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It has long been recognised that a key element in improving student transition, retention and success in higher education is cross-institutional consistency and unity of action among disparate academic, policy and support units. However, transferring this principle into practice often requires overcoming departmental silos, negotiating shared understandings of key concepts, and establishing patterns of cross-institutional collaboration in spaces where this may have been lacking. This study examines the effect of a program of supported communities of practice among teaching academics that sought to improve the culture of learning and teaching in a large science, health and engineering faculty in an Australian university. We found indications that these communities of practice promoted collaboration by functioning as loci of cross-institutional consultation and coordination, providing the basis for an enhanced student experience. We interpret this finding through the lens of Bronfenbrenner's ecological model of development, and propose an approach based on academic communities of practice as a way of building cross-institutional unity of action and making the student experience everybody's business.

Students, the public, and government expect university graduates to find meaningful employment and contribute to the economic and social prosperity of society. Universities have a responsibility to support students to develop their career management skills. An assessed career research module was embedded into a second-year human physiology subject taken by students in health-science related undergraduate STEM degrees. Students conducted research on the logistics of entering their preferred career, the Australian labour market for this career, and the transferable skills and personal attributes required. They communicated their learnings in a video and completed reflection activities comprised of Likert-scale and open-ended questions. The aims of this study were to determine students': (1) ability to research the logistics of entering their preferred career and the labour market; (2) perceptions of the most important skills and attributes for their preferred career, and development of these; (3) perceptions of module activities and career planning, and perceived career management skills. To address the aims of the study, 265 student videos and reflection activities were analysed. Results indicate that the module supported students in gaining career management skills that were a focus of the curriculum. Most students identified their current university course as the main way they were developing important skills and attributes, with their course, volunteering and further study the main ways they planned to continue skill and attribute development. In conclusion, a career research module is an effective career development tool for students in a range of undergraduate courses.

Core concepts in physiology, designed by physiology educators to promote improved learning and teaching, have existed for over a decade. This study aimed to investigate the extent to which a set of 15 core concepts of physiology (developed by Michael and McFarland, U.S.-based educators) are reflected in the learning outcomes (LOs) of units (subjects) comprising physiology curricula in Australian universities. From publicly accessible online information, we identified 17 Australian universities that offered a physiology major for undergraduate degree students and downloaded 788 LOs from the 166 units that comprised the majors. Each LO was blindly mapped against the 15 core concepts by 8 physiology educators from 3 Australian universities. Additionally, text-matching software was employed to match keywords and phrases (identified as descriptors of the 15 core concepts) against the LOs. The frequency of individual words and two-word phrases for each core concept was calculated and ranked. There was variability in rating LOs for the same university among academic mappers; nevertheless, many of the 15 core concepts did not appear to be adequately covered in the LOs. Two core concepts most matched manually were in the top three most mapped by the software. These were, from most common, structure/function and interdependence. Our findings suggest a lack of alignment of LOs with the core concepts across Australian physiology curricula. This highlights the need for Australia-wide agreement on a set of core concepts in physiology as the first step in collaboratively improving assessment and learning and teaching practice in physiology.

Realising the full potential for educational technologies to improve the student experience is a challenge for higher education institutions. Although academic resistance is often blamed for poor dissemination of teaching technologies, recent literature has more satisfactorily framed the issue in terms of intransigent organisational culture. Features of higher education organisational culture that are conducive to innovation include senior executive support, freedom to experiment and permission to fail and interdisciplinary and cross-institutional engagement. One approach to changing organisational culture is to establish new organisational structures embodying positive traits. This study qualitatively evaluated a technology in teaching innovators group established in 2018 in a science, health and engineering faculty of an Australian university; it provides evidence that the group improved the culture of teaching technology innovation by creating a safe space for innovation, which members then disseminated into their departmental communities. The study also found that the group created a forum for teaching technology innovators to engage with stakeholders in the university's learning and teaching and information and communication technology units, leading to improved outcomes for the university's learning environment.

Purpose: Children with hearing loss (HL), including those with hearing aids (HAs) and cochlear implants (CIs), often have difficulties contrasting words like "beach" versus "peach" and "dog" versus "dock" due to challenges producing systematic voicing contrasts. Even when acoustic contrasts are present, these may not be perceived as such by others. This can cause miscommunication, leading to poor self-esteem and social isolation. Acoustic evidence is therefore needed to determine if these children have established distinct voicing categories before entering school and if misperceptions are due to a lack of phonological representations or due to a still-maturing implementation system. The findings should help inform more effective early intervention. Method: Participants included 14 children with HL (eight HA users, five CI users, and one bimodal) and 20 with normal hearing, all English-speaking preschoolers. In an elicited imitation task, they produced consonant-vowel-consonant minimal pair words that contrasted voicing in word-initial (onset) or word-final (coda) position at all three places of articulation (PoAs). Results: Overall, children with HL showed acoustically distinct voicing categories for both onsets and codas at all three PoAs. Contrasts were less systematic for codas than for onsets, as also confirmed by adults' perceptual ratings. Conclusions: Preschoolers with HL produce acoustic differences for voiced versus voiceless onsets and codas, indicating distinct phonological representations for both. Nonetheless, codas were less accurately perceived by adult raters, especially when produced by CI users. This suggests a protracted development of the phonetic implementation of codas, where CI users, in particular, may benefit from targeted intervention.

