy-balance behaviors in schoolchildren. Schools are an important setting for health promotion in this age group, but school-based interventions mostly fail to target and involve the family environment.

Methods
Led by a multidisciplinary team of researchers from eleven European countries and supported by a team of Australian experts, the ENERGY-project is informed by the Environmental Research Framework for Weight gain Prevention, and comprises a comprehensive epidemiological analysis including 1) systematic reviews of the literature, 2) secondary analyses of existing data, 3) focus group research, and 4) a cross European school-based survey.

Results and discussion
The theoretical framework and the epidemiological analysis will subsequently inform stepwise intervention development targeting the most relevant energy balance-related behaviors and their personal, family-environmental and school-environmental determinants applying the Intervention Mapping protocol. The intervention scheme will undergo formative and pilot evaluation in five countries. The results of ENERGY will be disseminated among key stakeholders including researchers, policy makers and the general population.

Conclusions
The ENERGY-project is an international, multidisciplinary effort to develop and test an evidence-based and theory-informed intervention program for obesity prevention among school-aged children.

Socio-economic and demographic variations in school lunch participation of French children aged 3-17 years

Objective: To assess school canteen attendance in a French nationally representative sample of children and to analyse its association with the socioeconomic and demographic characteristics of the children and their families.
Design: Data from the second French national cross-sectional food consumption survey (INCA2), performed in 2006–2007, were used. Information on usual weekly school canteen attendance was collected through a self-reported questionnaire, and demographic and socio-economic variables through a face-to-face questionnaire. The associations between school canteen attendance and the socio-economic and demographic variables were investigated by multivariate logistic regression analyses.
Setting: The INCA2 sample was representative of the children aged 3–17 years in France.
Subject: Analysis was performed on 1413 schoolchildren who completed the school canteen attendance questions.
Results: Some 65?6% of schoolchildren aged 3–17 years had school lunch at least once weekly. This rate of attendance was positively correlated with age. Whatever the school level, school canteen attendance was positively associated with the educational level of the caregiver/parent. In pre- and elementary-school children, enrolment at the school canteen was also higher when the caregiver/parent worked, or in single-parent families. In secondary-school children, school lunch participation decreased with children living in more densely populated areas and increased with the level of the household’s living standards.
Conclusions: School canteen attendance was positively associated with children’s socio-economic background. This could reduce the effectiveness of the forthcoming school meal composition regulations designed to improve the diet of children from deprived backgrounds, who are more likely to have unhealthy food habits.

Critical multicultural teacher education

This thesis examined how best to prepare teachers to work in bicultural and multicultural New Zealand. Drawing on life history interviews with teacher education students, it identified key areas for reform, including closer examination of practices in multicultural education and greater acknowledgement of the cultural background of teachers themselves.

The role of science education in reducing violence towards others

This thesis explored how science education could contribute to the amelioration of violent behaviours in schools. Findings show that a shift in the way we relate with nature and animals could contribute to change the attitudes of children who, at the age of nine years, are already presenting aggressive behaviours.

Exploring girl power : gender, literacy and the textual practices of young women attending an elite school

Popular discourses concerning the relationship between gender and academic literacies have suggested that boys are lacking in particular, school-based literacy competencies compared with girls. Such discourses construct “gender” according to a binary framework and they obscure the way in which literacy and textual practices operate as a site in which gendered identities are constituted and negotiated by young people in multiple sites including schooling, which academic inquiry has often emphasized. In this paper I consider the school-based textual practices of young women attending an elite school, in order to explore how these practices construct “femininities”. Feminist education researchers have shown how young women negotiate discourses of feminine passivity and heterosexuality through their reading and writing practices. Yet discourses of girlhood and femininity have undergone important transformations in times of ‘girl power’ in which young women are increasingly constructed as successful, autonomous and sexually agentic. Thus young women’s reading and writing practices may well operate as a space in which new discourses around girlhood and femininity are constituted. Throughout the paper, I utilize the notion of “performativity”, understood through the work of Judith Butler, to show how textual practices variously inscribe and negotiate discourses of gender. Thus the importance of textual work in inscribing and challenging notions of gender is asserted. I argue that critical literacy is just as important, but perhaps no more guaranteed, within elite girls’ education as it is within boys’ education.

