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Australian initial teacher education accreditation requirements have, since 2016, mandated a capstone teaching performance assessment (TPA) to assess pre-service teachers (PSTs) against the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers. This research examines how a standardised TPA known as the Assessment for Graduate Teaching (AfGT) can impact on PSTs’ readiness to teach. The AfGT comprises PSTs’ analysis of their teaching practice using video of teaching episodes, observation feedback, and students’ work samples augmented by an online situational judgement task. The researchers used thematic data analysis of surveys to investigate how the AfGT impacted on PSTs’ perspectives of what matters in teaching. The research established that the process of completing the TPA can activate and reinforce reflection and professional reasoning, and expand PSTs’ knowledge of how their teaching improved student learning. The results provide insights into how a complex and high-stakes TPA can foster professional growth while signalling key enabling conditions.

Consumers often encounter advertisements in the background while primarily focused on other stimuli (e.g., while multitasking). Consumers’ perceived level of distraction by these background ads serves as a metacognitive cue from which inferences are drawn. When consumers perceive themselves to be relatively distracted by a background advertisement, they draw on an underlying lay theory that distraction implies interest in the contents of the distracting stimulus to make the metacognitive inference that they have positive evaluations of the advertised brand. Across five studies, we provide evidence for this proposed metacognitive inferential process by demonstrating that perceived distraction does not enhance brand evaluations when the distraction = interest lay theory is not perceived to be (1) diagnostic or (2) applicable to the current context (e.g., when consumers have little interest in the product category being advertised). Thus, this research introduces distraction as a new metacognitive experience from which consumers draw inferences and offers important insights into when and how background ads shape brand evaluations.

Artificial intelligence (AI) helps companies offer important benefits to consumers, such as health monitoring with wearable devices, advice with recommender systems, peace of mind with smart household products, and convenience with voice-activated virtual assistants. However, although AI can be seen as a neutral tool to be evaluated on efficiency and accuracy, this approach does not consider the social and individual challenges that can occur when AI is deployed. This research aims to bridge these two perspectives: on one side, the authors acknowledge the value that embedding AI technology into products and services can provide to consumers. On the other side, the authors build on and integrate sociological and psychological scholarship to examine some of the costs consumers experience in their interactions with AI. In doing so, the authors identify four types of consumer experiences with AI: (1) data capture, (2) classification, (3) delegation, and (4) social. This approach allows the authors to discuss policy and managerial avenues to address the ways in which consumers may fail to experience value in organizations’ investments into AI and to lay out an agenda for future research.

Providing effective feedback to students is a significant issue for Australian educators. The ability to provide effective feedback comprises one of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers and is seen as being a key element of quality teaching. Much research has been conducted into what constitutes effective feedback. Yet in spite of this existing knowledge, evidence suggests that feedback continues to be poorly received by students. The overall purpose of this research was to explore how ten Year Seven students (aged 12- 13) reflected on and responded to written teacher feedback on a music history/appreciation project. Data from this pilot study revealed that students reflected on and responded to feedback based on personal features, task perceptions and individual choices. Findings from this study are relevant to teachers and teacher educators interested in improving classroom feedback practices.

Engagement in leisure offers a host of benefits for mental and physical health, yet many people view leisure as wasteful and unproductive. Four studies (n = 1310) demonstrate that believing leisure is wasteful undermines enjoyment of enacted leisure activities. Studies 1 and 2 document that people with a general tendency to find leisure wasteful report lower enjoyment of leisure activities on average, especially terminally-motivated leisure (performed as an end in itself) compared to instrumentally-motivated leisure (performed as a means to an end). The belief that leisure is wasteful is also associated with poorer mental health outcomes, including lower reported happiness, and greater reported depression, anxiety, and stress. Establishing causality, Studies 3 and 4 show that priming the belief that leisure is wasteful or unproductive reduces enjoyment of terminally-motivated leisure activities; unfortunately, priming the belief that leisure is productive does not increase enjoyment. We discuss implications for maximizing hedonic utility and well-being.

