Search

Mathematics anxiety is common among pre-service primary teachers and many experience higher levels of maths anxiety than other university students. This study asks: What are maths anxious preservice teachers' perspectives of "doing" mathematics in a whiteboard room? The Abbreviated Mathematics Anxiety Rating Scale (A-MARS) was used to identify high, medium and low levels of maths anxiety in a cohort of first-year pre-service teachers (n=196). Semi-structured interviews (n=6) explored perspectives that were analysed through Vygotsky's sociocultural dimensions of the intrapersonal and the interpersonal, as well as the physical environment of the whiteboard room. Results show that doing maths in a whiteboard room was positive and engaging for participants because the room afforded positive interpersonal interactions and fostered an engaging learning environment that served to ease their maths anxiety. The whiteboard pedagogy is thus recommended in pre-service teacher education.

The construction of dynamic multimedia products requires the selection and integration of a range of semiotic resources. As an assessment task for preservice teachers, this construction process is complex but has significant potential for learning. To investigate how weaving together multiple representations in such tasks enables learners to develop conceptual understanding, the paper presents an indicative case study of a 2nd-year preservice primary (K-6) teacher who created a digital explanation on the topic of 'transparency' for stage 3 children (ages 11-12). We focus on data gathered during the 3-h construction process including artefacts such as images, online searches, websites accessed and paper records used for planning; the digital explanation as product; audio and video capture of the construction process and pre- and post-construction interviews. Using multimodal analysis, we examine these data to understand how meanings are negotiated as the maker moves iteratively among multiple representations and through semiotic choices within these representations to explain the science concept. The analyses illustrate the complexity of the construction process while providing insight into the creator's decision-making and to her developing semiotic and conceptual understandings. These findings allow us to build on the concept of cumulative semiotic progression (Hoban & Nielsen, "Research in Science Education," 35, 1101-1119, 2013) by explicating the role of iterative reasoning in the production of pedagogic multimedia.

The purpose of this study was to elaborate the knowledge of the supervising teacher as enacted through mentor-mentee conversations that occur during practicum. An interpretivist framework using Clarke et al.'s (2014) Categories of Participation was used to consider how supervising teacher knowledge manifests in mentoring conversations with the preservice teacher. Case study methods captured conversations "in situ" when dyad pairs (n = 5) discussed a particular lesson developed and taught by the preservice teacher. The results illustrate three Categories of Participation as most frequent, providing insight into supervising teachers' knowledge base. An important finding from this study is the value of mentoring conversations for 'making visible' classroom teacher practices and knowledge to the preservice teacher during the practicum, which has implications for the professional development of supervising teachers.

All teachers in Australia must now achieve and maintain certification through mandatory accreditation processes that include specified professional learning hours. While key policies that outline teacher professional learning in Australia and New South Wales make no specific reference to a role for universities, this discussion paper proposes that the new teacher accreditation landscape provides opportunities for universities to work collaboratively with education systems to co-design and deliver contextually relevant teacher professional learning, support teachers-as-researchers and support schools to become learning communities. This collaboration would advance the policy agenda inherent in the accreditation processes by developing the intended culture of professional learning among teachers, education systems and universities that goes beyond mandated professional learning hours. We review the Australian policy context from a systems-thinking perspective and argue that university Schools and Faculties of Education (called SOE throughout this paper) work across multiple levels in education systems and are thus uniquely positioned to co-design and deliver relevant and contextually significant learning opportunities that foster teacher professional learning and school improvement.

