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International students in Australia risk financial insecurity and as a result, may make suboptimal health decisions. Limited research has explored the experiences of international students' health-related financial decision making. In-depth interviews were conducted with 31 international students to explore how financial situation influences their decisions in Australia. Data were thematically analysed. Findings highlight that limited income can impact overall wellbeing and health-related decision making. When making financial health-related decisions, participants prioritised urgent health needs and education. Participants who perceived their financial situation limited were less willing to spend money on mental health services, social activities, and food. This study suggests that students may consider the long-term financial benefits of studying abroad when making decisions, but they do not consider the long-term health implications of stress and wellbeing. Enabling students to improve their financial situation and lower their expenses could enhance wellbeing and facilitate health-related decision making.

Scholars in critical masculinities studies argue that we need men involved and engaged in gender equity movements for gender justice to be realised. Yet we need to know more about how different groups of men are understanding gender equity and what the barriers might be. Amidst significant media interest in elite private boys' schooling and its possible (re)production of sexist cultures, this paper explores how 13 men who attended such schools in Australia between the 1970s and the 2000s understand gender justice, revealing a diversity of positions and practices across the different generational groups. We argue the men's engagements with gender justice are shaped by a broad 'curriculum of privilege' including school and non-school based experiences that mediates their lives. Further research with both elite boys' schools and their alumni is needed to better understand generational change in their engagements with gender justice.

Enabling education programs in Australia assist students, who would otherwise have been excluded from higher education, to transition into undergraduate study. These programs emerged independently in response to the needs of individual universities and the varying cohorts of students they serve. The exclusion of these programs from the Australian Qualifications Framework (AQF) has meant they remain unregulated, with no national framework for standards. The development of academic standards is a dynamic, consensus driven process, and benchmarking provides a method through which academics from across institutions can work in partnership to reach shared understandings and improve and align practices. This practice report outlines the results of the first comprehensive cross-institutional benchmarking project involving nine Australian universities and demonstrates there is shared understanding of the standards of enabling programs between institutions. These findings will contribute to the establishment of national standards for enabling programs in Australia.

This paper investigates the preparation of Australian undergraduate university arts students for a life challenging arts-teaching and creative experience in Timor-Leste. It explores university teaching practice and how we may achieve better student experiences in preparation for their futures as teaching artists. This narrative inquiry research hears the voices of the students through their individual, personal stories. The emerging teaching artists articulate challenges, identify shifts in beliefs and values, and confirm skills that are transferable to cultural arts teaching contexts in the future. In all, the research has resulted in 46 recommendations, some minor, and some requiring more significant structural changes that affect course delivery. For the purposes of this paper, we reflect on and discuss three of the major findings and recommendations in the pedagogical, cultural, and artistic areas of the project implementation. As such, this paper represents a reflective analysis of some of the findings regarding curriculum design within this project.

In 2014, the Australian Government introduced the New Colombo Plan (NCP), whereby undergraduate students would become 'informal ambassadors' enhancing Australia's 'soft power' within the Asia-Pacific region. Participation by students, universities, host organisations and communities expanded rapidly before Australia's pandemic-driven closure of international borders. This hiatus has afforded a space for reflection upon the NCP, including the pivotal study tour supervisor role. Supervisors assume informal responsibilities beyond their formal roles, often in unfamiliar settings, with scarce recognition. Their assumption of responsibility is conceptualised here within a formal-informal spectrum, which underpins an evaluation of how the role might be accorded greater recognition.

The oral health of people with intellectual and developmental disability is poorer than that of the general community. Any solution for people with intellectual and developmental disability living in residential services needs to include disability support workers (DSWs). Previous studies have used either didactic or train-the-trainer approaches to enhance DSW knowledge and skills. Taking a different approach, a novel program used DSWs as embedded oral health champions. This model provided educational opportunities for DSWs to learn about good oral health and then share with peers and provide benefits to people with intellectual and developmental disability that they support. Interviews with a sample of these champions were conducted and analysed using content analysis. Findings suggest that DSWs are capable of affecting change with the right type and depth of training, management and organisational support. A DSW-led champions model has merit, however requires ongoing expert support to help maintain and sustain benefits over time.