This research documents a systematic bias in memory for ethical attribute information: consumers have better memory for an ethical attribute when a product performs well on the attribute versus when a product performs poorly on the attribute. Because consumers want to avoid emotionally difficult ethical information (e.g., child labor) but believe they should remember it in order to do the right thing, the presence of negative ethical information in a choice or evaluation produces conflict between the want and should selves. Consumers resolve this conflict by letting the want self prevail and forgetting or misremembering the negative ethical information. A series of studies establishes the willfully ignorant memory effect, shows that it holds only for ethical attributes and not for other attributes, and provides process evidence that it is driven by consumers allowing the want self to prevail in order to avoid negative feelings associated with the conflict. We also ameliorate the effect by reducing the amount of pressure exerted by the should self. Lastly, we demonstrate that consumers judge forgetting negative ethical information as more morally acceptable than remembering but ignoring it, suggesting that willfully ignorant memory is a more morally acceptable form of coping with want/should conflict.

From the Food and Drug Administration's efforts to prompt healthier eating to the Environmental Protection Agency's desire to prompt people to engage in environmentally friendly behaviors, a wide range of policy makers aim to persuade consumers. To do so, they must decide how and whether to use information about the behavior of other consumers as part of their persuasive message. In four experimental studies, the authors demonstrate that the persuasive advantage of high- versus low-consensus information depends on the target consumer's trait level of susceptibility to interpersonal influence (SII). Low-SII consumers differentiate between low- and high-consensus information, such that they are more persuaded by high-consensus information. In contrast, high-SII consumers find any cue about the behavior of others persuasive, regardless of whether it is high or low consensus. Importantly, this finding suggests that policy makers may find success motivating behavioral change even in low-consensus situations. The authors close by reporting data from two broadscale correlational surveys that identify behavioral, psychographic, and demographic characteristics related to consumer SII as well as domains in which low consensus currently exists, so that policy makers can identify and target these individuals and related issues.

Throughout Australia, many government and non-government schools have implemented a one-laptop-per-student (1:1) policy. Whilst there was initial interest in the implementation of these programs, little has been done to track the uptake of digital learning technologies afforded by access to the laptops. This study examined pre-service teachers' reflections on their experiences with 1:1 laptop programs in their secondary schooling. The lens for this reflection was their consideration of their aspirational teaching practice. Qualitative data were collected from two successive cohorts (2014 and 2015) of the first year of a Bachelor of Education course. The objectives of the research presented in this paper were to: capture recollections of the students' experience of 1:1 laptop programs; categorise these recollections into positive and negative experiences; and investigate the impact of 1:1 laptop programs on students' perceptions of teaching with ICTs and their personal learning at university.

Higher education is increasingly responding to the need for flexible, accessible study options for diverse student cohorts. This includes offering courses available in fully online mode that incorporate work integrated learning (WIL) which contribute to preparing work-ready graduates. This chapter presents one university’s approach to delivering fully online initial teacher education (ITE), its embedded WIL components and innovative approaches for support and supervision. Survey responses from 56 online ITE graduates showed that participants were predominantly mature-aged females transitioning from other careers and who juggled multiple responsibilities during the final WIL. Overall, graduates were satisfied with their WIL and intended to stay in teaching for their whole career. Most were employed as teachers, with approximately one-quarter employed at their final WIL placement school. Insights gained about this component of fully online ITE are of global significance given the sustained interest in the capacity and retention of teachers in Australia and across the world.

“Behavioral targeting” is an Internet-based targeting strategy that delivers digital ads to individuals based on their online behavior (e.g., search, shopping). This research explores the unique ways in which consumers respond to ads using this type of targeting (vs. to ads that use more traditional forms of targeting), demonstrating that a behaviorally targeted ad can act as a social label even when it contains no explicit labeling information. Instead, when consumers recognize that the marketer has made an inference about their identity in order to serve them the ad, the ad itself functions as an implied social label. Across four studies, behaviorally targeted ads lead consumers to make adjustments to their self-perceptions to match the implied label; these self-perceptions then impact behavior including purchase intentions for the advertised product and other behaviors related to the implied label. Importantly, these effects only hold when the label is plausibly connected to consumers’ prior behavior (i.e., when the targeting is at least moderately accurate).

This research explores how loyal customers, those who have invested relatively high amounts of effort with a firm in the form of past purchases, respond to randomly determined marketing outcomes (e.g., winning a prize in a random drawing). Across five studies, participants exhibit a "lucky loyalty" effect, in which they believe that greater effort (e.g., dollars spent at a retailer or number of nights stayed at a hotel) results in greater likelihood of obtaining randomly determined promotional outcomes. Loyal customers report these higher subjective likelihoods for randomly determined outcomes because they feel they deserve special treatment from the firm. Theoretically, this work demonstrates that individuals appear to believe that they can earn "unearnable" outcomes through effort, even when the effort and outcome are unrelated. Boundary conditions for the lucky loyalty effect are presented, and the implications of the findings are discussed along with opportunities for future research.