Green bodies : training environmental educators

In this paper, we examine the “greening” of Outdoor & Environmental Education (OEE) students at an Australian regional university through three lenses: temporal, spatial & material. We are inspired by Grosz’ claim that “bodies are always understood within a spatial & temporal context, & space & time remain conceivable only insofar as corporeality provides the basis for our perception & representation of them” (1995, p. 84). As suggested by Grosz, these lenses are not discrete and, in the course of the paper, their intersections & reciprocity become apparent. We draw on interview responses & observations from a longitudinal cohort study undertaken by Preston in an attempt to trace the regulation and practice of “green” “outdoor Ed” subjectivities in the context of the materialities, time & spaces of this specific course. Grosz, E.A. (1995) Space, Time & Perversion: The Politics of Bodies, New York: Routledge

Australian transnational higher education quality assurance in Singapore and Malaysia

This thesis investigates the nature of the mutual understanding of quality assurance between two importing countries and Australia, as an exporter, of transnational higher education. The findings highlight the risks for policy makers and the need for better communication and collaboration between importing and exporting institutions and their transnational higher education counterparts.

Socio-scientific issues in education : innovative practices and contending epistemologies

In the past decade, we have seen the well-established discourse of environmental education (EE) supplanted by that of education for sustainability (EfS). In some ways this change in terminology has been no more than a slogan change, with the actual educational practices associated with EfS little changed from those qualified by EE (Campbell and Robottom 2008). Environment-related education activities under both terms frequently focus on socio-scientific issues – which serve as the chief organising principle for a range of related curriculum activities – and are shaped by the particular characteristics of these issues. Socio-scientific issues are essentially constituted of questions that are philosophical as well as empirical in nature. Socio-scientific issues consist in contests among dissenting social, economic and environmental perspectives that rarely all align, giving rise to debates whose resolution is not amenable to solely scientific approaches. Socio-scientific issues, then, exist at the intersection of differing human interests, values and motivations and are therefore necessarily socially-constructed. An adequate educational exploration of these issues requires a recognition of their constructedness within particular communities of interest and of the limitation of purely applied science perspectives, and, in turn, requires the adoption of curricular and pedagogical approaches that are in fundamental ways informed by constructivist educational assumptions – at least to the extent that community constructions of socio-scientific issues are recognised as being shaped by human interests and social and environmental context. This article considers these matters within the context of examples of environment-related practice drawn from two geographical regions. The article will argue that a serious scientific element is both necessary and insufficient for a rigorous educational exploration of socio-scientific issues within either the EE or EfS discourses, and will consider some implications for professional development and research in this field.

The underlying assumption in chemistry education

The underlying assumption in chemistry education is that chemistry is real, distinct discipline, clearly differentiable from other sciences. Chemistry is the study of matter and its interactions with other matter and with energy, but the aspects which distinguish chemistry are: macroscopic observations and descriptions of properties and change; understanding in terms of atoms and molecules; abstract representations to describe and communicate chemical concepts; and occupational health and safety. These aspects are not unique to chemistry, but their combination make chemistry unique. Over the last three years, there have been major reviews of school science education through the formulation of the Australian National Curriculum and of undergraduate education through the Learning and Teaching Academic Standards Project. In both cases, individual RACI members and chemistry professionals, including school teachers, and RACI working party and workshop, have articulated the unique nature of chemistry and the need for chemistry education as a separate subject.

Online role play stories, engagement and learning in higher education

This thesis studies online role plays as they are used in higher education. It finds that where students are able to develop engaging stories together, their story-building can promote a range of learning outcomes. It also identifies techniques to develop their critical awareness and skills, and makes design recommendations.