The pandemic-induced suspension of international study tours in 2020 permits space within which to examine the specific role of the study tour supervisor and student learning. While there is a significant body of literature on student experiences, relatively little attention has been devoted to the supervisor's role. Drawing on a first-hand account by a nurse educator on Australia's New Colombo Plan (NCP) international study tour program, this paper reveals the role's shifting complexities and uncertainties. This discussion provides the basis from which to explore the dynamics of supervisor-student relationships within unfamiliar overseas settings. The original Grand Tour, particularly the advice provided by Sir Francis Bacon in the early 17th century, serves as a frame of reference against which to evaluate the experiences shared by supervisors and students on international study tours. The frequently hazardous situations they face together required them to assume increasing responsibilities. The paper assesses the strategic and theoretical implications arising from this exercise of responsibility, which is grounded in nursing ethics and the goals of public health.

Early alert systems (EAS) are an important technological tool to help manage and improve student retention. Data spanning 16,091 students over 156 weeks was collected from a regionally based university in Australia to explore various microeconometric approaches that establish links between EAS and student retention outcomes. Controlling for numerous confounding variables, significant relationships between the EAS and student retention were identified. Capturing dynamic relationships between the explanatory variables and the hazard of discontinuing provides new insight into understanding student retention factors. We concluded that survival models are the best methods of understanding student retention when temporal data is available.

This paper reports on the implementation of a Teaching Performance Assessment (TPA), a component of graduation recently introduced into the teaching workforce in Australia. The TPA typically requires graduates to demonstrate that they can plan, implement, assess and reflect on a series of lessons given to school students. This case study used grounded theory to analyse the initial implementation of a TPA at an Australian university, based on interviews, student focus groups, and a classroom readiness survey. We investigated the TPA's contribution to final-year pre-service teachers' learning and professional readiness. We conclude that the TPA, as a threshold task, is broadly beneficial to the profession and graduating teachers, and may strengthen professional bonds between schools and universities. We also warn of TPA-related fragilities and its potential to reinforce populist notions of 'teaching as telling' and to test surface-level quiz-knowledge to the exclusion of deeper, attitudinal learning outcomes.

This paper reports on the first stage of an international comparative study for the project "'Digital educational architectures: Open learning resources in distributed learning infrastructures--EduArc,'" funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Research. This study reviews the situation of digital educational resources (or (O)ER) framed within the digital transformation of ten different Higher Education (HE) systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey and the United States). Following a comparative case study approach, we investigated issues related to the existence of policies, quality assurance mechanisms and measures for the promotion of change in supporting infrastructure development for (O)ER at the national level in HE in the different countries. The results of this mainly documentary research highlight differences and similarities, which are largely due to variations in these countries' political structure organisation. The discussion and conclusion point at the importance of understanding each country's context and culture, in order to understand the differences between them, as well as the challenges they face.

Limited empirical research has investigated the impact of interdisciplinary STEM approaches on students' learning with a particular dearth in the area of assessment. A lack of alignment between interdisciplinary approaches in STEM teaching and its assessment strategies is notable. In this study, we adopt an inquiry approach to the ways in which interdisciplinary learning of science and mathematics impacted on student learning through the use of a STEM challenge that involved a real-world task. Two secondary school teachers, one who teaches science and the other mathematics, participated in the study and jointly planned and taught a sequence of science and mathematics lessons using an interdisciplinary approach to their Year 8 class of 24 students over several weeks. Data of students' project reports, video of their project presentation, and teacher interviews were analysed to identify the intersection of disciplinary specific and generic skills in assessment practice of an interdisciplinary task. Our findings highlight the importance of having an assessment rubric with criteria that addressed both disciplinary specific skills as well as generic STEM skills.

