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The transformation of cities into smarter and more efficient environments relies on proactive and timely detection and maintenance of city-wide infrastructure, including roadside infrastructure such as road signs and the cleaning of illegally dumped rubbish. Currently, these maintenance tasks rely predominantly on citizen reports or on-site checks by council staff. However, this approach has been shown to be time-consuming and highly costly, resulting in significant delays that negatively impact communities. This paper presents AIoT-CitySense, an AI and IoT-driven city-scale sensing framework, developed and piloted in collaboration with a local government in Australia. AIoT-CitySense has been designed to address the unique requirements of roadside infrastructure maintenance within the local government municipality. A tailored solution of AIoT-CitySense has been deployed on existing waste service trucks that cover a road network of approximately 100 kms in the municipality. Our analysis shows that proactive detection for roadside infrastructure maintenance using our solution reached an impressive 85%, surpassing the timeframes associated with manual reporting processes. AIoT-CitySense can potentially transform various domains, such as efficient detection of potholes and precise line marking for pedestrians. This paper exemplifies the power of leveraging city-wide data using AI and IoT technologies to drive tangible changes and improve the quality of city life. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Legal attendance requirements and national declarations establish a social contract between the State and its citizens for the provision of schooling. Any shortage of teachers compromises the ability of the State to meet its contractable obligations. The sovereignty of the social contract is complex as no single body has ultimate responsibility for housing the teaching workforce, but everyone has a stake in it. Empirically focused on the largest school system in the southern hemisphere, the New South Wales public education system (Australia), this paper demonstrates that 90.8% of teaching positions, over 50,000 full-time equivalent posts, are in Local Government Areas where the median rent and house sales price are severely unaffordable on a top-of-the-scale teacher salary. With the system requiring additional teachers to meet increasing enrolments, and housing costs outstripping salaries, many schools not traditionally considered difficult to staff are becoming, if not already, inaccessible for teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Acknowledging Australian Indigenous cultural diversity involves respecting local Indigenous knowledge and perspectives. This can be difficult for teachers who do not know about Indigenous people and their knowledge. The Differentiated Indigenous Pedagogies project evaluated digitally available information describing Indigenous in this paper, 'Indigenous' will be used when referring to First Nations and Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander peoples, pedagogies, policies, and institutional contexts in Australia apart from references used which use other terminology. The authors acknowledge the contested nature of terminology and use the term 'Indigenous' as it is consistent with the title of the research project on which this article is based pedagogies in the Northern Territory. The purpose was to consolidate findings to increase positive intercultural actions in the wider education community. An important aspect of the project is addressing gaps in western, non-Indigenous teacher knowledge pertinent to the diversity within Indigenous language groups and regions. Through searching for available Indigenous pedagogies as a teacher might, we found information differs in description and levels of relationality. Pedagogies are presented in numerous ways which complicates teachers' cultural understandings. Common themes from search results and Indigenist educational research are used to define ways teachers can actively engage in more respectful, relational, and reconciliatory ways to develop a differentiated approach for themselves to use when working with Indigenous pedagogies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In this journal, Sciffer et al. (Large-scale Assessments in Education 10:1–22, 2022), hereafter SP&M, conclude that school socioeconomic compositional (SEC) or school socioeconomic status (school-SES) effects in Australia are substantial and substantively important for research and policy. This paper demonstrates that these claims are unwarranted. Their SEC estimates are much larger than estimates from comparable studies and a metastudy. Despite plausible theoretical reasons and empirical evidence, SP&M do not consider that school academic composition is a significant predictor of student achievement independent of SEC. SEC effects are confounded by academic composition and are typically trivial when considering academic composition. The second part of this paper compares SP&M's estimates with analysis of the same data, from the Australian National Assessments in Performance—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). In a model corresponding to SP&M analyses comprising demographics, SES, school-SES, and student-level prior achievement, the effects of school-SES are small, with standardized effects mostly less than 0.10. With the addition of academic composition measured by school-level prior achievement, school-SES effects are effectively zero. In contrast, academic composition has significant, albeit small, impacts on student achievement. Therefore, contrary to SP&M's (2022) conclusion, school-SES effects on student achievement in NAPLAN are negligible, whereas school-level prior achievement has small effects. That is not to say that school-SES is always irrelevant, but any assessment of its importance must consider both student- and school-level prior achievement. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Home renovation is a global phenomenon, where households seek to remodel, reconfigure, and retrofit their home. While often a response to the material conditions of a dwelling, such as decay and damage, renovation also as emerges as a practice central to identity creation, sense of home, and leisure. Importantly, improving household sustainability is increasingly driving renovation activities, as governments and households seek to reduce the environmental impact of residential dwellings. Drawing on data collected from a national survey developed by the authors, this paper explores sustainable renovation practices in Australia. The paper provides a three-level analysis of home renovators. First, the paper profiles recent renovators. Second, the extent to which sustainability was considered by recent renovators during the renovation process is investigated. Third, the relationship between personal values placed on household sustainability and the sustainable renovation practices are explored. The analysis reveals that sustainability is an important renovation driver. However, sustainable renovation practices differ between groups of homeowners, with educated and wealthy homeowners most likely to undertake sustainable renovation. Further, those with a stronger commitment to household sustainability are the most likely to include expensive sustainability technologies as part of their renovations. However, it is younger households, who are less committed to the principles of household sustainability, that are most likely to access government subsidies to support the inclusion of these technologies as part of their renovation. The different profiles and actions of these renovator groups reveal a series of challenges and opportunities for governments seeking to promote household sustainability. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Driven by the focus on standardised assessment and performance-driven accountability, a considerable body of literature has documented differences in students' academic achievement across school sectors, both internationally and in Australia. However, few studies have to date explored the potential mechanisms underlying such differences, particularly through the lens of school climate and student engagement. And despite extensive literature on school climate and student engagement, including their relationships with achievement, the differences in these patterns across school sectors remain under-studied. In this paper, we leverage nationally representative data from a large-scale longitudinal survey in Australia with linked administrative data on student achievement to reveal different patterns of school climate and student engagement across government, Catholic and independent sectors. Employing multivariable regression analyses, we identify unique school climate and student engagement facets that are associated with improved achievement in each of these sectors, offering important pointers for educational policies. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Increasing the numbers of Indigenous people enrolled in research higher degrees in Australia is important for building the Indigenous academic workforce, broadening the scope of knowledge production in academic institutions and ensuring effective research outcomes for Indigenous Australians. While the numbers of Indigenous research higher degree students are increasing, universities still have a lot to do to bring that number up to parity. In this paper, we explore the value of a pre-doctoral program developed for Indigenous people interested in doing a PhD that provides them the information they need to inform their choices about undertaking a doctoral project. As the only program of this kind in Australia, this research contributes to the emerging literature on the factors that have an influence on why Indigenous people choose to undertake PhD programs and the effectiveness of initiatives to support their pathway to higher degree research. The research outcomes build on the evidence base for improving initiatives across the university sector, highlighting the need for tailored, Indigenous-led pre-doctoral support programs for Indigenous students, the value of cohort experiences and the importance of universities that value Indigenous people and their knowledge systems. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

By the end of 2021, more than 168 million students across the globe had missed a year of face-to-face schooling due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In NSW, Australia, most students engaged in learning from home for eight weeks during 2020 and a further 14 weeks during 2021. This study provides robust empirical evidence on how two years of disruptions to schooling affected student learning. Drawing on matched data for 3,827 Year 3 and 4 students from 101 NSW government schools, this paper compares student achievement growth in mathematics and reading for 2019 (pre-pandemic) and 2021 (second year of the pandemic) student cohorts. While overall there was no significant difference between cohorts, when analysed by socio-educational advantage, we were surprised to find that students in the lowest band achieved approximately three months' additional growth in mathematics. Arguably, grave concerns about the potentially dire impact of COVID-19 on the learning of disadvantaged students were met by investments that made a difference. We argue that targeted funding and system-wide initiatives to support more equitable outcomes should remain a priority after the pandemic if Australia is to meet its aspirations for excellence and equity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As the university student body becomes more diversified and students' lives less linear, student retention carries increased importance for universities, including the conversion of deferrers and the re-enrolment of leave-taking students. This paper is based on a broader research project which explored national patterns of deferral and leave of absence in Australia and the policies and strategies for re-engaging the students who defer or take leave. Through a mixed research design, the study explores the extent to which students are positioned at the centre of deferral and leave of absence policy, informed by relationship marketing concepts. This study suggests that many universities have moved towards greater consideration of student perspectives and individualised approaches to building a trustworthy and supportive relationship with deferral and leave-taking students, based on data analytics of individual students' information and circumstances. Despite such efforts, there remain both limitations and tensions within these approaches. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Access to higher education remains elusive for many young people despite substantial investment in outreach interventions, most of which target students in underrepresented equity groups. This paper explores an alternative approach to widening participation in Australia that focuses on teacher professional development to support student aspirations. We examine school teachers' responses to a course designed to develop their conceptual understanding of aspirations and provide a framework for developing aspirations-related initiatives with their students and colleagues. The course pilot was evaluated drawing on surveys (N = 49) and interviews (N = 21). Teachers reported that they gained the following: (1) access to robust evidence of factors affecting aspirations; (2) relevant theoretical perspectives to conceptualise aspirations in new ways; and (3) insights on practical strategies with which they might nurture student pathways to higher education. To support widening participation in higher education, we argue that the scope of current outreach initiatives offered by universities must broaden to capitalise on the untapped potential of teachers. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]