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Purpose: The aim of this article was to explore how the type of allomorph (e.g., past tense buzz[d] vs. nod[ed]) influences the ability to perceive and produce grammatical morphemes in children with typical development and with specific language impairment (SLI). Method: The participants were monolingual Australian English-speaking children. The SLI group included 13 participants (mean age = 5;7 [years;months]); the control group included 19 children with typical development (mean age = 5;4). Both groups performed a grammaticality judgment and elicited production task with the same set of nonce verbs in third-person singular and past tense forms. Results: Five-year-old children are still learning to generalize morphophonological patterns to novel verbs, and syllabic /ez/ and /ed/ allomorphs are significantly more challenging to produce, particularly for the SLI group. The greater phonetic content of these syllabic forms did not enhance perception. Conclusions: Acquisition of morphophonological patterns involving low-frequency allomorphs is still underway in 5-year-old children with typical development, and it is even more protracted in SLI populations, despite these patterns being highly predictable. Children with SLI will therefore benefit from targeted intervention with low-frequency allomorphs., It has long been known that grammatical morphemes tend to be acquired in a certain order, and that some morphemes take longer to master than others (Berko, 1958; Brown, 1973; [...]

The study examines two different models of measuring, assessing and ranking quality in higher education. Do different systems of quality assessment lead to equivalent conclusions about the quality of education? This comparative study is based on the rankings of 24 Swedish higher education institutions. Two ranking actors have independently assessed the quality of these institutions during the same year. The analysis focuses on the concepts of quality on which the rankings are based, the choice of quality indicators, as well as methods, data sources and assessors. Although both actors base their rankings on the same overarching definition of quality, their conclusions do not correspond. The statistical method applied in this review, Bland-Altman analysis, indicates no significant agreement between the qualitative and quantitative measurements of quality in higher education. On the contrary, in several cases there are remarkable differences.

The integration of technology, pedagogy, and content in the teaching of secondary mathematics was explored among 280 secondary mathematics teachers in the State of New South Wales, Australia. The study adopted the technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK) model through the administration of a 30-item instrument called TPCK-M. The instrument consisted of three major theoretically based constructs: technological content knowledge (TCK), technological pedagogical knowledge (TPK) and technological pedagogical content knowledge (TPCK). Results indicated that PowerPoint and Excel constitute the two TCK modal technological capabilities while TPK scores revealed teachers' lower capacity to deal with the general information and communications technologies goals across the curriculum, such as creating digital assessment formats. TPCK-M scores seem to suggest a healthy standard in teachers' technological skills across a variety of mathematics education goals. However, the magnitude of such influence in practice needs to be further ascertained, given that the study identified a number of instructional, curricular, and organizational factors seriously inhibiting the integration of technology into teaching and learning. In general, to take advantage of more novel learning technologies, teachers need to be trained in working with online tools (webquests, wikis), mobile learning, and interactive whiteboards and in authoring digital learning resources. (Contains 1 figure and 4 tables.)

The need for appraising the effective integration of technologies into teaching and learning within a disciplinary context is crucial for upholding quality teaching standards in schools and formulating professional development programs. This paper describes the development and validation of an instrument aimed at characterising the integration of technological knowledge in secondary school mathematics teachers. The Technological Pedagogical Content Knowledge (TPACK) framework is used to underpin the development and validation of the questionnaire. The questionnaire consisting of three 10-item scales was administered to a sample of 280 teachers across the state of New South Wales, Australia. The factor analysis undertaken confirms the structurally soundness of the instrument in terms of validity and reliability. (Contains 3 figures and 7 tables.)

We report on an international study about mathematics students' ideas of how they will use mathematics in their future study and careers. This builds on our previous research into students' conceptions of mathematics. In this paper, we use data from two groups of students studying mathematics: those who participated in an in-depth interview and those who completed an open-ended questionnaire. We found that their responses could be grouped into four categories: don't know; procedural skills; conceptual skills; and professional skills. Although some students held clear ideas about the role of mathematics, many were not able to articulate how it would be used in their future. This has implications for their approach to learning and our approach to teaching.

The term "data snooping" refers to the practice of choosing which statistical analyses to apply to a set of data after having first looked at those data. Data snooping contradicts a fundamental precept of applied statistics, that the scheme of analysis is to be planned in advance. In this column, the authors shall elucidate the statistical consequences of data snooping in the context of hypothesis testing. They shall show why statisticians should be wary of this practice and, yet, why it is almost impossible to avoid. Answers to their previous five questions and five new questions related to data snooping are also presented.

This paper reports on a case study which examined factors leading to the adoption of graphics calculators (GCs) by secondary mathematics teachers in the state of New South Wales, Australia. In total, 587 teachers of the General Mathematics Course (Years 11 and 12) participated in the study. The median teachers' stage of adoption of GCs was found to be at the "Understanding and application of the process" level, the third lowest on a six point scale. The results also indicate that competence is the most important factor in explaining stages of adoption, training the second most important, followed by personal interest in GCs as well as faculty support. Teachers' gender, teaching experience, educational qualifications and the number of GCs in schools were not found to be statistically significant. Qualitative analysis of teachers' open ended comments also shed light on the nature of the explanatory variables. The findings are relevant to curriculum development policy and the design of professional development programs, and has implications for the introduction of other technologies. (Contains 1 figure and 6 tables.)

