Enhancing teacher education : the School-Community Intergrated Learning (SCIL) pathway

National Australian reviews advocate exploring new models for preservice teacher education. This study investigates the outcomes of the School-Community Integrated Learning (SCIL) pathway as a model for advancing preservice teachers’ understandings of teaching. Thirty-two final-year preservice teachers were surveyed with extended written responses on how the SCIL pathway advanced their understandings of teaching. Results indicated 100% agreement on 6 of the 27 survey items. Indeed, 78% or more preservice teachers agreed that they had a range of experiences across the five categories (i.e., personal-professional skill development, understandings of system requirements, teaching practices, student behaviour and reflective practices). Extended responses suggested they had developed understandings around setting up classrooms, whole school planning processes with professional development, the allocation of teacher responsibilities (e.g., playground duties), parent-teacher interviews, diagnostic testing for literacy and numeracy, commencing running records of students’ assessment results, and the development of relationships (students, teachers and parents). Although a longitudinal study is required to determine long-term effects, the SCIL pathway may be viewed as a positive step towards preparing final-year preservice teachers for their first year as fully-fledged teachers.

Learning portals : analyzing threshold concept theory for LIS education

This paper explores the theoretical framework of threshold concepts and its potential for LIS education. Threshold concepts are key ideas, often troublesome and counter-intuitive, that are critical to profound understanding of a domain. Once understood, they allow mastery of significant aspects of the domain, opening up new, previously inaccessible ways of thinking. The paper is developed in three parts. First, threshold concept theory is introduced and studies of its use in higher education are described, including emergent work related to LIS. Second, results of a recent study on learning experiences integral to learning to search are presented along with their implications for search expertise and search education, forming a case illustration of what threshold concept theory may contribute to this and other areas of LIS education. Third, the potential of threshold concept theory for LIS education is discussed. The paper concludes that threshold concept theory has much to offer LIS education, particularly for researching critical concepts and competencies, and considerations for a research agenda are put forth.

Reconceptualizing Early Mathematics Learning : The Fundamental Role of Pattern and Structure

The Pattern and Structure Mathematics Awareness Program (PASMAP) was developed concurrently with the studies of AMPS and the development of the Pattern and Structure Assessment (PASA) interview. We summarize some early classroom-based teaching studies and describe the PASMAP that resulted. A large-scale two-year longitudinal study, Reconceptualizing Early Mathematics Learning (REML) resulted. We provide an overview of the REML study and discuss the consequences for our view of early mathematics learning. A purposive sample of four large primary schools, two in Sydney and two in Brisbane, representing 316 students from diverse socio-economic and cultural contexts, participated in an evaluation of the PASMAP intervention throughout the 2009 school year and a follow-up assessment in 2010. Two different mathematics programs were implemented: in each school, two Kindergarten teachers implemented the PASMAP and another two implemented their regular program. The study shows that both groups of students made substantial gains on the ‘I Can Do Maths’ standardized assessment and the PASA interview, but highly significant differences were found on the latter with PASMAP students outperforming the regular group on PASA scores. Qualitative analysis of students’ responses for structural development showed increased levels for the PASMAP students. Implications for pedagogy and curriculum are discussed.

Playing with Grammar in the Early Years : Learning about Language in the Australian Curriculum : English

