Development of a model to explain the sexual beliefs, intentions and behaviours of adolescents and young adults

In the last thirty years there have been many research studies which have examined the reasons why adolescents and young adults engage in sexual behaviours. Most of these studies have lacked a theoretical basis, Consequently there are many links made between variables, but no consistency across studies, or attempts to develop an underlying theory to explain the results. However, there have been theoretical models developed to explain adolescents’ and young adults’ sexual decision making. Unfortunately, many of these models have not been empirically validated. This thesis attempts to address these deficiencies in the literature by utilising a theory of behaviour and applying it to adolescent and young adult sexual decision making. This theory is the Theory of Planned Behaviour (TPB). Two longitudinal studies were conducted to examine the utility of an adaptation of the TPB to sexual decision making among adolescents and young adults. In the first study 58 adolescent males, aged between 14 years and 18 years participated in a longitudinal study using a questionnaire adapted from the Depth of Sexual Involvement Scale. In the second study, 194 young adults (156 female, 38 male) aged between 18 years and 21 years participated in a similar study. The first study found that intention to engage in behaviour was well predicted, although some of the variables in the model, did not in fact, contribute significantly to the prediction. The prediction of behaviour was less strong than that of intention. Study two found that intention to engage in behaviours was well predicted by the model. However, the degree to which intention led to behaviour was not well predicted. Overall, the results of these studies suggest that the TPB is a good theoretical basis from which to launch a systematic and theoretically informed explanation of adolescent and young adult sexual decision making. However, other factors may need to be added to the model to fully describe the decision making process and accurately predict behaviour. Suggestions are made for future research, as well as interventions that may arise as more knowledge is gathered using this paradigm.

From recruitment to consent : what makes doctors want to participate in the review of lifescripts

Aims & rationale/Objectives : The Australian Government wants the Lifescripts resources to be utilised by general practices. Therefore a national review has been commissioned.The aim of this presentation is to identify characteristics, barriers and enablers associated with consenting and non-consenting general practices within two Victorian general practice networks.
Methods : Recruitment of general practice staff consisted of three phases: promotion, communication and practice visits. Recruitment occurred from Sept to November 2007. Data was collected via face to face interviews.
Principal findings : Prior to the consenting phase 17 practices expressed interest in participation. At the consent phase, 10 general practices (7% response), 17 GPs (3% response), and three practice nurses (2.5% response) agreed to participate.Consenting practices had more: principal GPs involved in the recruitment process; greater intention to implement Lifescripts around MBS numbers; more experience with change management strategies, consulting health professionals, and defined their practice population(s) as middle aged and older.Non-consenting practices identified the following barriers: lack of support from principal general practitioners or owners; lack of capacity to incorporate Lifescripts into existing computer software; lack of financial incentive; heavy work loads and poor patient response to 45 health check.est
Implications : Inform general practices of a resource to assist them to detect and prevent chronic disease, and enable early intervention strategies. The benefit of this presentation is that it identifies the importance of determining barriers and enabling factors when implementing a lifestyle based service program at general practice level.
Presentation type : Poster

Teacher change in exploring representational approaches to learning science

The researcher worked closely with two biology-trained teachers to plan three teaching sequences in the topics of forces, substances and astronomy that were subsequently taught to Year 7 students. The sequences sought to develop a model of classroom practice that foregrounds students’ negotiation of conceptual representations.

The difficulties encountered by individuals in learning science point to the need for a very strong emphasis of the role of representations in learning. There is a need for learners to use their own representational, cultural and cognitive resources to engage with the subject-specific representational practices of science. Researchers who have undertaken classroom studies whereby students have constructed and used their own representations have pointed to several principles in the planning, execution and assessment of student learning (diSessa, 2004; Greeno & Hall, 1997). A key principle is that teachers need to identify big ideas, key concepts, of the topic at the planning stage in order to guide refinement of representational work. These researchers also point out the need for students to engage with multiple representations in different modes that are both teacher and student generated. A representation can only partially explain a particular phenomenon or process and has both positive and negative attributes to the target that it represents. The issue of the partial nature of representations needs to be a component of classroom practice (Greeno & Hall, 1997) in terms of students critiquing representations for their limitations and affordances and explicitly linking multiple representations to construct a fuller understanding of the phenomenon or process under study. The classroom practice should also provide opportunities for students to manipulate representations as reasoning tools (Cox, 1999) in constructing the scientifically acceptable ideas and communicating them.

Research question: What impact was there on the participating teacher’s practice through the adoption of a representational focus to teaching science?

Data collection included video sequences of classroom practice and student responses, student work, field notes, tape records of meetings and discussions, and student and teacher interviews based in some cases on video stimulated recall. Video analysis software was used to capture the variety of representations used, and sequences of representational negotiation.