This article explores the potential of a theoretical framework, based on social cognitive theory (SCT), to inspire future research into sustainable consumption. The SCT framework provides a dynamic perspective on sustainable consumption through exploring the interactive nature of personal, environmental and behavioral factors of consumption. The SCT framework, which builds on prior theoretical models of sustainable consumption, incorporates the concept of reciprocal determinism, wherein personal, environmental and behavioral factors create a feedback loop to influence each other. Two examples, toy sharing in New Zealand and water conservation in Australia, illustrate the dynamic nature of sustainable consumption and the potential of an SCT based framework to provide a more nuanced view of behavioral change in this context. From these two examples, several ideas for future research emerge to help illustrate the potential of SCT to inform and inspire the next wave of research on sustainable consumption.

By 2011, approximately 83% of Fortune 500 companies were using some form of social media to connect with consumers. Furthermore, surveys suggest that consumers are increasingly relying on social media to learn about unfamiliar brands. However, best practices regarding the use of social media to bolster brand evaluations in such situations remain undefined. This research focuses on one practice in this domain: the decision to hide or reveal the demographic characteristics of a brand's online supporters. The results from four studies indicate that even when the presence of these supporters is only passively experienced and virtual (a situation the authors term “mere virtual presence”), their demographic characteristics can influence a target consumer's brand evaluations and purchase intentions. The findings suggest a framework for brand managers to use when deciding whether to reveal the identities of their online supporters or to retain ambiguity according to (1) the composition of existing supporters relative to targeted new supporters and (2) whether the brand is likely to be evaluated singly or in combination with competing brands.

This research introduces product retention tendency, a consumer lifestyle trait characterized by an individual's propensity to retain consumption-related possessions. We develop a parsimonious measure of product retention tendency. Next, we report on the results of two studies designed to contrast product retention tendency with clinical compulsive hoarding, examining the relationships between these different types of keeping behavior as related to waste avoidance and product attachment tendencies. Three experimental studies examine the relationship between product retention tendency and the decision to retain versus relinquish different types of possessions, including used and in- need-of-repair durables, as well as perishable possessions.

Seeing others make the same decision we do does not always increase choice confidence or tell the whole story of social influence when consumers expect to have to publically discuss their choice and reasoning. Instead, consumers' confidence in their publically stated choices can be diminished if observed others make the same choice but justify the choice using different reasoning. This effect occurs because confidence in one's own reasoning is thrown into doubt, rather than due to a desire to affiliate with the observed other. These effects are eliminated in both private choice contexts and in rejection versus selection tasks.

Inquiry-based learning (IBL) is promoted as a teaching approach that can enhance student learning outcomes. IBL can be categorised according to scale (e.g. tasks, course/module/paper, degree), mode (structured, guided, open) and framing (information or discovery-oriented). Our research used a survey instrument to determine how student perceptions of learning processes and intended learning outcomes (ILOs) varied in response to courses with different modes and framing of IBL. The survey was completed by 940 students in 15 IBL courses across a range of disciplines and levels. All types of IBL courses were well rated by students for encouraging learning processes and ILOs congruent with a well-designed inquiry experience. Regarding modes of IBL, there was a clear hierarchy from open (most highly rated) to guided and then structured inquiry. For the framing of IBL, courses using discovery-oriented IBL were more highly rated than information-oriented IBL. Overall, the most highly rated course design was open, ...

This study involved a meta-analysis of 10 cases of inquiry-based learning (IBL) in undergraduate education to determine the factors which both enable and constrain its use. The enabling factors were found to include: teacher attributes – being student-centred, reflective but rebellious; course design attributes – questions stimulating learning, collaborative learning, progressive development of inquiry skills, required student preparation and constructive alignment; department and institutional attributes – IBL being more accepted if permeating a whole programme, the pivotal role of supportive senior management and assistance by staff developers. The major constraints were gaining philosophical buy-in to inquiry approaches; supporting transition to inquiry; developing self-reflection skills; and coping with varied assessment products. Departmental and institutional challenges included timetables and room allocation and the difficulty of recruiting teachers in a research intensive environment. Some strateg...

