Establishing a framework for transforming student engagement, success and retention in higher education institutions [Final Report]

The perennial issues of student engagement, success and retention (SESR) in higher education continue to attract attention as key indicators of learning and teaching quality. This project aimed to establish and provide a holistic framework that would allow higher education institutions (HEIs) manage and improve their student engagement and retention strategies and programs. The framework and main project deliverable is a Maturity Model (MM) for Student Engagement, Success and Retention (SESR-MM). The project involved three Australian universities with experience and reputations in SESR activities: Queensland University of Technology (lead institution), the University of Queensland and Griffith University, working cooperatively to develop and trial the project deliverables. Project findings suggest that the SESR-MM has the potential to positively transform the holistic—academic, social and personal—engagement experiences of students in Australian universities, and that the SESR-MM is a useful mechanism for sharing good practice and improving programs designed to enhance the student experience.

Mapping Australian journalism culture : results from a survey of journalists’ role perceptions

Research on journalists’ characteristics, values, attitudes and role perceptions has expanded manifold since the first large-scale survey in the United States in the 1970s. Scholars around the world have investigated the work practices of a large variety of journalists, to the extent that we now have a sizeable body of evidence in this regard. Comparative research across cultures, however, has only recently begun to gain ground, with scholars interested in concepts of journalism culture in an age of globalisation. As part of a wider, cross-cultural effort, this study reports the results of a survey of 100 Australian journalists in order to paint a picture of the way journalists see their role in society. Such a study is important due to the relative absence of large-scale surveys of Australian journalists since Henningham’s (1993) seminal work. This paper reports some important trends in the Australian news media since the early 1990s, with improvements in gender balance and journalists now being older, better educated, and holding more leftist political views. In locating Australian journalism culture within the study’s framework, some long-held assumptions are reinforced, with journalists following traditional values of objectivity, passive reporting and the ideal of the fourth estate.

A sequential Monte Carlo framework for adaptive Bayesian model discrimination designs using mutual information

In this paper we present a unified sequential Monte Carlo (SMC) framework for performing sequential experimental design for discriminating between a set of models. The model discrimination utility that we advocate is fully Bayesian and based upon the mutual information. SMC provides a convenient way to estimate the mutual information. Our experience suggests that the approach works well on either a set of discrete or continuous models and outperforms other model discrimination approaches.

The professional identity of child care practitioners : self-authorship as a theoretical framework

This research contributes new understandings about the development of the professional identity of child care practitioners and how professional identity changes during the transition from student to practitioner. Self-authorship theory was used as the framework to investigate the development of professional identity through exploration of beliefs about practice, sense of self, and capabilities for collaborative engagement. Students recruited for this research were completing their qualifications to work with young children in child care settings. Data from initial and follow-up interviews were analysed to understand change over time in professional identity. Findings indicated a need for training institutions and workplaces to move beyond competency-based training approaches to include more critically reflective learning opportunities. Such a focus on critical reflection has implications for improving the skills, status, and recognition of child care practitioners as educators.

Publishing, postage, and prizes : classic Australian children’s literature in the public eye

2012 saw the publication of competing and complementary lines of Australian “classics”: “A&R Australian Classics” (HarperCollins) and “Text Classics” (Text Publishing). While Angus and Robertson were key in establishing a canon of Australian children’s classics in the twentieth century, it was the Text Classics line which included a selection of young people’s titles in their 2013. In turn, Penguin Australia launched a selection of “Australian Children’s Classics”. In so doing, these publishers were drawing on particular literary and visual cultural traditions in Australian children’s literature. Public assertions of a particular selection of children’s books reveals not only contemporary assumptions about desirable childhood experiences but about the operation of nostalgia therein. In encouraging Australian adults to judge books by their covers, such gestures imply that Australian children may be similarly understood. Importantly, the illusion of unity, sameness, and legibility which is promised by circumscribed canons of “classic” children’s literature may well imply a desire for similarly illusory, unified, legible, “classic” childhood. This paper attends to public attempts to materialise (and legitimise) a canon of classic Australian children’s literature. In particular, it considers the ways in which publishing, postage stamps, and book awards make visible a range of children’s books, but do so in order to either fix or efface the content or meaning of the books themselves. Moving between assertions of the best books for children from the 1980s to today, and of the social values circulated within those books, this paper considers the possibilities and problematics of an Australian children’s canon.