As teacher/researchers interested in the pursuit of socially-just outcomes in early childhood education, the form and function of language occupies a special position in our work. We believe that mastering a range of literacy competences includes not only the technical skills for learning, but also the resources for viewing and constructing the world (Freire and Macdeo, 1987). Rather than seeing knowledge about language as the accumulation of technical skills alone, the viewpoint to which we subscribe treats knowledge about language as a dialectic that evolves from, is situated in, and contributes to a social arena (Halliday, 1978). We do not shy away from this position just because children are in the early years of schooling. In ‘Playing with Grammar’, we focus on the Foundation to Year 2 grouping, in line with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (hereafter ACARA) advice on the ‘nature of learners’ (ACARA, 2013). With our focus on the early years of schooling comes our acknowledgement of the importance and complexity of play. At a time where accountability in education has moved many teachers to a sense of urgency to prove language and literacy achievement (Genishi and Dyson, 2009), we encourage space to revisit what we know about literature choices and learning experiences and bring these together to facilitate language learning. We can neither ignore, nor overemphasise, the importance of play for the development of language through: the opportunities presented for creative use and practice; social interactions for real purposes; and, identifying and solving problems in the lives of young children (Marsh and Hallet, 2008). We argue that by engaging young children in opportunities to play with language we are ultimately empowering them to be active in their language learning and in the process fostering a love of language and the intricacies it holds. Our goal in this publication is to provide a range of highly practical strategies for scaffolding young children through some of the Content Descriptions from the Australian Curriculum English Version 5.0, hereafter AC:E V5.0 (ACARA, 2013). This recently released curriculum offers a new theoretical approach to building children’s knowledge about language. The AC:E V5.0 uses selected traditional terms through an approach developed in systemic functional linguistics (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) to highlight the dynamic forms and functions of multimodal language in texts. For example, the following statement, taken from the ‘Language: Knowing about the English language’ strand states: English uses standard grammatical terminology within a contextual framework, in which language choices are seen to vary according to the topics at hand, the nature and proximity of the relationships between the language users, and the modalities or channels of communication available (ACARA, 2013). Put simply, traditional grammar terms are used within a functional framework made up of field, tenor, and mode. An understanding of genre is noted with the reference to a ‘contextual framework’. The ‘topics at hand’ concern the field or subject matter of the text. The ‘relationships between the language users’ is a description of tenor. There is reference to ‘modalities’, such as spoken, written or visual text. We posit that this innovative approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts (see Exley and Mills, 2012). We believe there is enormous power in using literature to expose children to the richness of language and in turn develop language and literacy skills. Taking time to look at language patterns within actual literature is a pathway to ‘…capture interest, stir the imagination and absorb the [child]’ into the world of language and literacy (Saxby, 1993, p. 55). In the following three sections, we have tried to remain faithful to our interpretation of the AC:E V5.0 Content Descriptions without giving an exhaustive explanation of the grammatical terms. Other excellent tomes, such as Derewianka (2011), Humphrey, Droga and Feez (2012), and Rossbridge and Rushton (2011) provide these more comprehensive explanations as does the AC:E V5.0 Glossary. We’ve reproduced some of the AC:E V5.0 glossary at the end of this publication. Our focus is on the structure and unfolding of the learning experiences. We outline strategies for working with children in Foundation, Year 1 and Year 2 by providing some demonstration learning experiences based on texts we’ve selected, but maintain that the affordances of these strategies will only be realised when teaching and learning is purposively tied to authentic projects in local contexts. We strongly encourage you not to use only the resource texts we’ve selected, but to capitalise upon your skill for identifying the language features in the texts you and the children are studying and adapt some of the strategies we have outlined. Each learning experience is connected to one of the Content Descriptions from the AC:E V5.0 and contains an experience specific purpose, a suggested resource text and a sequence for the experience that always commences with an orientation to text followed by an examination of a particular grammatical resource. We expect that each of these learning experiences will take a couple if not a few teaching episodes to work through, especially if children are meeting a concept for the first time. We hope you use as much, or as little, of each experience as is needed. Our plans allow for focused discussion, shared exploration and opportunities to revisit the same text for the purpose of enhancing meaning making. We do not want the teaching of grammar to slip into a crisis of irrelevance or to be seen as a series of worksheet drills with finite answers. Strategies for effective practice, however, have much portability. We are both very keen to hear from teachers who are adopting and adapting these learning experiences in their classrooms. Please email us on b.exley@qut.edu.au or lkervin@uow.edu.au. We’d love to continue the conversation with you over time.

