Productive pedagogies : is it an intelligible language for preservice teachers?

Australian teacher educators and teachers have become increasingly familiar with the notion of ‘Productive Pedagogies’, itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform recently undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al., 2001a, , 2001b) . One of its strengths has been its efficacy for in-service teachers to use as a language to talk about their pedagogical work and hence a way of reclaiming some of the ground on what constitutes good teaching. In part, this can be attributed to the numerous observations of teachers’ classroom practice that informed the construction of Productive Pedagogies (PPs). That is, many teachers understand these as naming what ‘good’ teachers have always done. In this paper the value of PPs as a metalanguage for developing pre-service teachers’ knowledge and understanding of teaching is examined; whether PPs is a language that is intelligible for pre-service teachers without access to this prior teacher knowledge or whether its elements and dimensions merely constitute an isolated vocabulary. A case study of four pre-service teachers provides the context for this exploration and its empirical data. Drawing on their fieldwork observations of teaching practice, voiced in the language of PPs, the paper argues that PPs language is indeed useful in the development of pre-service teachers’ understanding of teaching, particularly in assisting them to name evidence of teachers’ recognition of and engagement with difference.

Individuals with chronic low back pain have greater difficulty in engaging in positive lifestyle behaviours than those without back pain : an assessment of health literacy

Background: Despite the large volume of research dedicated to understanding chronic low back pain (CLBP), patient outcomes remain modest while healthcare costs continue to rise, creating a major public health burden. Health literacy - the ability to seek, understand and utilise health information - has been identified as an important factor in the course of other chronic conditions and may be important in the aetiology of CLBP. Many of the currently available health literacy measurement tools are limited since they measure narrow aspects of health literacy. The Health Literacy Measurement Scale (HeLMS) was developed recently to measure broader elements of health literacy. The aim of this study was to measure broad elements of health literacy among individuals with CLBP and without LBP using the HeLMS.
Methods: Thirty-six community-dwelling adults with CLBP and 44 with no history of LBP responded to the HeLMS. Individuals were recruited as part of a larger community-based spinal health study in Western Australia. Scores for the eight domains of the HeLMS as well as individual item responses were compared between the groups.
Results: HeLMS scores were similar between individuals with and without CLBP for seven of the eight health literacy domains (p > 0.05). However, compared to individuals with no history of LBP, those with CLBP had a significantly lower score in the domain ‘Patient attitudes towards their health’ (mean difference [95% CI]: 0.46 [0.11- 0.82]) and significantly lower scores for each of the individual items within this domain (p < 0.05). Moderate effect sizes ranged from d = 0.47-0.65.
Conclusions: Although no differences were identified in HeLMS scores between the groups for seven of the health literacy domains, adults with CLBP reported greater difficulty in engaging in general positive health behaviours. This aspect of health literacy suggests that self-management support initiatives may benefit individuals with CLBP.

Family functioning, parental psychological distress and child behaviours : evidence from the Victorian child health and wellbeing study

We examined, using data from the 2006 Victorian Child Health and Wellbeing Study (VCHWS), whether family functioning is associated with parental psychological distress and children’s behavioural difficulties. The VCHWS was a statewide cross-sectional telephone survey to 5,000 randomly selected primary caregivers of 0- to 12-year-old children between October 2005 and March 2006. Only parents or guardians of children aged 4–12 years (n = 3,370) were included in this study. After adjusting for sociodemographic variables and ethnicity, parents or guardians scoring higher on the family functioning scale (i.e., from poorly functioning households) were at greater risk of psychological distress and had children with lower levels of prosocial behaviour and higher levels of behavioural difficulties relative to those from healthily functioning households. Mental health prevention programmes addressing child mental and conduct problems should consider the family environment and target those families functioning poorly.

Using job strain and organizational justice models to predict multiple forms of employee performance behaviours among Australian policing personnel

The overall purpose of this investigation was to examine the relationship between stress-related working conditions and three forms of employee performance behaviours: in-role behaviours, citizenship behaviours directed at other individuals and citizenship behaviours directed at the organization. The potentially stressful working conditions were based on the job strain model (incorporating job demands, job control and social support) as well as organizational justice theory. A sample of Australian-based police officers (n = 640) took part in this study and the data were collected via a mail-out survey. Multiple regression analyses were undertaken to assess both the strength and the nature of the relationships between the working conditions and employee performance and these analyses included tests for additive, interactional and curvilinear effects. The overall results indicated that a significant proportion of the explained variance in all three outcome measures was attributed to the additive effects of demand, control and support. The level of variance associated with the organizational justice dimensions was relatively small, although there were signs that specific dimensions of justice may provide unique insights into the relationship between job stressors and employee performance. The implications of these and other notable findings are discussed.

