Retention and graduation of Australian Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students in initial teacher education

This paper reports on an Australian national project to address retention, success and graduation of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teacher education students. The project, led by the Australian Council of Deans of Education and managed by Queensland University of Technology, forms a sub-set of the More Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Teachers Initiative (MATSITI) directed by the David Unaipon College of Indigenous Education and Research and funded by the Department of Education, Employment and Workplace Relations. MATSITI will develop Action Plans within participating universities (n=33) to improve the retention/graduation rates of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander teachers. The paper provides an overview of the teacher education component of the MATSITI project and presents preliminary research from 33 Australian universities.

Functional Imagery Training to reduce snacking: Testing a novel motivational intervention based on Elaborated Intrusion theory

Functional Imagery Training (FIT) is a new theory-based, manualized intervention that trains positive goal imagery. Multisensory episodic imagery of proximal personal goals is elicited and practised, to sustain motivation and compete with less functional cravings. This study tested the impact of a single session of FIT plus a booster phone call on snacking. In a stepped-wedge design, 45 participants who wanted to lose weight or reduce snacking were randomly assigned to receive a session of FIT immediately or after a 2-week delay. High-sugar and high-fat snacks were recorded using timeline follow back for the previous 3 days, at baseline, 2 and 4 weeks. At 2 weeks, snacking was lower in the immediate group than in the delayed group, and the reduction after FIT was replicated in the delayed group between 2 and 4 weeks. Frequencies of motivational thoughts about snack reduction rose following FIT for both groups, and this change correlated with reductions in snacking and weight loss. By showing that FIT can support change in eating behaviours, these findings show its potential as a motivational intervention for weight management.

“Heroic victims”: Discursive constructions of preservice early childhood teacher professional identities

Government policies in Australia and in many other parts of the world, are calling for degree-qualified teachers to work in prior to formal school settings (center-based care, preschool). Yet, many preservice early childhood teachers assume they will end up teaching in primary schools. This paper examines the professional identities preservice early childhood teachers take up and speak into action while participating in classes focused on teaching in child care. Employing poststructural social theory, data drawn from focus groups with preservice early childhood teachers was examined through a Foucauldian-informed discourse analysis. Particular ways in which the preservice teachers talked about images of children and quality in early childhood are scrutinized for how discourses work to constitute the professional identities of preservice early childhood teachers. It was found that the participants drew on a range of competing discourses available to them, through their degree, and from elsewhere to describe the work of teaching young children and teaching in child care. These competing and colliding discourses, it is argued produce an identity of preservice teachers as ‘heroic victims.’ The paper raises questions about the discourses in circulation in preservice early childhood teacher education, and considers the implications this has for professional identities and career pathways—particularly work in child care.

Two worlds apart: Indigenous community perspectives and Non-Indigenous teacher perspectives on Australian schools

Our evaluation studies of Indigenous school reform begin from a different starting point: listening to, hearing and engaging with the commentaries, voices, narratives and analyses of Indigenous community as they discuss and recount their experiences and current encounters with Australian state schools. Here we undertake a contrastive documentation of the views of Indigenous community members, Elders, parents, education workers, and young people and, indeed, of the views of their non-Indigenous teachers and school principals. This is a dramatic picture of two distinctive cultural lifeworlds, communities and worldviews in contact, of two very different ‘constructions’ by participants of a shared, mutual experience: everyday interaction in the social field of the Australian school. Taken together, our Indigenous and non-Indigenous participants repeatedly confirmed and corroborated a key theme: that Indigenous peoples continue to be viewed and ‘treated’ through the lens and language of cultural, intellectual and moral ‘deficit’.

Teacher quality in upper secondary science education in Australia

Science education has been the subject of increasing public interest over the last few years. While a good part of this attention has been due to the fundamental reshaping of school curricula and teacher professional standards currently underway, there has been a heightened level of critical media commentary about the state of science education in schools and science teacher education in universities. In some cases, the commentary has been informed by sound evidence and balanced perspectives. More recently, however, a greater degree of ignorance and misrepresentation has crept into the discourse. This chapter provides background on the history and status of science teacher education in Australia, along with insights into recent developments and challenges.

Cluster based training for scaling non-linear support vector machines

Support Vector Machines(SVMs) are hyperplane classifiers defined in a kernel induced feature space. The data size dependent training time complexity of SVMs usually prohibits its use in applications involving more than a few thousands of data points. In this paper we propose a novel kernel based incremental data clustering approach and its use for scaling Non-linear Support Vector Machines to handle large data sets. The clustering method introduced can find cluster abstractions of the training data in a kernel induced feature space. These cluster abstractions are then used for selective sampling based training of Support Vector Machines to reduce the training time without compromising the generalization performance. Experiments done with real world datasets show that this approach gives good generalization performance at reasonable computational expense.