This case study explores student perceptions and experiences of advising at a New Zealand university. It considers the implications arising from the students’ responses and also investigates the influence of students’ demographic characteristics on perceptions of advice. Both first‐ (n = 191) and final‐ (n = 171) year cohorts of students were surveyed to determine why they chose particular courses, what advice they received and how aware they were of various support services. Although students were happy overall with the advice received, many had little or no expectations of the type of advice they should be receiving. The main sources of advice were the University enrolment pack, family and University School’s Liaison Officers. Academic advisers were less well used as a source of advice, even during later years of study. Advisers need to be educated about particular advising issues related to first‐generation students, part‐time students and international students. Many students had a career path in mind...

This study aimed to use a learning inventory (the Approaches and Study Skills Inventory for Students, ASSIST) to measure the impact of a curriculum change on students’ approaches to learning in two large courses in a health sciences first year programme. The two new Human Body Systems (HUBS) courses were designed to encourage students to take a deep approach to learning. ASSIST was completed by 599 students enrolled in a biology class in 2006 that was part of the old curriculum, and by 705 students at the beginning and end of the new HUBS courses in 2007. Changes in students’ approaches to learning over time were examined. The ASSIST scores for both HUBS courses reflected the dominance of a surface approach, followed by a strategic and then a deep approach. However, by the end of the year, students were taking a deep and strategic approach to their studies to a greater extent, and a surface approach to a lesser extent. Moreover, students enrolled in the new course adopted a deep approach to their studies to a significantly greater degree than those studying the old curriculum. Despite the predominance of a surface approach, the results suggest that it is possible to bring about small but significant positive changes in students’ learning behaviour in a very large class through curriculum change. The proportion of students preferring a surface approach, and results showing that high performance on the final exam was significantly correlated with a surface approach, probably reflected contextual factors, including assessment, and is the focus of ongoing curriculum development.

Across four studies, including one involving an actual monetary decision, the authors demonstrate that forming a product consideration set by excluding versus including alternatives induces consumers to place more weight on ethical attributes, such as company labor practices and animal testing. This nonnormative difference reflects a compatibility between exclusion and ethics, and it holds regardless of attribute framing or consumer emotion. The authors also find that consumers judge others’ behavior more negatively for excluding ethical products than for including ethical products. These results have implications for the marketing of ethical products, both specifically (e.g., it is important to encourage exclusion modes) and generally (e.g., the failure to consider ethical products may reflect seemingly minor contextual issues guiding the decision process and not consumer disinterest in ethical issues).

Consumers often make judgments about service providers based solely on their photograph (e.g., on a billboard, on the Internet) before interacting with them face-to-face. This first impression is important for marketers to understand because it influences service provider selection and evaluation. This research explores the nature and subsequent influence of initial judgments made from static images. The results of two studies indicate that (1) judgments based on nonverbal cues can be surprisingly accurate, particularly of personality traits relevant to the domain in which the target is being judged, and (2) initial nonverbal cues-based judgments influence subsequent judgments of a target’s actions.

Across four experiments, the authors find that when information pertaining to the assessment of the healthiness of food items is provided, the less healthy the item is portrayed to be, (1) the better is its inferred taste, (2) the more it is enjoyed during actual consumption, and (3) the greater is the preference for it in choice tasks when a hedonic goal is more (versus less) salient. The authors obtain these effects both among consumers who report that they believe that healthiness and tastiness are negatively correlated and, to a lesser degree, among those who do not report such a belief. The authors also provide evidence that the association between the concepts of “unhealthy” and “tasty” operates at an implicit level. The authors discuss possibilities for controlling the effect of the unhealthy = tasty intuition (and its potential for causing negative health consequences), including controlling the volume of unhealthy but tasty food eaten, changing unhealthy foods to make them less unhealthy but still tasty, and providing consumers with better information about what constitutes “healthy.”

Research has suggested that conscious cognitive processes mediate positive responses to promotions. In contrast, we find that exposure to promotional stimuli evokes a positive evaluative reaction spontaneously and that this reaction generalizes to products that are evaluated subsequently. Three experiments support our predictions and rule out alternative possibilities. Specifically, we find that promotions spontaneously evoke positive evaluative responses and that these responses mediate liking for a target product. Our findings also identify conditions under which promotion-generated evaluative responses are transferred to products unrelated to the promotion and indicate the type of product categories that are likely to produce this effect. The theoretical and substantive implications of this research are discussed.