Within political philosophy and particularly in the work of Chantal Mouffe and Hannah Arendt, "agonism" has been described as representing the notion of being able to challenge and dissent in a productive way. However, little is known about how agonism is used in the educational literature, other than some applications relevant to democratic education. This paper considers the use of agonism in the educational literature drawing on the findings of a systematic scoping review exploring how it has been used in the context of education. Five databases were searched for literature published using agonism within the context of education to map the existing body of work in a systematic fashion, and to explore how agonism has been differently conceptualised and utilised by researchers in the field of education. The findings suggest that there have been a range of attempts to apply agonistic principles in different educational sub-fields (including, citizenship education, early years education, initial teacher training, arts education and international education), and different interpretations of such principles into education based on different philosophical underpinnings (dissociative and associative approaches). As agonism is mostly explored in a theoretical way, we also discuss the potential of abstract theoretical agonistic principles from different philosophical traditions to be translated into meaningful practical applications for education in order to inform curriculum development, infuse democratic principles into classroom practice, and help to negotiate deep-running tensions amongst key stakeholders in education.

Despite a significant number of international graduates staying in the host countries on post-graduation visas, their experiences in gaining access to the host labour market are less documented. This article addresses this critical but under-researched topic. It discusses the ecological circumstances impacting international graduates' participation in the Australian host labour market, including the temporality of their visas, employers' concerns, constraints of the market, time issue and bargaining position. Drawing on agency theory, the study shows two forms of agency enacted by international graduates in navigating the host market: needs-response agency, entailing their choice of field, persistence, and early job-seeking, and agency as becoming, entailing their professional identity development to become more employable. The study found the following common strategies adopted by international graduates: proactively explaining their work rights to employers, using alternative job search channels, reskilling, evidencing their professional skills, undertaking internships, networking and creating jobs for themselves and other peers. The study offered fresh insights into international graduates' career adaptive behaviours, job-seeking skills and career management skills.

Open Educational Resources (OER) in higher education cannot be put into practice without considering institutional contexts, which differ not only globally but also within the same country. Each institutional context provides educators with opportunities or limitations where Open Educational Practices (OEP) and OER for teaching and learning are involved. As part of a broader research project, and as a follow-up to national perspectives, an international comparison was conducted, based on institutional cases of nine different higher education systems (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain, Turkey). Aspects regarding the availability of infrastructure and institutional policies for OER, as well as the existence of measures directed at OER quality assurance and at the promotion of the development and use of OER were covered. The resulting theoretical contribution sheds light on an international comparative view of OER and points towards country-specific trends, as well as differences among institutions. These aspects could provide an impetus for the development of institutional guidelines and measures. In line with international literature on the topic, recommendations are derived to promote/enhance the use of OER in teaching and learning in higher education at the institutional level.

Engaging students in the creation of learning resources is an effective way of developing a repository of revision items. However, a selection process is needed to separate high- from low-quality resources as some of the materials created by students can be ineffective, inappropriate or incorrect. In this study, we share our experiences and findings in incorporating three approaches for peer evaluation of student-generated content, using an educational technology called RiPPLE which supports learner sourcing of study materials. All approaches asked students to score peer-developed resources, rate their confidence in that judgment and to provide written feedback or justification of their evaluation to the resource's author. The first approach provided no guidance to scoring. The second supplied a simple instructor-developed rubric for scoring. The third utilised a simple data-informed rubric incorporating criteria derived from thematic analysis of students' comments provided in the first two conditions. The analysis of 8,213 evaluations of student-generated content from 813 students shows that the data-informed rubric produced more rigorous evaluations, higher agreement in scores but lower student confidence in the accuracy of their assessments. The analysis of comments shows that students went beyond the criteria supplied in the rubrics and applied their own understanding of resource quality.

This study explored potential influence of a text-based program for fathers of children on the autism spectrum. Fathers (N = 184) were recruited through autism services across Australia. Participants received messages focusing on five domains: (a) relationships with parenting partner; (b) formal support; (c) father-child interaction; (d) understanding autism; and, (e) coping. Surveys explored parenting stress, co-parenting quality and autism-specific parenting self-efficacy. Eighty-eight percent completed the program, 43.6% completed pre and post surveys. There was significant reduction in parenting stress (p < 0.01) and increase in autism-specific parenting self-efficacy (p < 0.01). Effect sizes indicate these may be clinically meaningful. This highly scalable intervention has potential to influence factors that shape and sustain relationships fathers share with their children on the autism spectrum, families and services.