The teachers in this study reported substantial shifts in their classroom practices, and in the quality of classroom discussions, arising from adopting a representational focus. The shifts were reported by them as a three-fold challenge. First, there was an epistemological challenge as they came to terms with the culturally produced nature of representations in the topics of force, substance and astronomy and their flexibility and power as tools for analysis and communication, as opposed to their previous assumption that this was given knowledge to be learnt as an end point. The second challenge was pedagogical, in that this approach was acknowledged to place much greater agency in the hands of students, and this brought a need to learn to run longer and more structured discussions around conceptual problems. The third challenge related to content coverage. The teachers sacrificed coverage for the greater depth offered by this approach, and were unanimous in their judgment that this had been a change that had paid dividends in terms of student learning.

The Canadian response to Aboriginal residential schools : lessons for Australia and the United States?

The common policy of the Australian, Canadian and United States governments of removing aboriginal children from their families and placing them in institutions is now well documented. This article considers the responses to the stolen generations in Australia, Canada and United States. A major focus of the article is the historic compensation package agreed to by the Canadian government. Whilst the Canadian federal government has not been without criticism on this issue, it must be applauded for its efforts to meet a peaceful solution to a tragic past. The political responses in Australia and United States and Canada are simply incomparable. The failure to address the plight of the stolen generations of Australia and the United States evidences a major failing in Indian/Aboriginal policy in these two nations that needs to be addressed. Australia and the United States have much to learn from the reconciliatory policies of the Canadian government.

The emergent structure of feeling : what does it mean for critical educational studies and research?

Critical research in education is not what it used to be. It must now engage with a differently structured and globalized world with different social and material conditions for its peoples. This paper sets out to name the contemporary structure of feeling in which education researchers now work, particularly in terms of what now is to be the object of their educational theorizing and research and what are to be the intellectual resources brought to bear on such activity. The intention is to open up debate, recognizing that there are no easy answers and yet acknowledging the need for answers to be attempted. It is, therefore, an invitation premised on an optimism of the will to complement legitimate pessimism of the intellect. It concludes that a critical engagement with these matters demands a modernist/postmodernist, reconstructive/deconstructive reflexivity in the mobilizing of a new sociological imagination applied across the broad spectrum which is educational research.

Towards a better understanding of how effective IT governance leads to business value : a literature review and future research directions

This paper reviews the existing literature on IT governance to assess whether IT governance has contributed to delivering business value from IT and if so, how. The conducted literature review has shown the scarce number of studies that focus on why and how effective IT governance may lead to business value. By using a structured literature review analysis, the paper has offered a number of insights to the topic of IT governance: a) provided a systematic definition of effective IT governance based on a multi-dimensional framework, b) listed benefits of effective IT governance, and c) identified mechanisms that lead effective IT governance to those benefits. This paper takes a step towards addressing the ‘why’ and ‘how’ knowledge gaps by synthesising the fragmented knowledge to provide the best that is known about the subject and to identify future research directions.

Introduction : In Australian educational researcher, v.39 v.4

This special issue can be situated in the ‘affective turn’ in education. It responds to the increasing significance of affect, emotions and creativity as the foci of contemporary educational research. The resurgence of interest in these issues is symptomatic of current educational reforms and their impact on how educators should think about, and practise, teaching andwhat students need to know and howthey should learn. It is not to say that the current reforms are radically dissimilar from the previous ones in terms of their general intention to bring about change.What is different, though, is theweight they put on standards, accountability, efficiency, performativity and valueaddedness. As a result, the economic, market-driven principles of reforms have subsumed all other dimensions of education, such as its socio-cultural and relational aspects. The turn to affect is driven by a recognition that the economic rationalisation of education is at odds with its emotional and creative dimensions. The turn is registering a change in how education is managed and, indeed, what counts as education today.

How do Digital Immigrant Teachers (DITs) learn ICT for the information age?

This study reports about teacher learning and in particular, teachers who have extensive teaching experience but limited ICT knowledge and skills. The Digital Immigrant Teachers (DITs) grew up before digital technologies; they are not frequently confident or comfortable with ICT. Like all immigrants, they have to learn new and creative ways to enhance their survival in the third millennium, where the acceleration of knowledge has allowed communication and application of information to be rapidly disseminated. In order to fully participate in the technologically rich society DITs must actively engage in the construction of authentic and purposeful learning. This research came about as a result of the digital immigrants' struggles to construct and acquire the necessary knowledge and skills to teach in the Knowledge Economy and the Information Age. The experienced present day teachers, as digital immigrants are trying to teach digital natives (Prensky, 2001 & 2003). And in order to assist these teachers in their learning ICT struggle, it is imperative to understand the teacher learning process, and the learning style through which they acquire the knowledge and skills for this new milieu.