Automatic classification of free-text radiology reports to identify limb fractures using machine learning and the SNOMED CT ontology

Objective To develop and evaluate machine learning techniques that identify limb fractures and other abnormalities (e.g. dislocations) from radiology reports. Materials and Methods 99 free-text reports of limb radiology examinations were acquired from an Australian public hospital. Two clinicians were employed to identify fractures and abnormalities from the reports; a third senior clinician resolved disagreements. These assessors found that, of the 99 reports, 48 referred to fractures or abnormalities of limb structures. Automated methods were then used to extract features from these reports that could be useful for their automatic classification. The Naive Bayes classification algorithm and two implementations of the support vector machine algorithm were formally evaluated using cross-fold validation over the 99 reports. Result Results show that the Naive Bayes classifier accurately identifies fractures and other abnormalities from the radiology reports. These results were achieved when extracting stemmed token bigram and negation features, as well as using these features in combination with SNOMED CT concepts related to abnormalities and disorders. The latter feature has not been used in previous works that attempted classifying free-text radiology reports. Discussion Automated classification methods have proven effective at identifying fractures and other abnormalities from radiology reports (F-Measure up to 92.31%). Key to the success of these techniques are features such as stemmed token bigrams, negations, and SNOMED CT concepts associated with morphologic abnormalities and disorders. Conclusion This investigation shows early promising results and future work will further validate and strengthen the proposed approaches.

Measuring up! Bringing everything we know together to make the researcher profile “sing”.

The search is ongoing for the perfect researcher profile with fully integrated citations, plus links to publications, research data, esteem measures, media releases, plus social media feeds and links to the researchers place of work.

Relating Across Difference : A Case Study in Transformative Learning

This chapter examines the process of “transformative learning” for the 2008 cohort of the St. Thomas More College–Intercordia Canada (STM/IC) international community service-learning program. My primary data comes from the eight students who were part of that cohort, when I was their program coordinator. That data later became the heart of my Master’s thesis and was approved by the Research Ethics Office of the University of Saskatchewan. In this chapter I focus on three of those eight participants, outlining the critical elements of their experiences that were conducive to their transformative learning. To be sure, my sample size is too small to draw generalizable conclusions, but the quality of information I received from these students and their colleagues, coupled with the follow-up conversations I had with other educators and with the accompanying literature, supports the value of reflecting at length here about these students’ comments. I have chosen to highlight the experiences of these three participants because together they provide a range of experiences that best enables an analysis of the conditions that both did and did not lead to transformative learning. This case study suggests that transformative learning occurs through: the dynamics of vulnerability, a discovery of persisting differences within inter-personal relationships, and an experience of welcome and hospitality in the host environment. In contrast to other studies that focus on the enhanced capacities, skills and subsequent employability of participants through international education, transformative learning for these students required a relinquishing of securities, a disorientation and critical interrogation of the self, and enhanced receptivity to the newly recognized Other. Moreover, consistent with the critical-humanistic educational philosophy shared in different ways by the participants of the STM/IC program, this study suggests that international community service-learning can most responsibly contribute to good global citizenship through the construction of relationships of solidarity across difference.

Learning-based Relevance Feedback for Web-based Relation Completion

In a pilot application based on web search engine calledWeb-based Relation Completion (WebRC), we propose to join two columns of entities linked by a predefined relation by mining knowledge from the web through a web search engine. To achieve this, a novel retrieval task Relation Query Expansion (RelQE) is modelled: given an entity (query), the task is to retrieve documents containing entities in predefined relation to the given one. Solving this problem entails expanding the query before submitting it to a web search engine to ensure that mostly documents containing the linked entity are returned in the top K search results. In this paper, we propose a novel Learning-based Relevance Feedback (LRF) approach to solve this retrieval task. Expansion terms are learned from training pairs of entities linked by the predefined relation and applied to new entity-queries to find entities linked by the same relation. After describing the approach, we present experimental results on real-world web data collections, which show that the LRF approach always improves the precision of top-ranked search results to up to 8.6 times the baseline. Using LRF, WebRC also shows performances way above the baseline.