This paper explores faculty's perspectives and use of open educational resources (OER) and their repositories across different countries by conducting a multiple case study to find similarities and differences between academics' awareness, perceptions and use of OER, as well as examining related aspects of institutional policy and quality that may influence individual views. Data were collected through nine expert reports on each country studied (Australia, Canada, China, Germany, Japan, South Africa, South Korea, Spain and Turkey) and were analyzed through qualitative content analysis using thematic coding. Findings show the impact on individual OER adoption with regard to the individual control of diverse factors by faculty members; of institutional policies and quality measures on the externally determined factors (by the institution); and of institutional professional development and provision of incentives in more internally determined factors (by the faculty members themselves). These findings carry implications for higher education institutions around the world in their attempt to boost OER adoption by faculty members.

This paper details the gendered oppressions of young female teachers in three elite boys' private schools in Australia. Drawing on Foucauldian analytics and the theory of practice architectures, we explore the discourses and practices that work together to silence and disempower female teachers in these schools. There is an unevenness in these accounts, as there are also female teachers in the study who appear to successfully circumnavigate these issues. However, this apparent wherewithal of some female teachers speaks to the internalisations of gender oppression as much as it does to the teachers' agency. This paper illuminates these gender oppressions, which are made possible because they remain hidden and unchallenged. The findings of this study raise thorny issues for school-based leadership, but also for educational policy-makers, because gender oppression is seemingly inextricable from the social practices that elite private boys' schools both advocate and rely on for positional advantage in schooling markets.

In this paper we provide an evaluative description and report of the various aspects of teaching and learning Greek as a heritage and/or foreign language in the Northern Territory of Australia. Initially, we focus on the importance of the formation of dynamic learning communities through interdisciplinary collaboration. The main purpose of Charles Darwin University's "Greek In-Country Study Program" is to support the learning of Greek language and culture through language lessons as well as concurrent cultural activities that are delivered while students are in Greece. After thirteen years of successful implementation of the program, the purpose of this report is to highlight the learning activities that have been completed over these years through a discussion of the research outcomes of the students' experiences that we believe will underscore the important roles that language, literature, and culture play in the strengthening of one's Greek identify while living within Australia. Within this framework, basic principles of design and the use of cross-university teaching and learning programs for the Greek language are presented, as well as foregrounding the advantages of current information technology for instructional purposes and, in particular, the maintenance, and perhaps even revival of heritage languages as well as reinforcing their contributions to the role of education in the diaspora.

Rubrics have been suggested as a means to foster students' evaluative judgement, the capacity to appraise their own work and that of others; however, empirical evidence of rubrics' effectiveness is still emerging. This paper contributes findings from a randomised controlled experiment on the effect of rubrics on evaluative judgement. Participants were randomly assigned to one of two groups: a control group which evaluated peer-authored learning resources without the use of a rubric and an experiment group which carried out the evaluation using a three-item rubric based on (1) alignment with course content, (2) accuracy and (3) clarity. Both groups were asked to rate their confidence and provide comments to justify their scoring. The results showed a small effect size in increasing average agreement on the quality of learning resources in the experiment group. Analysis of comments reveals that criteria in and beyond the rubric guided participants' ratings of quality. The study provides evidence of the impact of rubrics on students' evaluative judgement and an example of how data-driven approaches and learning analytics can inform actionable design choices for embedding pedagogically supported strategies derived from the literature into actively operating educational technologies.