Global classrooms : from telling the world to showing the world

Web 2.0 and online participatory media are becoming valuable resources for educators as we become more aware of the flexible and creative nature of such tools. This is opening up further opportunities for collaboration across classes, schools and countries where a global perspective on learning can support students in becoming active participants in the learning process. The purpose of this research study was to explore how social and participatory media could be used safely in the classroom to support a more global approach to learning. The objective was to design a framework for learning that provided students with opportunities to interact and to learn through formal projects, but also informally through online social interaction. This framework valued students’ funds of knowledge (Comber & Kamler, 2005; González, Moll, & Amanti, 2005) and encouraged them to be active participants in their own learning and that of their peers. This article will focus on the global nature of the learning that took place while looking at instructional design and assessment processes. It will also highlight:
• Developing students into responsible global citizens;
• Increasing global awareness and perspectives;
• Building knowledge and understandings of those different to themselves;
• Valuing others and developing key critical skills and processes including empathy, fairness and cooperation.
This research provides a framework that integrates all of these aspects into the day-to-day classroom program within a wide range of curriculum content.

Using video to promote pre-service teachers’ thinking about their transition to teaching

This paper reports on research investigating the use of video representations of first-year teachers’ experiences in undergraduate teacher education workshops that focus on the transition to teaching. The use of the video is a responsive act that draws on the notion of looking back, where graduates in their first year of teaching ‘speak to’ current students. Scenes from video footage of the theatre-based research performance The First Time shaped workshop activities and discussions in the unit. Themes ranged from pedagogical to practical, covering topics such as teacher identity discourses; epiphanic and revelatory moments of transition to becoming a teacher; and preparing for job applications and interviews. Data from the researcher’s journal, Student Evaluation of Teaching and Units (SETU) comments, and semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students upon completion of the workshops are framed within a phenomenographic paradigm. The aim in phenomenography is to describe variations of conception that people have of a particular phenomenon (Sin, 2010), in this case the video as a tool to promote critical thinking about the transition to teaching. The researcher explored her own, and participants’ experiences, and identified a range of conceptual meanings of the phenomenon. These were classified into categories according to their similarities and differences concerning the effectiveness of this specific video in assisting undergraduates in their transition to teaching. Early results reveal some similarities and many variations among participants as to the effectiveness of the video as a tool. Their conceptions of the phenomenon are individual and relational, and as such are quite varied. Emergent varied themes include: ‘I know what it is that I need to learn’; ‘Is this theory or practice?’; and ‘I don’t do drama’. Emergent similarities include: ‘Preparing for the unexpected’.

Because it takes a village to fund the answers: Crowdfunding University Research

Whichever way you look at it, online crowdfunding is ramifying. From its foundations supporting creative industry initiatives, crowdfunding has branched into almost every aspect of public and private enterprise. Niche crowdfunding platforms and models are burgeoning across the globe faster than you can trill “kerching”. Early adopters have been quick to discover that in addition to money, they also get free market information and an opportunity to develop a relationship with their market base. Despite these evident benefits, universities have been cautious entrants in the crowdfunding space and more generally in the emerging ‘collaborative economy’ (Owyang, 2013). There are many cultural and institutional legacies that might explain this reluctance. For example, to date universities have achieved social (and economic) distinction through refining a set of exclusionary practices including, but not limited to, versions of gatekeeping, ranking and credentialing. These practices are reproduced in the expected behaviors of individual academics who garner social currency and status as experts, legislators and interpreters (Osborne, 20014: 435). Digitalization and the emergent knowledge and collaboration economies, have the potential to disrupt the academy’s traditional appeals to distinction and to re-engage universities and academics with their public stakeholders. This chapter will examine some of the challenges and benefits arising from public micro-funding of university-based research initiatives during a period of industrial transition in the university sector.Broadly then this chapter asks; what does scholarship mean in a digital ecosystem where sociality (rather than traditional systems for assessing academic merit) affords research opportunity and success? How might university research be rethought in a networked world where personal and professional identities are blurred? What happens when scholars adopt the same pathways as non-scholars for knowledge discovery, development and dissemination through use of emerging practices such as crowdfunding. These issues will be discussed through detailed exploration of a successful pilot project to crowdfund university research; Research My World. This project, a collaboration between Deakin University and the crowdfunding platform pozible.com, set out to secure new sources of funding for the ‘long-tail’ of academic research. More generally, it aimed to improve the digital capacity of the participating researchers and create new opportunities for public engagement for the researchers themselves as well as the university. We will examine how crowdfunding and social media platforms alter academic effort (the dis-intermediation or re-intermediation of research funding, reduction of the compliance burden, opportunities for market validation and so on), as well as the particular workflows of scholarly researchers themselves (improvements in “digital presence-building”, provision of cheap alternative funding, opportunities to crowdsource non-academic knowledge). In addressing these questions, this chapter will explore the influence that crowdfunding campaigns have for transforming contemporary academic practices across a range of disciplinary instances, providing the basis for a new form of engagement-led research. To support our analysis we will provide an overview of the initiative through quantitative analysis of a dataset generated by the first iteration of Research My World projects.