Lattice mixing and vanishing trapdoors : a framework for fully secure short signatures and more

We propose a framework for adaptive security from hard random lattices in the standard model. Our approach borrows from the recent Agrawal-Boneh-Boyen families of lattices, which can admit reliable and punctured trapdoors, respectively used in reality and in simulation. We extend this idea to make the simulation trapdoors cancel not for a specific forgery but on a non-negligible subset of the possible challenges. Conceptually, we build a compactly representable, large family of input-dependent “mixture” lattices, set up with trapdoors that “vanish” for a secret subset which we hope the forger will target. Technically, we tweak the lattice structure to achieve “naturally nice” distributions for arbitrary choices of subset size. The framework is very general. Here we obtain fully secure signatures, and also IBE, that are compact, simple, and elegant.

Dancing to too many tunes : contemporary course design in teacher education

Contemporary course designers in schools and faculties of Education are finding themselves dancing to many tunes, arguably too many tunes, in order to have their initial teacher education courses accredited by external agencies whilst satisfying internal approval processes and, critically, maintaining the philosophical integrity of their programs and their institutional watermarks. The “tunes” here are the agendas driven by and the demands made by distinct independent agencies. The external agencies influencing Education include: TEQSA (Tertiary Education Quality and Standards Agency) which will assure alignment to the AQF (Australian Qualifications Framework); professional bodies such as AITSL (Australian Institute for Teaching and School Leadership) which now accredits all pre-service teacher Education courses across Australia and assures alignment with the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers; and the state and territory regulatory authorities that have an impact within a specific jurisdiction, for example, the Queensland College of Teachers (QCT) and the Teacher Registration Board of Western Australia (TRBWA). This paper – whose findings have been arrived at through a year-long OLT National Teaching Fellowship - will outline the complex and competing agendas currently at play and focus on the disjuncture evident in the fundamental defining of who is a “graduate.” It will also attempt to identify where there are synergies between the complex demands being made. It will argue that there are too many “tunes” and the task of finding a balance between compliance and delivering effective initial teacher education may not be possible because of the cacophony of their conflicting demands.

Generalized IBE in the exponent-inversion framework

The purpose of this chapter is to provide an abstraction for the class of Exponent-Inversion IBE exemplified by the [Bscr ][Bscr ]2 and [Sscr ][Kscr ] schemes, and, on the basis of that abstraction, to show that those schemes do support interesting and useful extensions such as HIBE and ABE. Our results narrow, if not entirely close, the “flexibility gap” between the Exponent-Inversion and Commutative-Blinding IBE concepts.

Making quality teachers : the role of an explicit values-based pedagogy

There is little conjecture that quality teaching is essential to student achievement and well-being. Whilst much has been written about the importance of quality teaching, including the link to pre-service teacher education, to date there has been little investigation into specific pedagogical practices that can enhance quality teaching dimensions within a pre-service teacher education programme. This paper reports on a small-scale qualitative research study, undertaken in an Australian university, which linked the fields of quality teaching, pre-service teacher education and values education. The study followed the journey of five pre-service teacher education students as they undertook their second field experience unit where the focus was centred on the values-based pedagogy of Philosophy in the Classroom. The research findings, collected via interviews, demonstrated that an explicit values-based pedagogy can have a positive impact on the development of quality teaching dimensions. This new knowledge has potential for further research into examining the ways quality teaching dimensions are gained and practised by pre-service teacher education students and these findings and recommendations are discussed in this paper.