Engineering tertiary courses that reflect professional activity mandate the successful application of theorems and concepts in order to solve technical problems. This graduate skill is typically assessed during student problem-solving activities. Furthermore, both collaborative learning and the interactive study method known as self-explanation have been identified, by researchers, as techniques that enhance student learning. In the reported longitudinal study, students shared their solutions to problem-solving exercises with a version of self-explanation in a collaborative environment. The research investigated the effects of the intervention on student outcomes as reflected in their assessment results. In 2013, the weekly tutorial content, for a first-year electronics course, was reworked with a focus on problem-solving activities. During these sessions the students were engaged by asking them to share electronically, or via a document camera, their prepared solutions to problems that should have been attempted prior to attending. The data collected included the scores these students obtained for each of the assessable components for the course in semester one 2013, 2014, 2016 and semester two in 2016. This data were analyzed by comparing results with those of the 2012 cohort. Week-by-week tutorial attendances showed similar trending in all semesters. The mean total mark, mean exam mark and the mean laboratory mark consistently maintained improvement over those of 2012; while the mean tutorial participation mark and the mean assignment mark were consistently worse (except for the 2014 cohort) than the corresponding ones for 2012.

'Inclusive pedagogies' have been recommended as an approach for addressing increased student diversity in the university classroom. However, to date, no research has sought to map the field of inclusive pedagogies in higher education (HE) to establish how researchers have conceptualised and investigated this phenomenon. In this systematic scoping review, five databases were searched for literature published on the topic of inclusive pedagogies in HE. The findings suggest that HE researchers do not share a common understanding of inclusive pedagogies. We argue that inconsistency and fragmentation in perceptions of inclusive pedagogies is the result of inclusion itself being a philosophically contested matter; and that this needs to be reflected in the way that inclusive pedagogies are discussed in HE -- even if this goes against current performative and market-driven trends that emphasise quick fixes over acknowledging the complexity of pedagogic issues.

Australian higher education institutions have focused on attrition rates with increased vigour in light of the introduction of a new student success metric tied to attrition rates. Online programs have been of particular concern given persistently high attrition rates, being roughly double that of programs delivered either face-to-face or in blended online/face-to-face mode. This study considers attrition theory as it has evolved for the online environment with particular reference to the role of external risk factors such as employment, and internal factors, such as social integration. The study presents data from a 2018 survey of students enrolled in a fully online law school program at an Australian university (n = 203). The data reveals a cohort with an array of external attrition risk factors, who are not only time poor but experience a strong sense of isolation. The study contributes to the attrition literature by providing insights into effective educational design and delivery aimed at student retention.

Educators around the world have been challenged to adapt their teaching and pastoral care rapidly in response to the coronavirus pandemic. In this article, we, the academic members of the Chemistry Education and Communication Research Theme (CECR) from the School of Chemistry at the University of Sydney, reflect on the challenges and successes over the course of this most unusual semester. We have included discussions on the specific tools and techniques we employed, in light of the available literature, across the range of modes in which we teach, including lectures, tutorials, and laboratories. As many of us prepare to begin or continue teaching, we hope the experiences and lessons we have learned can offer some assistance to our disciplinary colleagues around the world.

Despite enduring and unacceptable disparities in health outcomes for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Australians as well as people living in rural and remote locations, evidence indicates that health services are not routinely evaluated. This article describes an exploration of a context where evaluators and community partners have achieved considerable success in implementing and sustaining ongoing monitoring and evaluation for enhanced service effectiveness in rural and underserved communities of New Hampshire. The purpose of this project was to establish the principles supporting this success and to set the stage for future research investigating the applicability of these principles to the remote Australian context. Semistructured interviews were conducted with 15 people from different organizations and in different positions within those organizations. The results invite a reconsideration of the way in which evidence-based practice is conceptualized as well as the role of external evaluators. The study has important implications and recommendations for both policy and practice.

We present ideas about concepts underlying climate change, held by students in years 9 and 10. Misconceptions about climate change are common among students, and may be due to misconceptions about underlying concepts. To investigate this, we developed the Climate Change Concept Inventory (CCCI), and trialed it with 229 students; corroborating findings through focus group interviews. Our interview method and data analysis methods are described. Findings included overestimation of human contributions to atmospheric carbon inputs, ultra violet radiation in sunlight, and greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. Students were unaware that CO2 dissolves in water, and of the role of oceans in the carbon cycle. Greenhouse gases other than CO2 were rarely known. Earth's energy balance and black body radiation were not well understood. There were misconceptions about interactions between electromagnetic radiation and atmospheric gases; and limited understanding of carbon chemistry. The CCCI is available from the corresponding author.