We did the how to teach it: music teaching and learning in higher education in Australia

The Australian Government recognizes that the Arts are acritical part of formal school education and it should not be viewedas subordinate or extra. This paper forms part of a wider researchproject titled “Pre-service teacher attitudes and understandings ofMusic Education” that started in 2013. The focus of this paperinvestigates music teaching and learning in a core unit within theBachelor of Education (Primary) course at Deakin University(Australia). Using questionnaire and interview data gathered in 2014,I employ Interpretative Phenomenological Analysis to analyse andcodify the data. Three themes are discussed in relation to: Why it isimportant to include music in the primary school? What wasenjoyable and what aspects were challenging in the musicworkshops? What can students integrate as generalist teachers intotheir future classrooms? Though the findings focus on “we did thehow to teach it”, it also highlights some challenges and opportunitiesfor students and staff. Tertiary educators are challenged to raise thecapacity and status of music when preparing students to translate themusic curriculum into their future classrooms.

Video technology as pedagogy: past teacher education students speak to current students through performed research

This paper reports the use of video representations of first-year teachers’ experiences in teacher education workshops that focus on the transition to teaching. This use of video technology is a responsive act that draws on the notion of looking back, where graduates ‘speak to’ current students. Video footage of the performed research ‘The First Time’ shaped activities and discussions in the unit. Workshop/video themes included teacher identity discourses; epiphanic and revelatory moments of transition to becoming a teacher; and preparing for job applications and interviews. A range of data including semi-structured interviews with undergraduate students upon completion of the workshops were analysed within a phenomenographic paradigm, with the aim of describing variations of conception that people have of a particular phenomenon (Sin, 2010). The investigation of the use of video technology as a pedagogical approach to promote critical thinking about the transition to teaching revealed a range of conceptual meanings. These meanings were classified into categories according to their similarities and differences concerning the effectiveness of the technological tool in assisting undergraduates in their transition to teaching. Participants’ conceptions of the phenomenon are individual and relational, and as such results were quite varied. Emergent varied themes include: ‘I now know what it is that I need to learn’; ‘Is this theory or practice?’; and ‘I don’t do drama’. Similarities include: ‘Preparing for the unexpected’. The use of video technology was deemed effective in creating workshop content from the past, in order to teach for tomorrow.

Design and conduct of a pragmatic randomized controlled trial to enhance smoking-cessation outcomes with exercise: The Fit2Quit study

Background: Most smokers want to stop smoking and many try to quit. However abstinence rates are low and most smokers do not manage to abstain for even a week. Relapse to smoking can be related to the occurrence of tobacco withdrawal symptoms (e.g., sleep disturbance, irritability, and craving) and weight gain. If regular exercise mitigates these effects it could have potential as an aid to smoking cessation. The aim of the Fit2Quit study is to determine the effects of a home and community-based exercise intervention on smoking abstinence at six months when used as an adjunct to usual care (telephone smoking-cessation counseling and nicotine replacement therapy; NRT). Methods/design: A prospective parallel two-arm randomized controlled trial. Participants (n = 1400, 700 per arm) will be randomized to a structured home and community-based exercise program plus usual care (behavioral counseling and NRT) or to usual-care alone. It is targeted that at least 25% of the sample will be of Mori ethnicity (New Zealand indigenous). Outcomes to be measured using intention-to-treat analysis include: seven-day point prevalence of smoking abstinence verified by salivary cotinine (primary outcome); 6 months continuous abstinence; body mass index (BMI); cardio-respiratory fitness; physical activity levels; and cost effectiveness. Discussion: The Fit2Quit study is an example of a large, pragmatic randomized controlled trial in a community setting. Specific components of the exercise intervention are outlined in detail. Trial registration: Australian New Zealand Clinical Trials Registry ACTRN12609000637246.

"Ready to acquire": the IT resources required for a growth-by-acquisition business strategy

This article describes the experiences of Danisco (a global food ingredients company) as it followed a growth-by-acquisition business strategy, focusing on how a new CIO built the IT resources to ensure the IT organization was "ready to acquire." We illustrate how these IT capabilities expedited the IT integration following two acquisitions, one of which involved Danisco expanding the scale of its business and the other extending the scope. Based on insights gained from Danisco, we provide lessons for CIOs to realize business benefits when managing post-acquisition IT integration.