This research shows that consumers who willfully ignore ethical product attributes denigrate other, more ethical consumers who seek out and use this information in making purchase decisions. Across three studies, willfully ignorant consumers negatively judge ethical others they have never met across various disparate personality traits (e.g., fashionable, boring). The denigration arises from the self-threat inherent in negative social comparison with others who acted ethically instead of choosing not to do so. In addition, this denigration has detrimental downstream consequences, undermining the denigrator's commitment to ethical values, as evidenced by reduced anger toward firms who violate the ethical principle in question and reduced intention to behave ethically in the future. There are two moderators of the effect: Denigration becomes less strong if willfully ignorant consumers have a second opportunity to act ethically after initially ignoring the ethical product information and also significantly weakens if initially ignoring the ethical attribute is seen as justifiable. These results have implications for understanding ethical consumption behavior, perceptions of ethical consumerism in general, and marketing of ethical products.

This longitudinal study investigated the relation between children's early use of symbols and their later understanding of representation and metarepresentation. The performance of 64 children on DeLoache's (1987) scale model task was measured at 30, 36, and 42 months, and their false belief understanding was measured at 42 and 48 months. Language and executive function measures were taken at each time point. Scale model performance was related to concurrent and subsequent false belief understanding, and scale model performance both predicted and was predicted by language across time. Language predicted false belief within and across time, and with increasing age it mediated the relation between success on the scale model task and false belief understanding. Although executive function was related to performance on scale model and theory of mind tasks, it did not mediate the relation between these. This study provides evidence suggesting that symbolic functioning, language, and theory of mind may form part of a single skill set underlying symbolic representation.

Organisation is a key factor for successful everyday adaptive functioning in schools. Although it is widely recognised that the school environment requires students to be organised if they are to be successful, particularly at the secondary school level, there is currently a lack of instruments available for measuring this construct. To address this, a new teacher report measure of student disorganisation behaviours in the secondary school environment was developed. Following a review of the literature and currently available instrumentation, three phases were implemented: focus-group interviews with primary and secondary teachers; a pilot test of the newly developed instrument to check face validity and item functioning; and an analysis of data from a large scale administration based on the Rasch measurement model. The outcome was a 23-item teacher report scale entitled the Student Disorganisation Scale.

Consumers increasingly inform one another about marketplace offerings in online review forums. The authors demonstrate that when given no information about a reviewer (i.e., when the reviewer's identity is ambiguous), consumers use an accessibility-based egocentric anchor to infer that ambiguous reviewers have similar tastes to their own, leading consumers to be (1) similarly persuaded by reviews written by ambiguous and similar reviewers and (2) more persuaded by reviews written by ambiguous reviewers than by reviews written by dissimilar reviewers. The authors demonstrate that this effect holds in a single-offering, single-reviewer context. The authors also show that when consumers are exposed to multiple offerings with multiple reviewers, there may be a slight “cost” to ambiguity as opposed to similarity but that ambiguity remains much more persuasive than dissimilarity. Finally, the authors demonstrate that the effects of egocentric anchoring on persuasion can be moderated, first, by making other-related thoughts accessible and, second, by providing external cues about potential reviewer heterogeneity. These findings have important implications for both the management and monitoring of consumer-to-consumer online communication.

Past research has shown the robustness of egocentric anchoring or false consensus effects (e.g., Naylor, Lamberton, and Norton; Ross, Greene, and House) primarily in situations where consumers adopt a cooperative or neutral stance toward one another. However, competition among consumers is a ubiquitous part of Western culture. Across five experiments in competitive contexts (either a dictator game or an online auction), interpersonal ambiguity leads to an inference of dissimilarity, rather than similarity. As a result, consumers compete as aggressively against ambiguous others as they do against dissimilar others. This effect occurs regardless of brand quality, seller reputation, or number of other competitors in the auction. A final study demonstrates that aggressiveness may be directed toward the seller rather than other bidders when sellers are ambiguous or dissimilar. This work therefore offers an important boundary condition for the operation of egocentric tendencies, highlighting the pervasive effect of competitive contexts on consumer behavior.