Previous work at Monash University has shown that students recognise that inquiry-, problem-, context- and industry-based experiments were better contextualised, more open to decision making and aided in the development of scientific and transferable skills. This study investigated whether these gains persisted over a longer time scale, rather than just after the completion of a given experiment. Student focus groups were conducted at the completion of units (sometimes known as a course) in which more than half of the laboratory experiments were redesigned. Annual surveys were distributed to monitor students' perceptions of the aims of teaching laboratories, and their expectations of their own behaviour. The findings indicated that the previously noted positive outcomes were still evident at the end of a semester. The annual survey showed that whilst 2nd year students were able to appreciate the real world context of the experiments, 3rd year students did not. Overall, the large-scale changes away from expository experiments had a positive impact on student enjoyment and perceived skill development but only when meaningful proportions of the experiments were redesigned. It would appear that the continuing existence of many expository experiments undermined the students' perceptions of the benefits gained by the new laboratory experiments.

In a competitive international education market, the opportunity to gain post-study work experience in the host country is one of the key drivers of international students' decision making and critical to education export, especially in top destination countries, such as Australia, Canada, the UK and US. Understanding the impacts of post-study work for international graduates is crucial for both host countries' international student recruitment and employment agendas and their ethical commitment to delivering on promise to the international cohort. Drawing on analysis of government policies and in-depth interview data, this study provides evidence about the effects of the post-study work policy in Australia. The overarching view from international graduates indicates that the temporary graduate visa does not seem to provide them with a competitive advantage in the Australian labour market as employers either are unclear about this visa or hesitate to recruit those on this visa. However, the visa brings multiple side benefits, including the chance to round off their employability skills, improve their English proficiency, and get a return on investment in overseas study. Many international graduates see the post-study work visa as a pathway to permanent residency despite the fact that visa reforms have broken the direct education-migration pathway.

Older adults' engagement with information communication technology (ICT) can enhance their wellbeing and quality of life. However, older adults continue to lag behind their younger cohorts' ICT use, and many remain unconnected. While policy and strategy has tended to focus on the need to equip older adults with technology skills and improve their digital literacy, the relationship between skills adoption of technologies is not straightforward. This study sought to investigate via case study the diverse digital experiences and motivations of 10 older adults within a regional area of Queensland, Australia. Through "questerviews," the integration of questionnaire items (on technology acceptance models) and semi-structured interview questions, the participants relayed their frustrations, successes, strategies, tools and connections they needed in order to use ICT more extensively and more effectively. What these data showed were older adults with varying degrees of ICT skills and diverse motivations, from complete yet passionate beginner, through to others who were considered savvy users. Higher levels of digital skills and literacy did not necessarily equate to increased engagement with ICT for all participants in this study, rather a range of motivational processes mattered. Implications are considered for technology training and learning for older adults.

While poor parental bonding has been linked with psychological distress, few studies have assessed bonding with mothers and fathers separately among adolescents and whether there are gender differences in the relationships between bonding and psychological distress. Additionally, low self-esteem has been shown to predict psychological distress, but low self-esteem may develop as a result of poor bonding with parental figures. We explored the relationships between (a) perceived maternal and paternal bonding factors and (b) psychological distress, and examined whether self-esteem mediated these relationships in a non-clinical sample of 337 adolescents (aged 13-17 years, M = 14.17, 50.6% female) in Canberra, Australia. Relative to males, females reported lower levels of self-esteem and higher levels of psychological distress. For females, low self-esteem and perceived maternal or paternal rejection predicted higher levels of psychological distress, whereas low self-esteem predicted psychological distress for males. Implications for future research and further considerations are discussed.