Prediction of activity type in preschool children using machine learning techniques

Objectives Recent research has shown that machine learning techniques can accurately predict activity classes from accelerometer data in adolescents and adults. The purpose of this study is to develop and test machine learning models for predicting activity type in preschool-aged children. Design Participants completed 12 standardised activity trials (TV, reading, tablet game, quiet play, art, treasure hunt, cleaning up, active game, obstacle course, bicycle riding) over two laboratory visits. Methods Eleven children aged 3–6 years (mean age = 4.8 ± 0.87; 55% girls) completed the activity trials while wearing an ActiGraph GT3X+ accelerometer on the right hip. Activities were categorised into five activity classes: sedentary activities, light activities, moderate to vigorous activities, walking, and running. A standard feed-forward Artificial Neural Network and a Deep Learning Ensemble Network were trained on features in the accelerometer data used in previous investigations (10th, 25th, 50th, 75th and 90th percentiles and the lag-one autocorrelation). Results Overall recognition accuracy for the standard feed forward Artificial Neural Network was 69.7%. Recognition accuracy for sedentary activities, light activities and games, moderate-to-vigorous activities, walking, and running was 82%, 79%, 64%, 36% and 46%, respectively. In comparison, overall recognition accuracy for the Deep Learning Ensemble Network was 82.6%. For sedentary activities, light activities and games, moderate-to-vigorous activities, walking, and running recognition accuracy was 84%, 91%, 79%, 73% and 73%, respectively. Conclusions Ensemble machine learning approaches such as Deep Learning Ensemble Network can accurately predict activity type from accelerometer data in preschool children.

Learning about and taking action for the environment : child and teacher experiences in a preschool water education program

Water education and conservation programs have grown exponentially in Australian primary and secondary schools and, although early childhood services have been slower to respond to the challenges of sustainability, they are catching up fast. One early program targeted at preschools was the Water Aware Centre Program in northern New South Wales developed by the local water supply authority. This paper reports on a qualitative study of children’s and teachers’ experiences of the program in three preschools. The study’s aim was to identify program attributes and pedagogies that supported learning and action taking for water conservation, and to investigate if and how the program influenced children’s and teachers’practices. Data were collected through an interview with the program designer, conversations with child participants of the program, and a qualitative survey with early childhood staff. A three-step thematic analysis was conducted on the children’s and teachers’ data. Findings revealed that the program expanded children and teachers’ ideas about water conservation and increased their water conservation practices. The children were found to influence the water conservation practices of the adults around them, thus changing practices at school and at home.

Learning the learning rate for prediction with expert advice

Most standard algorithms for prediction with expert advice depend on a parameter called the learning rate. This learning rate needs to be large enough to fit the data well, but small enough to prevent overfitting. For the exponential weights algorithm, a sequence of prior work has established theoretical guarantees for higher and higher data-dependent tunings of the learning rate, which allow for increasingly aggressive learning. But in practice such theoretical tunings often still perform worse (as measured by their regret) than ad hoc tuning with an even higher learning rate. To close the gap between theory and practice we introduce an approach to learn the learning rate. Up to a factor that is at most (poly)logarithmic in the number of experts and the inverse of the learning rate, our method performs as well as if we would know the empirically best learning rate from a large range that includes both conservative small values and values that are much higher than those for which formal guarantees were previously available. Our method employs a grid of learning rates, yet runs in linear time regardless of the size of the grid.

Exploring with Grammar in the Primary Years: Learning about Language in the Australian Curriculum: English

