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Assessment policy internationally places significant importance on the use of assessment criteria across all subject areas. However, in order to ensure effective use of criteria, it is critical for teachers to develop an in-depth understanding of them. This paper reports on a study of a range of Australian Science teachers' views and uses of criteria in practical work. Six Science teachers working in secondary schools across Sydney were interviewed, their classroom activities were observed, and the data obtained were analysed using a qualitative constant comparative method. The findings indicate that despite the emphasis on Assessment for Learning (AfL) in assessment policy in Australia, teachers generally consider criteria as a marking tool, for Assessment of Learning (AoL), rather than a learning instrument. Consequently, they use criteria exclusively as a framework for assigning grades. This paper argues that teachers need to consider the use of criteria from a learning perspective in addition to its other multipurpose functions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Comprehensive cancer centres are on the rise as patients seek a more holistic approach to maintaining their wellbeing when living with a cancer diagnosis. Many cancer centres worldwide now incorporate a selection of evidence-based complementary therapies and qualified therapists into their offerings. The Chris O'Brien Lifehouse, a comprehensive cancer centre in Sydney, Australia, provides integrative oncology services including acupuncture, massage, reflexology, dietetics and exercise physiology for individual patients, along with group programmes, and an integrative and supportive care medical specialist. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on one model of integrative oncology service and approach to integration and team and service development. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Quarantine was used by British colonial authorities and later by Australian governments to manage and control the introduction of infectious diseases. Facilities at North Head, Manly, New South Wales, were initially built as a specialist institution but as the need for mass quarantine declined over time, the site was used for other forms of social regulation and welfare. This paper explores an enduring tradition of memorialization, commemoration, and in some instances, resistance to the conditions of isolation and confinement found in the mark-making practices of people held at the Quarantine Station from the 1830s to the 1970s. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Australia's quarantine regulations have their roots in colonial practice. This paper is concerned with the 'matter' of quarantine-its location, spatialization, and materialization-and the ways in which it contributed to the colonial agenda. Through an exploration of Sydney's North Head Quarantine Station, quarantine is shown to be a technology through which the colony and the continent were framed as simultaneously pure and vulnerable. These colonial roots of quarantine practice are then brought back to the present, drawing on Stoler's (2008) concept of 'imperial debris' to contemplate the contemporary ruins, both material and ideological, of colonial quarantine practice. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Religion and spirituality have often been neglected by historical archaeologists, in spite of the importance of religious devotion in public and private life. Recent investigation of artifacts from the Hyde Park Barracks Destitute Asylum in Sydney, Australia, however, has begun to shed new light on the role of spirituality in an institutional context. An extensive underfloor collection from the asylum includes many paper fragments from the Bible and from religious tracts, along with rosaries and devotional medals. This material suggests that while visiting clergymen and missionaries distributed large quantities of "improving" literature, the inmates expressed their own religious feelings in more personal, private ways. The archaeological and historical evidence also indicates that Catholic inmates were separated from Anglicans and others, mirroring the wider sectarian division in 19th-century Australia. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Introduces articles in this special double issue, which consists of a selection of papers presented at the Ninth World Congress of Comparative Education, held at the University of Sydney, Australia, in July 1996, on the theme of ?Tradition, Modernity and Post-modernity in Comparative Education?.