Variation in marks awarded, alongside quality of feedback, is an issue whenever large-scale assessment is undertaken. In particular, variation between sessional teaching staff has been studied for decades resulting in many recorded efforts to overcome this issue. Attempts to curtail variation range from moderation meetings, extended training programmes, electronic tools, automated feedback or even audio/video feedback. Decreased marking variation was observed whenever automated marking was used, potentially due to less academic judgment being used by the markers. This article will focus on a case study of three interventions undertaken at Monash University that were designed to address concerns around the variability of marking and the feedback between sessional teaching staff employed in the chemistry teaching laboratories. The interventions included the use of detailed marking criteria, Excel marking spreadsheets and automated marked Moodle reports. Results indicated that more detailed marking criteria had no effect whilst automated processes caused a consistent decrease. This was attributed to a decrease in the academic judgment markers were expected to use. Only the Excel spreadsheet ensured the provision of consistent feedback to students. Sessional teaching staff commented that their marking loads were reduced and the new methods were easy to use.

The presence of International Baccalaureate (IB) programmes in Australia has grown significantly over the past decade. Despite this, little critical research exists on the IB in Australia. This article provides an analysis of the IB currently in Australia, outlining the trends in growth across the various IB programmes over the last decade and compares this to international trends, including those of the Asia-Pacific region in which Australia is located. This profile is then contrasted against the profile of research that has been conducted into the IB in Australia during this same period. A discrepancy is apparent between implementation of the IB and critical analysis of that implementation. Much of IB practice in Australia therefore remains unresearched. Suggestions for future research to address this discrepancy are offered.

How students behave and learn in the teaching laboratory is a topic of great interest in chemical education, partly in order to justify the great expense of teaching laboratories. Much effort has been put into investigating how students think, feel and physically act in these unique learning environments. One such attempt was made through the generation and utilisation of the Meaningful Learning in the Laboratory Instrument (MLLI). This 30 question survey utilised Novak's theory of Meaningful Learning to investigate the affective, cognitive and psychomotor domains of the student learning experience. To date, this survey has been used to great effect to measure how students' perception of their own feelings and actions will change over the course of a semester. This study reports the use of a modified MLLI survey to probe how the expectations of students change over their undergraduate degree. To increase the generalisability of the outcomes of the study data was gathered from four universities from Australia (Monash University, the University of New South Wales and the University of Sydney) and the UK (the University of Warwick). Students were found to start their university careers with very positive expectations of their teaching laboratory experiences. Their outlook became somewhat more negative each year that they were enrolled in the program. A further modified MLLI survey was presented to teaching associates and academic staff. Teaching staff were shown to have far more negative expectations of the students' feelings and actions, with academic staff more likely to believe that students do not undertake many items of positive meaningful learning. Overall, this study highlights the large gap between the expectations of teaching staff and students which, if left unaddressed, will likely continue to cause great frustration for both teaching staff and students.

This article is based on a multi-site study of teachers in elite private schools in Australia. Teachers' accounts from this study bring nuance to the reasons one might short-handedly expect they have in working for these exclusive institutions. It is not that everyday motivations don't matter, for example, the financial compensations, the beautiful grounds and the status payoffs, but that teachers bring their own discourses, histories and intentions to bear on the contradictions of their work-lives. This is crucial evidence for understanding how privilege functions, how teachers are not simply co-opted or constrained. Instead, this article brings into view the agency of teachers who embrace privilege in spite of thorny questions around educational inequality that elite private schools cannot avoid.

This paper examines formations of the 'self' as a wise leader at both personal and professional levels. Drawing on Aristotle and theories of reflective and experiential learning, the possibility of cultivating wisdom through an experience of a leadership course, provided at the University of Melbourne for PhD candidates, is explored. Applying an autoethnographic methodology, a reflexive account of a doctoral student who experienced this programme is narrated to explore the (re)construction of a wiser 'self'. A synthesis of multiple points of personal and collective judgements, decision-making and performative actions leads to promising implications for future research, and for deeper pedagogical practices in leadership programmes.

The evolution of teachers' identities in Australia highlights the struggles between state and civic over the control of schooling and also the contingent nature of the teacher identity itself. A genealogical analysis of this history makes visible these contingencies, but more importantly suggests that little reckoning has been afforded to teachers' agency within these social struggles. This gap in understandings of teacher identity, as even potentially agentic, highlights the need for a more nuanced understanding of teachers and their transformative potential. In particular, it calls for a focus on teachers within elite private schools because these costly schools are highly influential as the aspirational model for schooling provision. If teachers' agency in these neoliberalised spaces were possible, if they could be empowered in their stewardship of the educational enterprise, then their activation would be crucial in any wider reform effort.