This article reports on an international study investigating university educators' ideas about the diversity of their students, carried out by using semi-structured email interviews. The information obtained from participants was analysed using a phenomenographic approach to obtain an outcome space, in which the narrowest conception ignored any differences between students, the broader conceptions made allowance for such differences, while the most expansive conceptions utilised diversity as an essential pedagogical resource. Educators' ideas are illustrated by quotes from their interview records, and the analysis is situated in the broader debate about the nature and role of difference and diversity in higher education and beyond. (Contains 1 figure.)

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to investigate ways in which university students are introduced to disciplines and thence to the professions based on those disciplines. Design/methodology/approach: E-mail interviews with a broad sample of university teachers in a variety of professional disciplines formed the basis of a grounded theory approach to identification of analytically distinct themes. Findings: Four different approaches were identified from the interview data, labelled as academic, apprenticeship, affective, and experiential. While these themes represent distinct approaches to introductory classes in professional fields, and have been described independently in the paper, in practice most teachers would use combinations of them. Research limitations/implications: The research represents a first stage in investigating approaches to introducing students to a discipline and profession. No claim is made to randomness, completeness or representativeness of the sample, which indeed was heavily based on colleagues in the broad area of pedagogy and teacher preparation. Practical implications: Teachers of introductory classes in professional disciplines can recognise their own approaches in the themes identified, and can consider a broader range of approaches based on the complete results. Workplace supervisors can consider diverse approaches utilised in academic settings. Social implications: Findings can contribute towards an awareness of the effect of introductory approaches to disciplines and professions in university classes, with potential implications for the way that university-trained professionals are accepted into the workplace. Originality/value: The research, unusually, shifts the focus from the end stage of professional education at university to the initial level. The investigation may form the basis of further research.

Internationalisation is an important but contentious issue in higher education. For some it means the facilitation of student mobility and an important source of funding for universities, while for others it forms a philosophy of teaching and student engagement, highlighting issues of global inequality. In this study, the papers from a recent statistics education conference, the 7th International Conference on Teaching Statistics, are subjected to a critical discourse analysis against a theoretical frame derived from research describing different ways of understanding and working with internationalisation. The analysis demonstrates how a specific discipline-based community--the statistics education community--involves itself with issues of internationalisation. (Contains 3 tables and a list of papers from ICOTS 7 discussed in this article)

Students enter university with ideas about their future professions. In some disciplines, the profession and the nature of professional work are well understood, while in other areas, they are more opaque. The authors investigate the ways in which students develop a sense of identity with their profession, how the nature of the profession impacts on identity formation, how students engage with learning based on their professional expectations, and how their pedagogic experience leads towards their professional formation. The authors' investigations are in two parts: first, they carry out a critical review of recent thinking on the question, including its formulation into national policy documents in two countries, Sweden and Australia. Then they adduce empirical data from the research outcomes of two international studies, in which students were interviewed about their understanding and experience of professional work, and the way in which their learning contributed to the development of their professional identities. The authors conclude that professional identity formation is a relation between students' learning experience and the manner in which they anticipate or practise in professional working life.

When people speak of "the Law of Gravity" they are generally referring to what is more specifically known as "Newton's Law of Gravitation." This law states that the gravitational force (that is, the mutual attraction) between any two physical bodies is directly proportional to the product of their individual masses and inversely proportional to the square of the distance between them. Why would such a scientific relationship be called a "law"? In this article, the authors explain why scientific relationships are called laws, and how scientific laws are established. This article also presents the solutions to previous questions posed in this column, and then poses five new questions.

Lectures remain the lynchpin of mathematics teaching at university even with advances in information technology and access to the internet. This paper examines the requirements for learning mathematics and shows how important it is for lecturers to be aware of the different modes of presentation they are using. Ways to assist students to make the connections between different representations are considered, with particular reference to students whose first language is not English. (Contains 4 figures.)

In this paper, we report on an international study of undergraduate mathematics students; conceptions of mathematics. Almost 1,200 students in five countries completed a short survey including three open-ended questions asking about their views of mathematics and its role in their future studies and planned professions. Responses were analysed starting from a previously-developed phenomenographic framework (Reid et al., "2003") which required only minor modification. Students' conceptions of mathematics ranged from the narrowest view as a focus on calculations with numbers, through a notion of mathematics as a focus on models or abstract structures, to the broadest view of mathematics as an approach to life and a way of thinking. Broader conceptions of mathematics were more likely to be found in later-year students (p less than 0.001) and there were significant differences between universities (p less than 0.001). The information obtained from the study not only confirms previous research, but also provides a basis for future development of a monitoring questionnaire.