This new volume, Exploring with Grammar in the Primary Years (Exley, Kevin & Mantei, 2014), follows on from Playing with Grammar in the Early Years (Exley & Kervin, 2013). We extend our thanks to the ALEA membership for their take up of the first volume and the vibrant conversations around our first attempt at developing a pedagogy for the teaching of grammar in the early years. Your engagement at locally held ALEA events has motivated us to complete this second volume and reassert our interest in the pursuit of socially-just outcomes in the primary years. As noted in Exley and Kervin (2013), we believe that mastering a range of literacy competences includes not only the technical skills for learning, but also the resources for viewing and constructing the world (Freire and Macdeo, 1987). Rather than seeing knowledge about language as the accumulation of technical skills alone, the viewpoint to which we subscribe treats knowledge about language as a dialectic that evolves from, is situated in, and contributes to active participation within a social arena (Halliday, 1978). We acknowledge that to explore is to engage in processes of discovery as we look closely and examine the opportunities before us. As such, we draw on Janks’ (2000; 2014) critical literacy theory to underpin many of the learning experiences in this text. Janks (2000) argues that effective participation in society requires knowledge about how the power of language promotes views, beliefs and values of certain groups to the exclusion of others. Powerful language users can identify not only how readers are positioned by these views, but also the ways these views are conveyed through the design of the text, that is, the combination of vocabulary, syntax, image, movement and sound. Similarly, powerful designers of texts can make careful modal choices in written and visual design to promote certain perspectives that position readers and viewers in new ways to consider more diverse points of view. As the title of our text suggests, our activities are designed to support learners in exploring the design of texts to achieve certain purposes and to consider the potential for the sharing of their own views through text production. In Exploring with Grammar in the Primary Years, we focus on the Year 3 to Year 6 grouping in line with the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (hereafter ACARA) advice on the ‘nature of learners’ (ACARA, 2014). Our goal in this publication is to provide a range of highly practical strategies for scaffolding students’ learning through some of the Content Descriptions from the Australian Curriculum: English Version 7.2, hereafter AC:E (ACARA, 2014). We continue to express our belief in the power of using whole texts from a range of authentic sources including high quality children’s literature, the internet, and examples of community-based texts to expose students to the richness of language. Taking time to look at language patterns within actual texts is a pathway to ‘…capture interest, stir the imagination and absorb the [child]’ into the world of language and literacy (Saxby, 1993, p. 55). It is our intention to be more overt this time and send a stronger message that our learning experiences are simply ‘sample’ activities rather than a teachers’ workbook or a program of study to be followed. We’re hoping that teachers and students will continue to explore their bookshelves, the internet and their community for texts that provide powerful opportunities to engage with language-based learning experiences. In the following three sections, we have tried to remain faithful to our interpretation of the AC:E Content Descriptions without giving an exhaustive explanation of the grammatical terms. This recently released curriculum offers a new theoretical approach to building students’ knowledge about language. The AC:E uses selected traditional terms through an approach developed in systemic functional linguistics (see Halliday and Matthiessen, 2004) to highlight the dynamic forms and functions of multimodal language in texts. For example, the following statement, taken from the ‘Language: Knowing about the English language’ strand states: English uses standard grammatical terminology within a contextual framework, in which language choices are seen to vary according to the topics at hand, the nature and proximity of the relationships between the language users, and the modalities or channels of communication available (ACARA, 2014). Put simply, traditional grammar terms are used within a functional framework made up of field, tenor, and mode. An understanding of genre is noted with the reference to a ‘contextual framework’. The ‘topics at hand’ concern the field or subject matter of the text. The ‘relationships between the language users’ is a description of tenor. There is reference to ‘modalities’, such as spoken, written or visual text. We posit that this innovative approach is necessary for working with contemporary multimodal and cross-cultural texts (see Exley & Mills, 2012). Other excellent tomes, such as Derewianka (2011), Humphrey, Droga and Feez (2012), and Rossbridge and Rushton (2011) provide more comprehensive explanations of this unique metalanguage, as does the AC:E Glossary. We’ve reproduced some of the AC:E Glossary at the end of this publication. We’ve also kept the same layout for our learning experiences, ensuring that our teacher notes are not only succinct but also prudent in their placement. Each learning experience is connected to a Content Description from the AC:E and contains an experience with an identified purpose, suggested resource text and a possible sequence for the experience that always commences with an orientation to text followed by an examination of a particular grammatical resource. Our plans allow for focused discussion, shared exploration and opportunities to revisit the same text for the purpose of enhancing meaning making. Some learning experiences finish with deconstruction of a stimulus text while others invite students to engage in the design of new texts. We encourage you to look for opportunities in your own classrooms to move from text deconstruction to text design. In this way, students can express not only their emerging grammatical understandings, but also the ways they might position readers or viewers through the creation of their own texts. We expect that each of these learning experiences will vary in the time taken. Some may indeed take a couple if not a few teaching episodes to work through, especially if students are meeting a concept or a pedagogical strategy for the first time. We hope you use as much, or as little, of each experience as is needed for your students. We do not want the teaching of grammar to slip into a crisis of irrelevance or to be seen as a series of worksheet drills with finite answers. We firmly believe that strategies for effective deconstruction and design practice, however, have much portability. We three are very keen to hear from teachers who are adopting and adapting these learning experiences in their classrooms. Please email us on b.exley@qut.edu.au, lkervin@uow.edu.au or jessicam@ouw.edu.au. We’d love to continue the conversation with you over time. Beryl Exley, Lisa Kervin & Jessica Mantei