The recent deployment of new satellite-based hyperspectral imaging sensors, along with advances in classification methods, has enhanced the acquisition of information on the spatiotemporal patterns of Land Use/Land Cover (LULC).. With this context, the study presented in this paper seeks to assess the combined utilization of the Pixxel's technology demonstrator hyperspectral satellite mission with the Support Vector Machines (SVM) and Random Forest (RF) machine learning classifiers for LULC mapping in an agricultural area located in Queensland, Australia. Accuracy assessment of the resulting LULC maps has been done based on relevant classification accuracy metrics. It has been observed that SVMs outperformed RF in terms of both overall classification and urban vegetation cover mapping accuracy. An overall accuracy of 92.34% with kappa of 0.90 was reported for the SVMs' results, whereas for RF, the accuracy was 89.65% with 0.89 kappa, respectively. Both classifiers produced similar results for the classes of mango tree and sugarcane crops, whereas minor differences were observed in the depiction of water bodies and artificial surfaces. Our study findings provide insightful perspectives on the potential of Pixxel datasets for delineating the spatiotemporal distribution of LULC in agricultural landscapes, showcasing Pixxel's hyperspectral sensors' promising potential in this field. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Social networking offers teachers and learners exciting opportunities to communicate. Web 2.0 and its synchronous communications platforms provide new avenues for teachers to deliver curriculum and facilitate learning. Further, they provide new avenues for students to engage and intensify their own learning. Being able to chat in real-time with a teacher, usually via face-to-face discussions, is something that many students studying in on-campus (or day) mode take for granted, and is something that distance or off-campus students are generally unable to experience. In the evolving, flexible-learning tertiary environment, viable and effective computer mediated communication (CMC) alternatives to face-to-face teaching need to be explored. These alternatives will only work if they prove useful to students. This article considers student reactions to social media as a teaching tool, probing its benefits and limitations. Over the course of a semester, third year on- and off-campus students communicated with an academic, outside lecture times, via the social networking site facebook[R]. Students were allowed to ask any questions they had that related to the unit. At the end of the semester students were provided with a 10-item questionnaire asking them to evaluate their experience. This study looked at a specific aspect of social networking--synchronous text-based chat--and the students' perceptions of its usefulness for their learning.

This study examined the effect of age-correction on IQ scores among preterm school-aged children. Data from the Flinders Medical Centre Neonatal Unit Follow-up Program for 81 children aged five years and assessed with the WPPSI-III, and 177 children aged eight years and assessed with the WISC-IV, were analysed. Corrected IQ scores were significantly higher than not-corrected IQ scores (Full Scale IQ and all indices) for both the WPPSI-III and WISC-IV. The use of age-corrected IQ scores has the potential to exclude some children from support services. (Contains 4 tables and 2 figures.)

This paper reports on an investigation of student engagement with e-learning, using practitioner reflection as a lens. Five e-learning practitioners each provided a case study from their teaching, which was the focus of practitioners' reflective accounts. Each of the practitioners had used e-learning as a way of promoting both learning and engagement in their classrooms, and while the contexts in which they worked were varied, there were some emergent similarities in their experiences. The practitioners' reflections show that e-learning is used as a tool to promote various types of engagement from engineering students; indeed, students' engagement in some cases evolved beyond that which the practitioners had intended or anticipated. While the intended outcomes were certainly achieved, other emergent changes in student engagement were reported by the practitioners.

Although Bandura had proposed that self-efficacy once established is relatively stable, it remains a topic of debate, as empirical evidence has shown different patterns of changes in self-efficacy across different career stages. The current study presents longitudinal data from 74 beginning school teachers in Victoria, Australia to discern changes during their first five years. Their increase in self-efficacy is discussed with reference to existing (primarily cross-sectional) studies, and policy implications for supporting early career teachers.