Mediators of longitudinal associations between television viewing and eating behaviours in adolescents

Background: Television viewing has been associated with poor eating behaviours in adolescents. Changing unhealthy eating behaviours is most likely to be achieved by identifying and targeting factors shown to mediate the association between these behaviours. However, little is known about the mediators of the associations between television viewing and eating behaviours. The aim of this study was to examine mediators of the longitudinal associations between television viewing (TV) and eating behaviours among Australian adolescents.
Method: Eating behaviours were assessed using a web-based survey completed by a community-based sample of 1729 adolescents from years 7 and 9 of secondary schools in Victoria, Australia, at baseline (2004-2005) and two years later. TV viewing and the potential mediators (snacking while watching TV and perceived value of TV viewing) were assessed via the web-based survey at baseline.
Results: Adolescents who watched more than two hours of TV/day had higher intakes of energy-dense snacks and beverages, and lower intakes of fruit two years later. Furthermore, the associations between TV viewing and consumption of energy-dense snacks, energy-dense drinks and fruit were mediated by snacking while watching TV. Perceived value of TV viewing mediated the association between TV viewing and consumption of energy-dense snacks, beverages and fruit.
Conclusion: Snacking while watching TV and perceived value of TV viewing mediated the longitudinal association between TV viewing and eating behaviours among adolescents. The efficacy of methods to reduce TV viewing, change snacking habits while watching TV, and address the values that adolescents place on TV viewing should be examined in an effort to promote healthy eating among adolescents.

Ability of predator odour exposure to elicit conditioned versus sensitised post traumatic stress disorder-like behaviours, and forebrain ΔFosB expression, in rats

At present, exposure of a rodent to the odour of a predator is one of the most common animal models of post traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). Despite this, the model remains incompletely characterized, particularly in regard to within subject assessment of major PTSD-like behaviours. In an attempt to redress this situation, we have extensively characterized the two broad categories of behaviour that are considered to characterize PTSD, that is sensitized behaviours such as social withdrawal and hypervigilance and conditioned behaviours such as avoidance of trauma linked cues. Specifically, we determined the presence and duration of both conditioned and sensitized behaviours, in the same cohort of animals, after three exposures to predator odour. Conditioned fear was assessed on the basis of inhibition of locomotor activity upon return to context 2, 7, 14, 21, and 28 days after the last odour exposure session. To assess the impact on sensitization behaviours, we monitored acoustic startle responses and social interaction behaviour 4, 9, 16, 23, and 30 days after the last exposure session. In addition to examining the behavioural consequences associated with odour exposure, we also determined the key brain regions that were activated using ΔFosB immunohistochemistry. Our results show that the two groups of behaviours thought to characterize PTSD (conditioned and sensitized) do not travel together in the predator odour model, with clear evidence of enduring changes in conditioned fear but little evidence of changes in social interaction or acoustic startle. With regard to associated patterns of activity in the brain, we observed that odour-exposed animals exhibited significantly higher numbers of FosB-positive nuclei in only the medial prefrontal cortex (mPFC), a finding that can be viewed as being consistent with the observed behavioural changes.

Recognising and monitoring high-level behaviours in complex spatial environments

The recognition of activities from sensory data is important in advanced surveillance systems to enable prediction of high-level goals and intentions of the target under surveillance. The problem is complicated by sensory noise and complex activity spanning large spatial and temporal extents. This paper presents a system for recognising high-level human activities from multi-camera video data in complex spatial environments. The Abstract Hidden Markov mEmory Model (AHMEM) is used to deal with noise and scalability The AHMEM is an extension of the Abstract Hidden Markov Model (AHMM) that allows us to represent a richer class of both state-dependent and context-free behaviours. The model also supports integration with low-level sensory models and efficient probabilistic inference. We present experimental results showing the ability of the system to perform real-time monitoring and recognition of complex behaviours of people from observing their trajectories within a real, complex indoor environment.

Insect inspired behaviours for the autonomous control of mobile robots

Animals navigate through various uncontrolled environments with seemingly little effort. Flying insects, especially, are quite adept at manoeuvring in complex, unpredictable and possibly hostile environments. Through both simulation and real-world experiments, we demonstrate the feasibility of equipping a mobile robot with the ability to navigate a corridor environment, in real time, using principles based on insect-based visual guidance. In particular we have used the bees’ navigational strategy of measuring object range in terms of image velocity. We have also shown the viability and usefulness of various other insect behaviours: (i) keeping walls equidistant, (ii) slowing down when approaching an object, (iii) regulating speed according to tunnel width, and (iv) using visual motion as a measure of distance travelled.

Recognising behaviours of multiple people with hierarchical probabilistic model and statistical data association

Recognising behaviours of multiple people, especially high-level behaviours, is an important task in surveillance systems. When the reliable assignment of people to the set of observations is unavailable, this task becomes complicated. To solve this task, we present an approach, in which the hierarchical hidden Markov model (HHMM) is used for modeling the behaviour of each person and the joint probabilistic data association filters (JPDAF) is applied for data association. The main contributions of this paper lie in the integration of multiple HHMMs for recognising high-level behaviours of multiple people and the construction of the Rao-Blackwellised particle filters (RBPF) for approximate inference. Preliminary experimental results in a real environment show the robustness of our integrated method in behaviour recognition and its advantage over the use of Kalman filter in tracking people.