ABSTRACT Aim Design Methods Results Conclusions Implications for the Profession and Patient Care Impact Reporting Method Patient or Public Contribution To explore how undergraduate nursing students develop knowledge during a breastfeeding module.A qualitative study using a single case‐study approach.This study was conducted in Australia over 2 years during the period between July 2021 and December 2022. Semi‐structured interviews and artefact collection were conducted with a purposive sample of undergraduate nurses (n = 10) who completed a paediatric elective subject that included a breastfeeding module. Thematic and content analysis were used. The specialisation dimension in Legitimation Code Theory (LCT) was used for the content analysis, and students' data was mapped on the specialisation plane.This study reveals how participants developed knowledge by linking personal breastfeeding experiences to theoretical components within the nursing program. Using the LCT dimension of specialisation, this study provides new insights into how participants move through distinct quadrants of the specialisation plane. Learners tour between the knowledge, knower, and elite quadrants of the plane as they integrate their knowledge. The research maps the journey towards becoming the ‘right kind of knower’ and reveals how personal experience and theoretical knowledge intersect to create disciplinary expertise. This study advances the LCT dimension of specialisation by illustrating the fluid, non‐linear nature of knowledge acquisition and knower development.This study highlights the value of integrating personal experiences into nursing education, demonstrating how students use these to build knowledge and professional identity. The findings emphasise the dynamic knowledge development process in preparing future healthcare professionals.Integrating lived experiences and interprofessional education equips nurses to address complex health issues, leading to more effective, personalised care and better health outcomes for breastfeeding mothers and infants. This approach signals a transformative shift in nursing education.By personalising and contextualising learning, fostering reflective practice, deepening disciplinary knowledge, and promoting a collaborative practice environment, this approach enriches nursing education.The consolidated criteria for reporting qualitative research (COREQ).No patient or public contribution. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Assessments in tertiary science subjects typically assess content knowledge, and there is current need to both develop and assess different forms of knowledge and skills, such as communications and digital literacies. A digital explanation is a multimodal artefact created by students to explain science to a specified audience, which is an alternate form of assessment that has potential to develop and assess these other important forms of knowledge and skills. This research draws from perspectives in multimodality, educational semiotics and science education to gain a better understanding of digital explanation as a form of assessment in university science. Data sources include digital artefacts (n = 42), task descriptions and rubrics and pre-/post-interviews (n = 21) with students who created them as a task in a university science subject. Analysis involved identifying the range of media resources used across the data set, seeking patterns in how multiple resources were used and exploring students' perspectives on the task, including their design decisions. A more detailed look at artefacts from three different science learning contexts illustrates that students base their design decisions on the content knowledge being represented, their technical capabilities to generate them and how to engage the audience. Students enjoy this form of assessment and feel that the tasks allowed them to demonstrate different sorts of capabilities than are normally assessed in their subjects. Recommendations for instructors provide guidance for considering this sort of task in tertiary science contexts.

Senior secondary students were tasked with generating slowmation representations of biological processes they had already learned about during Year 11 VCE biology. The slowmation task therefore connects work with representations to review of course material. Results indicate that students negotiated between the textbook (and some teacher-specific direction) and their representations to clarify the processes and to ensure accuracy. In a two-hour class, students remained fully engaged and developed skills in digital capture, representation construction, and knowledge of the biological process. We argue that slowmation is an effective pedagogical strategy for engaging students in the review process, which results in deepening learning.

This paper arises from research undertaken by educational semioticians and science educators investigating the use of student generated digital artefacts as assessment tasks in pre-service science teacher education. Part of a broader shift toward student-generated media in tertiary science, the use of such tasks is driven by the need to deepen pre-service primary teachers' understandings of content and to foster enthusiasm for teaching science. However, the tasks are challenging as students must demonstrate both content and meta-semiotic knowledge in these brief digital standalone presentations. In the paper, we draw on artefacts, interviews and assessment practices to demonstrate these challenges. We identify what have emerged as key semiotic understandings necessary to complete a successful response to the task, arguing that these include multimodal understandings as well as knowledge of disciplinary specific representational practices. We describe an intervention informed by functional social semiotics and scaffolded literacy approaches with key features including use of an exemplar text for deconstruction and an explicit instructional sequence with a tailored assessment rubric. The paper reports both theoretical and practical insights and seeks to contribute to emerging analytical frameworks as well as multimodal literacy assessment.

A "digital explanation" is a science learning task where learners explain science content to non-expert others, in this case, the learners are primary preservice teachers [PST] in a science methods class. In the task, PST are assigned a prompt based on science content from the New South Wales K-6 syllabus and generate or source multiple representations to design and produce this stand-alone digital artefact. In this study, PST were interviewed about their decision making in producing the digital explanation, which offers insight into the design process and what makes for a successful product. Data include the digital explanations, interviews with nine PST, marking rubrics and rationale statements generated as part of the task. Thematic coding shows PST make design decisions for four principal reasons: content, engagement, clarity and unconscious selection. Decisions around content and engagement prevail and their decisions reveal keys to success in creating a digital explanation. We also note a tension between emphasis on engagement over content, which may reflect that the intended audience is young children and PST have a strong desire to gain and keep children's interest.

Doctoral education scholars associate doctoral learning with certain threshold concepts, many of which are embedded in the literature review. In considering this, we draw from a literary metaphor of 'joining the conversation' and report on a doctoral writing programme that blended elements of workshops, 'shut-up-and-write' sessions and thesis writing circles in the Faculty of Social Sciences at an Australian university. Findings illustrate conceptual thresholds engendered in the literature review. Study participants reported growing awareness of: the need for a critical voice; the difference between descriptive and critical writing; and, different ways to conduct and structure the literature review. Further, these are capacities and skills that develop iteratively over the candidature. To join the research conversation, gaining an understanding of these aspects of the conceptual threshold is important and, as indicated here, writing programmes that explicitly support this learning are vital to the process of scholarly development.