EFL teachers' perceptions and experiences of blended learning in a Vietnamese university

This qualitative study investigates English as Foreign Language (EFL) teachers' perceptions and practices of blended learning in a Vietnamese university and influencing factors. Findings revealed that teachers have limited understandings and use of blended learning due to three primary influential factors: (i) the traditional teacher-centred pedagogy, (ii) institutional management and leadership styles, and (iii) fragmented knowledge of technological, pedagogical, and content knowledge (TPACK) for blended learning. To improve the take up and potential benefits of blended learning in EFL education in Vietnamese universities, this study proposes (i) a systematic understanding of blended learning concepts, (ii) a localised TPACK framework, and (iii) a model of teacher professional development program.

Gearing up academics for collaborative Building Information Modelling (BIM) education

Building information modelling (BIM) radically changes the practices in architecture, engineering and construction (AEC) and creates new job opportunities. Many governments, such as the United Kingdom, have made BIM a mandatory requirement. This substantially drives the demand for a BIM-literate workforce. Universities are facing the challenge to incorporate BIM into their curricula and produce “BIM ready” graduates to meet the needs of the industry. Like other universities, Queensland University of Technology (QUT) is at the heart of this change and aspires to develop collaborative BIM education across AEC. Previous BIM education studies identify that inadequate BIM awareness of AEC academics is one of the challenges for developing a BIM curriculum and there is a dearth in the learning and teaching support for academics on BIM education. Equipping the AEC academics for a more BIM focused curriculum is all the while more important. This paper aims to leverage knowledge drawn from a Learning & Teaching project currently undertaken at QUT. Its specific objectives are to: 1) review the existing learning and teaching initiatives on BIM education; and 2) briefly describe the learning and teaching activities on collaborative BIM education at QUT. Significance of the paper lies on revealing the importance of building up the capacity of AEC academics for collaborative BIM education. The paper contributes to sparking the interests in better equipping AEC academics to understand what curriculum changes would assist in BIM uptake within the relevant courses to provide context for changes in units; and how the use of BIM can improve the understanding by students of the large amounts of professional knowledge they need to function effectively as graduates.

Can GRI light up the future of mankind?

There is strong evidence across the media that humanity has finally come to recognize the certainty and imminence of a global environmental crisis due to man-triggered ecological alterations. This widespread recognition of what is happening around us has matured even further as studies acknowledging that everything on Earth is interconnected begin to mount across various branches of learning. The appreciation of this simple linear and two-dimensional relationship implies enormous consequences for economic and management studies, as alternative business models will eventually have to supersede the old practices that still govern major industry sectors (e.g. energy, cement, agriculture, automotive, pharmaceutical, etc.). This paper argues that traditional knowledge found in developing countries can sometimes harness the potential of sparking genuine alternatives to established business practices. With a focus on the most fundamental geochemical cycles on Earth − nitrogen, water, and carbon − and the primary resources they govern (soil, water, and air), three case studies are presented to illustrate how traditional knowledge in the context of GRI (Grassroots Innovation) projects can lead to challenge the dominant logic, when allowed to thrive in terms of adoption and scalability.