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The Children's Engagement Behaviour Framework was developed to describe young children's engagement with science exhibits and how their behaviour is related to learning about the exhibits. The Framework was synthesised from frameworks in research literature related to family learning and the nature of play. It describes three categories of epistemic behaviour and two categories of ludic play behaviour. Field-testing in a playgroup environment where young children engaged with science exhibits revealed that its five categories effectively captured the range of engagement behaviours children displayed. The Framework was used to code video-recordings of 20 children in five further playgroups, categorising 89 child-exhibit interactions lasting at least 30 s. The inter-coder agreement was 93% and differences were easily resolved. The highest level of epistemic behaviour was recorded at each exhibit and 29 instances of ludic behaviour occurred. Children were interviewed using stills from their video-recording to stimulate discussion about exhibits. Epistemic behaviour was strongly related to learning about how the exhibit worked but ludic behaviour had no relationship with such learning. This research has demonstrated the relationship between observable epistemic behaviour and learning and provided a Framework for research into the engagement behaviour of young children. Practical applications of the Framework arediscussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Augmented reality (AR) technology is being introduced in educational settings for its ability to overlay virtual information onto physical environments. The AR Sandbox is a conventional sandbox with depth coloured representations projected onto the sand's surface. This research investigates how 4- and 5-year-old Australian children use an AR Sandbox to enhance their spatial thinking through play. Participants were four children, their two educators and the first author as a participant-observer researcher. Data were collected over an 8-week period during 2015 and included observation, child conferencing, photography, educators' perspectives, and the researcher's perspectives. Vignettes are presented to demonstrate how children's spatial thinking was enhanced through exploration and representation in the AR Sandbox. Children's active and dynamic manipulation of the space of the AR Sandbox, along with a range of socio-cultural contexts and tools, assisted in enhancing their spatial abilities. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper introduces a hierarchical model of children’s (3- to 8-year olds) research participation rights that builds on work by Roger Hart and integrates key participation rights drawn from UNCRC Article 12: information, understanding, voice, and influence. It provides insight into the various levels of information that can be provided to children, the understanding that results, the scope given to them to express their views, and the degree to which their voices ultimately exert influence in research contexts. Each of these four elements plays a unique role in upholding and enhancing children’s rights in research and emphasises the need for rights to be woven into the fabric of a research project from its conception. Considering children’s rights of research participation in a more integrated manner, as suggested by the hierarchy, has the potential to improve participation experiences for children and to value them as citizens with meaningful rights. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ensuring young children’s competence to participate meaningfully in the informed consent process is a troublesome ethical issue. Evolving recognition of the influence of context and relationship, researcher perspective, and researcher responsibility to provide adequate support has advanced understanding of how this might be achieved. Here, we report the findings of the pilot trial of a new approach that used an ‘interactive nonfiction narrative’ to enhance young children’s capacity to provide meaningful informed consent. This innovative approach employs (re)telling strategies and technology (interactive) to convey factual information about the research (nonfiction) via a story (narrative) to promote participant understanding. Case studies of two 3-year-old boys and their mothers captured participants’ understanding of the informing and consent process. Data collection in the child’s home took place over 11 weeks and included conversations with children and semi-structured interviews with parents on three occasions, together with videos of children interacting with the informing story. We found that children understood many of the key concepts, including the research problem and how they could ‘help’ (participate). Children also understood that they could cease their participation, with one boy exercising his right to opt out towards the end of the study. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Ideas about ethical research with young children are evolving at a rapid rate. Not only can young children participate in the informed consent process, but researchers now also recognize that the process must be meaningful for them. As part of a larger study, this article reviews children's rights and informed consent literature as the foundation for the development of a new conceptual model of meaningful early childhood informed consent. Based on this model, an ‘interactive narrative’ approach is presented as a means to inform three- to eight-year-old children about what their participation might involve and to assist them to understand and respond as research participants. For use with small groups, this approach revolves around a storybook based on research-related factual images delivered via interactive (re)telling. This narrative approach to informed consent is unique in its holistic design which seeks to address the specific needs of young children in research. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

The case for integrating generic skills in university accounting programmes is well documented in the literature, but the implementation of strategies designed to teach generic skills in the context of accounting courses has posed ongoing challenges for academics and course administrators. The imperative for generic skills in accounting programmes derives from an economic view of the role of universities, reflecting the views of government and employers who perceive graduates as economic assets to business and the economy. It is argued that the role of universities extends beyond the economic imperative to encompass a greater social and cultural role. This paper traces the historical evolution of the generic skills discourse with an emphasis on accounting and places it in the broader context of the social and economic roles of universities in an era of transformation in the sector. The generic skills discourse, however, transcends disciplinary boundaries and international borders. The new knowledge economy, emerging as a result of technological advancement, needs graduates across disciplines with flexible mindsets and transferable skill sets, capable of innovating and adapting to a dynamic work environment. Consequently, universities must develop the transferable, generic skills required by graduates to advance their careers and contribute to economic innovation and social development. The generic skills debate must, therefore, be addressed from a systemic perspective, reaching beyond national and disciplinary borders. The lessons learned from the generic skills debate in accounting have wider interdisciplinary application for university policy-makers and educators facing the challenges of a new era in higher education. [ABSTRACT FROM PUBLISHER]

Teacher educators are consistently challenged with the problem of how to construct more meaningful and relevant experiences within their science methods courses. The research presented in this paper addressed this problem on two levels. On a pedagogical level, the aim of the research was to capture the salient details about how one pre-service early childhood teacher interpreted her journey about learning science and how to teach science over a 10-week science methods course. On a methodological level, the aim of this research was to describe, trial and evaluate a new, qualitative research method called 'dual vision' that enables critical incidents to be constructed and interpreted through the combined lenses of the pre-service teacher and the researcher. This exploratory research embraced a constructivist-interpretive research paradigm and was informed by the literature on critical incidents. The dual vision methodological process provided the researcher with an opportunity to move into the reality of the pre-service teacher, allowed both voices to be heard and, as a consequence, provided rich images of the pre-service teacher's experiences that are not accessible through other methods. Moreover, the dual vision method demonstrated rigorous advantages that are presented in this paper through an examination of three sets of criteria for legitimation. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]