This article reports on the investigation of collaborative learning processes in an online course that examined students' communication during whole-group discussions and small-group activities. Content analysis and social network analysis methods were employed to code and categorize text messages to uncover students' communication behaviour. The results show that individuals' participation patterns were similar during the two different settings, but some inactive students during whole-group discussions were more active in small-groups. The social-out (sent-out messages) during whole-group discussions was a significant variable associated with cognitive contributions in whole-group as well as social and managerial contributions in small-group activities. This article also identified three indices, i.e., quantity, equality, shareness, that can be used as quantitative measures for evaluating small group collaboration. (Contains 4 figures and 6 tables.)

This study investigated a professional learning community of cooperating teachers and university-based teacher educators. To examine our roles and perspectives as colleagues in teacher education, we drew on frameworks in teacher learning and complexity science. Monthly group meetings of this inquiry community were held over two school years in a suburban school district in British Columbia. Participants' current and prior experiences in the role of cooperating teacher provided rich topics for conversation. Our analysis illustrates how aspects of complexity thinking both enable and promote teacher learning, in this instance, the professional development of cooperating teachers. The study highlights (a) key tensions that allow for deeper exploration of issues, (b) the need for flexibility that is open to contingency, (c) the importance of reducing hierarchical structures to enable networks to develop, and (d) improvisation as a key ingredient for teacher learning. (Contains 2 tables, 2 figures, and 2 footnotes.) ["The Teacher Education Conversation: A Network of Cooperating Teachers" was written with Dianne Coulter, Tina Grigoriadis, Stephanie Hardman, Lee Hunter, Jane Kinegal, Bianca Li, Jeff Mah, Karen Mastin, David Partridge, Kathleen Salbuvik, Mitch Ward, Frederick Weil, Janet White, Kang Changyun, and Gaalen Erickson.]

This paper presents a study of two international doctoral students' perspectives on preparing to formally present the thesis proposal, which we conceptualise as a threshold in the PhD journey. They participated in a thesis writing group (TWG) that aimed to support international doctoral students to develop aspects of their scholarship in the early stages of their candidature. The case students reported feeling 'stuck' before joining the TWG run by the authors. After the writing group experience, they reported that they had gained confidence and developed the skills and knowledge required to prepare for their proposal presentation. Their perspectives were gathered through semi-structured interviews that were analysed using the conceptual framework of threshold concepts for doctoral learning. This small-scale study suggests that the collegial support provided by a TWG can be a powerful pedagogy enabling doctoral scholars to confidently negotiate crossing the thesis proposal threshold.

The purpose of this study is to describe the development and validation of a survey that examines science students' social media learning behaviours. Inherent in critiques regarding "digital natives" is a need to better understand what the current generation of learners actually do in their social media practices for "learning". The survey can help us understand how students actually use social media for learning science. Survey development followed an inductive approach [Brinkman, 2013. "Qualitative interviewing". Oxford ebook; Mansourian, 2006. "Adoption of grounded theory in LIS research." "New Library World", 107(9/10), 386-402; Strauss & Corbin, 1998. "Basics of qualitative research: Grounded theory procedures and technique (2nd ed.)". Newbury Park, CA: Sage], where survey design was informed by results of focus groups with secondary and post-secondary physics students and the survey was iteratively revised after two cycles of administration and validation interviews. The final version of the "Social Media and Science Learning Survey" can be used by educators and researchers to understand how social media tools can be leveraged in order to allow learning to emerge and to use this knowledge to frame recommendations and methods for integrating these tools into classroom-based environments.

This paper offers an overview of what motivates and challenges Australian supervising teachers to work with preservice teachers in their classrooms. In the contemporary Australian context of new National Professional Standards for Teachers, a new national curriculum and new standards for Initial Teacher Education programs, what motivates and challenges supervising teachers becomes a focus for professional learning through analysis presented in this paper. Data are reported from a national data set that includes 314 responding supervising teachers who took the "Mentoring Perspectives Inventory" from 2012-2014. The MPI data are aggregated in this paper to suggest that the wider system of teacher education could benefit from attention at various levels of interest to develop the underlying knowledge base of supervising teachers and our understanding of how they are challenged and motivated in their work with preservice teachers.