Adding value: Principals’ perceptions of the role of the teacher-librarian

This paper reports on a study into principals’ perceptions of the role of the teacher-librarian. Nine principals in Australia were interviewed about the role of the teacher-librarian and library in their school. The findings indicated a range of ways in which the teacher-librarian adds value to the school, including in their role as teacher, providing the principal with a broad perspective on the workings of the school, providing advice and ideas, and providing leadership in the use of information and communications technology (ICT) at the school. It also identified a number of personal qualities valued by principals.

The pulling power of chocolate: Effects of approach-avoidance training on approach bias and consumption

Previous research has shown that action tendencies to approach alcohol may be modified using computerized ApproacheAvoidance Task (AAT), and that this impacted on subsequent consumption. A recent paper in this journal (Becker, Jostman, Wiers, & Holland, 2015) failed to show significant training effects for food in three studies: Nor did it find effects on subsequent consumption. However, avoidance training to high calorie foods was tested against a control rather than Approach training. The present study used a more comparable paradigm to the alcohol studies. It randomly assigned 90 participants to ‘approach’ or ‘avoid’ chocolate images on the AAT, and then asked them to taste and rate chocolates. A significant interaction of condition and time showed that training to avoid chocolate resulted in faster avoidance responses to chocolate images, compared with training to approach it. Consistent with Becker et al.'s Study 3, no effect was found on amounts of chocolate consumed, although a newly published study in this journal (Schumacher, Kemps, & Tiggemann, 2016) did do so. The collective evidence does not as yet provide solid basis for the application of AAT training to reduction of problematic food consumption, although clinical trials have yet to be conducted.

Digital competence and professional development of vocational education and training teachers in Queensland

Teaching with digital technologies is essential to the development of 21st century students’ graduate capabilities. However, relatively little is known about the extent to which Queensland VET teachers engage with digitally-enhanced teaching, or have the capacity to do so. Using a mixed methods approach, this thesis investigated the current digital teaching capacities of VET teachers and how current professional development opportunities are helping to address their learning needs.

Clinical reasoning: The relative contribution of identification, interpretation and hypothesis errors to misdiagnosis

The aim of this study was to identify and describe the types of errors in clinical reasoning that contribute to poor diagnostic performance at different levels of medical training and experience. Three cohorts of subjects, second- and fourth- (final) year medical students and a group of general practitioners, completed a set of clinical reasoning problems. The responses of those whose scores fell below the 25th centile were analysed to establish the stage of the clinical reasoning process - identification of relevant information, interpretation or hypothesis generation - at which most errors occurred and whether this was dependent on problem difficulty and level of medical experience. Results indicate that hypothesis errors decrease as expertise increases but that identification and interpretation errors increase. This may be due to inappropriate use of pattern recognition or to failure of the knowledge base. Furthermore, although hypothesis errors increased in line with problem difficulty, identification and interpretation errors decreased. A possible explanation is that as problem difficulty increases, subjects at all levels of expertise are less able to differentiate between relevant and irrelevant clinical features and so give equal consideration to all information contained within a case. It is concluded that the development of clinical reasoning in medical students throughout the course of their pre-clinical and clinical education may be enhanced by both an analysis of the clinical reasoning process and a specific focus on each of the stages at which errors commonly occur.

Assessing clinical reasoning: A method to monitor its development in a PBL curriculum

The aim of this study was to develop and trial a method to monitor the evolution of clinical reasoning in a PBL curriculum that is suitable for use in a large medical school. Termed Clinical Reasoning Problems (CRPs), it is based on the notion that clinical reasoning is dependent on the identification and correct interpretation of certain critical clinical features. Each problem consists of a clinical scenario comprising presentation, history and physical examination. Based on this information, subjects are asked to nominate the two most likely diagnoses and to list the clinical features that they considered in formulating their diagnoses, indicating whether these features supported or opposed the nominated diagnoses. Students at different levels of medical training completed a set of 10 CRPs as well as the Diagnostic Thinking Inventory, a self-reporting questionnaire designed to assess reasoning style. Responses were scored against those of a reference group of general practitioners. Results indicate that the CRPs are an easily administered, reliable and valid assessment of clinical reasoning, able to successfully monitor its development throughout medical training. Consequently, they can be employed to assess clinical reasoning skill in individual students and to evaluate the success of undergraduate medical schools in providing effective tuition in clinical reasoning.