While voicing contrasts in word-onset position are acquired relatively early, much less is known about how and when they are acquired in word-coda position, where accurate production of these contrasts is also critical for distinguishing words (e.g., dog vs. dock). This study examined how the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts are realized in the speech of 4-year-old Australian English-speaking children. The results showed that children used similar acoustic cues to those of adults, including longer vowel duration and more frequent voice bar for voiced stops, and longer closure and burst durations for voiceless stops along with more frequent irregular pitch periods. This suggests that 4-year-olds have acquired productive use of the acoustic cues to coda voicing contrasts, though implementations are not yet fully adult-like. The findings have implications for understanding the development of phonological contrasts in populations for whom these may be challenging, such as children with hearing loss.

There has been significant interest in developing academics through Teaching Scholar Development Programs across the USA, Canada, the UK, and more recently in Australia. At their core, such programs develop academics across teaching scholarship, leadership, promotion, and award opportunities, where universities reap the benefits of developing such a cadre of leaders. This paper pays witness to one such a program in an Australian university to highlight enactments of caring passionately. We use qualitative survey evaluation data, metaphor analysis and reflective practice to nuance the pleasures, passions and challenges of the lived experiences using phenomenological and metaphor lenses to describe our experiences. Metaphors provide powerful insights into the dimensions of experience as they open up how programs are perceived and experienced. Our paper disrupts traditional linear writing through rhizomatic, multivocal and multitextual encounters to challenge dominant authorial voicing. The academic identity work and emotional work required in the program is unfolded through evolving, experiencing and reflecting on the program to inform design and highlight what we have come to (re)value in our academic work when we come together to learn, share, and lead. We forge ways to be and become with and against neoliberal agendas that have choked the soul of 'the university' to evolve rich spaces and practices of/for reciprocity and kindness where not only learning can thrive, but where "love acts" -- a much needed "revolutionary praxis" for our time.

In 2011, the Department of Human Biosciences introduced two physiology capstone subjects as part of the Design for Learning Project at La Trobe University. Consistent with the project, the aims of these subjects were to provide an effective culmination point for the Bachelor of Health Science course and to offer students orientation to opportunities for further study, employment and career development. The aim of this paper is to provide an overview of the skills-related assessment tasks of the newly introduced capstone program and an evaluation of the capstone program based on student performance and feedback scores in conjunction with staff perceptions. The skills-related assessment tasks were designed to facilitate the development of research skills and graduate capabilities such as writing, speaking, creative problem-solving, inquiry/research and team work. Student performance determined by mean scores on the skills-based assessment tasks ranged from A to C. Final grades were significantly higher (p less than 0.01) in 2011 when compared with final grades in 2010 and 2009. Students reported that the skills-based assessments contributed to their learning and skill development and satisfaction level was high. Staff noted a higher degree of student-centred learning, a vastly increased workload and a greater need for infrastructure services and support staff. Universities and departments should therefore consider staff and resource requirements when implementing curriculum that has a student-centred approach. In conclusion, the revised curriculum successfully promoted the development of research skills and graduate capabilities, thereby leading to work-readiness and/or entry to graduate studies in the Health and Biological Sciences. (Contains 4 tables and 3 figures.)

A fully flipped mode teaching approach is challenging for students in advanced engineering courses, because of demanding pre-class preparation load, due to the complex and analytical nature of the topics. When this is applied to large classes, it brings an additional complexity in terms of promoting the intended active learning. This paper presents a novel selective flipped mode teaching approach designed for large and advanced courses that has two aspects: (i) it provides selective flipping of a few topics, while delivering others in traditional face-to-face teaching, to provide an effective trade-off between the two approaches according to the demands of individual topics and (ii) it introduces technology-enabled live in-class quizzes to obtain instant feedback and facilitate collaborative problem-solving exercises. The proposed approach was implemented for a large fourth year course in electrical power engineering over three successive years and the criteria for selecting between the flipped mode teaching and traditional teaching modes are outlined. Results confirmed that the proposed approach improved both students' academic achievements and their engagement in the course, without overloading them during the teaching period.

Three experiments investigate psychological, methodological, and domain-specific characteristics of loudness change in response to sounds that continuously increase in intensity (up-ramps), relative to sounds that decrease (down-ramps). Timbre (vowel, violin), layer (monotone, chord), and duration (1.8 s, 3.6 s) were manipulated in Experiment 1. Participants judged global loudness change between pairs of spectrally identical up-ramps and down-ramps. It was hypothesized that loudness change is overestimated in up-ramps, relative to down-ramps, using simple speech and musical stimuli. The hypothesis was supported and the proportion of up-ramp overestimation increased with stimulus duration. Experiment 2 investigated recency and a bias for end-levels by presenting paired dynamic stimuli with equivalent end-levels and steady-state controls. Experiment 3 used single stimulus presentations, removing artifacts associated with paired stimuli. Perceptual overestimation of loudness change is influenced by (1) intensity region of the dynamic stimulus; (2) differences in stimulus end-level; (3) order in which paired items are presented; and (4) duration of each item. When methodological artifacts are controlled, overestimation of loudness change in response to up-ramps remains. The relative influence of cognitive and sensory mechanisms is discussed. (Contains 1 footnote, 2 tables, and 8 figures.)

The article offers a summary of recommendations for fracture prevention at residential aged care facilities (RACF) in Australia. As of August 2010, there are about 187,000 residents in 2,938 RACF across the country, with 83 as the average age of residents. The two levels of care handled by the institutional aged care system in Australia are hostels and nursing homes. The FRAX and the Garvan fracture risk assessment tools are the available tools used in identifying fracture risk in community-dwelling individuals.