Developing a culture to support peer review of teaching in higher education

This presentation addresses issues related to leadership, academic development and scholarship of teaching and learning, and highlights research funded by the Australian Office of Learning and Teaching (OLT) designed to embed and sustain peer review of teaching within the culture of 5 Australian universities: Queensland University of Technology, University of Technology, Sydney, University of Adelaide, Curtin University, and Charles Darwin University. Peer review of teaching in higher education will be emphasised as a professional process for providing feedback on teaching and learning practice, which if sustained, can become an effective ongoing strategy for academic development (Barnard et al, 2011; Bell, 2005; Bolt and Atkinson, 2010; McGill & Beaty 2001, 1992; Kemmis & McTaggart, 2000). The research affirms that using developmental peer review models (Barnard et al, 2011; D'Andrea, 2002; Hammersley-Fletcher & Orsmond, 2004) can bring about successful implementation, especially when implemented within a distributive leadership framework (Spillane & Healey, 2010). The project’s aims and objectives were to develop leadership capacity and integrate peer review as a cultural practice in higher education. The research design was a two stage inquiry process over 2 years. The project began in July 2011 and encompassed a development and pilot phase followed by a cascade phase with questionnaire and focus group evaluation processes to support ongoing improvement and measures of outcome. Leadership development activities included locally delivered workshops complemented by the identification and support of champions. To optimise long term sustainability, the project was implemented through existing learning and teaching structures and processes within the respective partner universities. Research outcomes highlight the fundamentals of peer review of teaching and the broader contextual elements of integration, leadership and development, expressed as a conceptual model for embedding peer review of teaching within higher education. The research opens a communicative space about introduction of peer review that goes further than simply espousing its worth and introduction. The conceptual model highlights the importance of development of distributive leadership capacity, integration of policies and processes, and understanding the values, beliefs, assumptions and behaviors embedded in an organizational culture. The presentation overviews empirical findings that demonstrate progress to advance peer review requires an ‘across-the-board’ commitment to embed change, and inherently demands a process that co-creates connection across colleagues, discipline groups, and the university sector. Progress toward peer review of teaching as a cultural phenomenon can be achieved and has advantages for academic staff, scholarship, teaching evaluation and an organisation, if attention is given to strategies that influence the contexts and cultures of teaching practice. Peer review as a strategy to develop excellence in teaching is considered from a holistic perspective that by necessity encompasses all elements of an educational environment and has a focus on scholarship of teaching. The work is ongoing and has implication for policy, research, teaching development and student outcomes, and has potential application world-wide.

Framework of whole life cycle costing for Malaysian high rise residential property development

This project was an initial stage in formulating and management of the optimum budget allocation during the operational, maintenance and rehabilitation phases in high rise residential property development in Malaysia. The principal objective of this project is to develop a framework of Whole Life Cycle Costing for high rise residential property development that will enhance the quality and cost effectiveness of this building type in Malaysia. The researcher investigated 13 building components from 6 high rise residential property developments in Johor, Malaysia to determine the affect and economic impact of component initial cost and quality by applying them to a Whole Life Cycle Cost model approach. The results provide valuable data in respect to the overall cost of specific components over the whole life of a large high rise building. In addition, Dr. Mat Noor also determined the impact and satisfaction of quality of building components through WLCC.

Cultural drivers of high performing knowledge-intensive service organisations

Organisational culture is considered an important influence on performance, particularly for service firms that rely on values-driven social controls to enhance human interactions (O’Reilly & Chatman, 1996). Using a qualitative approach, we show how the modified Organisational Culture Profile developed by Sarros, Gray, Densten, and Cooper (2005) to assess Australian organisations provides a framework for exploring the cultural drivers of high performing knowledge-intensive service firms in New Zealand. Our study provides rich insights into how six key cultural dimensions–competitiveness, innovation, performance orientation, emphasis on rewards, supportiveness and social responsibility–are translated into strategic human resource management practices.

Combining recommender and reputation systems to produce better online advice

Although recommender systems and reputation systems have quite different theoretical and technical bases, both types of systems have the purpose of providing advice for decision making in e-commerce and online service environments. The similarity in purpose makes it natural to integrate both types of systems in order to produce better online advice, but their difference in theory and implementation makes the integration challenging. In this paper, we propose to use mappings to subjective opinions from values produced by recommender systems as well as from scores produced by reputation systems, and to combine the resulting opinions within the framework of subjective logic.

Bayesian imputation of non-chosen attribute values in revealed preference surveys

Obtaining attribute values of non-chosen alternatives in a revealed preference context is challenging because non-chosen alternative attributes are unobserved by choosers, chooser perceptions of attribute values may not reflect reality, existing methods for imputing these values suffer from shortcomings, and obtaining non-chosen attribute values is resource intensive. This paper presents a unique Bayesian (multiple) Imputation Multinomial Logit model that imputes unobserved travel times and distances of non-chosen travel modes based on random draws from the conditional posterior distribution of missing values. The calibrated Bayesian (multiple) Imputation Multinomial Logit model imputes non-chosen time and distance values that convincingly replicate observed choice behavior. Although network skims were used for calibration, more realistic data such as supplemental geographically referenced surveys or stated preference data may be preferred. The model is ideally suited for imputing variation in intrazonal non-chosen mode attributes and for assessing the marginal impacts of travel policies, programs, or prices within traffic analysis zones.