Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemA comparative study of primary school social studies in three Australian states : Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia, 1952-1975( 1976)This study is concerned with the way in which Primary school Social Studies curricula have been revised, organized and developed from 1952 to 1975 in three Australian States - Victoria, New South Wales and Western Australia. As few commercially produced Social Studies courses, or indeed Social Studies units, have been forthcoming in these States, coverage in this thesis concentrates on those syllabus revisions which have been produced by Revision Committees organized by the respective Education Departments in these States. Underlying factors which have been instrumental in Social Studies revisions and their final outcome - a Social Studies Syllabus - have been analyzed by considering those constraints which form a part of the Curriculum Materials Analysis System (1967). The constituent six part cluster questions have been used in horizontal analysis to highlight features of Social Studies courses in the 1950's as compared to those of the 1960's, and the most significant changes which have occurred in the most current revisions. From courses which presented a high degree of uniformity in their emphasis on facts, social living and citizenship, have emerged State revisions which, though differing in format and degree of inclusiveness, reflect attributes commonly associated with 'new' Social Studies.
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ItemFormal adult education in Victoria, 1890 to 1950( 1971)This history deals mainly with four official groups: a sub-committee of the University of Melbourne, the Extension Board; a voluntary agency symbiotic with the university, the Workers' Educational Association; the Joint Committee of these two; and a later, separate statutory body, the Council of Adult Education. Because, however, it is concerned with education it also takes note of some social history, history of ideas, and biographies. Adult education in Victoria has always been an offering made by its providers, rather than the result of a demand from potential students; and the innovations made, as each provision proved inappropriate to the community, have been based on an ideal or an idea. Those ideas appear to have been formed largely from two sets of pre-suppositions: some overall view of the nature of man, and some view of educational rigour - what degree of systematic teaching or learning was appropriate. In particular, the period under review saw the end of the motivating force of philanthropy in adult education, and the rise of something closer to the concept of a welfare service for all taxpayers. Chapter One covers the background of ideas abroad before 1891, and the institutions that embodied them in Victoria. Chapter Two takes the beginning of University Extension as the first major provision of adult education, embodying a philanthropic ideal originating in England. Chapter Three introduces the W.E.A., who challenged philanthropy and achieved state subsidy for the learning of the workers, now called upon by universal suffrage to share in government. The workers failed to cooperate with the movement, and Chapter Four details the hopelessness of both the Extension and the W.E.A. ideals as guides to practice, and the consequent parasitism of the Victorian W.E.A. on the university. Chapter Five covers the rejection of the W.E.A. from its entanglement in the counsels and finances of the university, its eventual extinction, and the successful move of the Director of Extension to push the management of adult education off the campus. Chapter Six is a brief overview.
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ItemWhat are the objectives of the State College of Victoria at Frankston courses as perceived by students, lecturing staff (education), and teachers in the field( 1975)The purpose of this study was to investigate the Objectives of the State College of Victoria at Frankston as perceived by students, lecturing staff (in Education) and teachers in the field. The number of cases used was 227, including 25 first year private students, 40 first year studentship holders, 25 third year studentship holders, as well as 23 College education staff and 114 supervising teachers, of which only 61 replies were of value. The subjects were required to complete an open ended questionnaire on what they believed 'are' the objectives of the S.C.V. and what 'should be' the objectives. An inspection of the responses was made by using Content Analysis. It appeared that the responses fell into three fairly clearly defined areas of Objectives, viz. Professional, Academic and Personal Development. Further examination of the data indicated that an item had a positive or negative valence, i.e., the respondent indicated approval or disapproval of the item as an Objective. The Objectives were raw scored, and the frequency of mention was converted to percentages of the whole group being scored. This was done for both +ve and -ve valence, thus indicating whether a respondent was critical of or favourable to the perceived College Objectives. Further data was obtained by asking College lecturers and teachers in the field to rate on a scale +5 to -5 whether the College was doing what it should be doing in achieving College Objectives. The findings indicate that there is general agreement about the current levels of professional objectives as perceived by the different groups. there is consistent demand for more professional studies, except from college lecturers in Education. Colleges are seen by all groups as having an academic content which should be decreased markedly at all levels. Colleges are recognised as having a low personal development level which all but critical teachers agree needs to be significantly increased.
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ItemPost-world war II development of commercial courses for girls in Victorian technical schools, with special reference to the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology, 1945-1970( 1974)In the inter-war years (1919- 1939), commercial courses, traditionally part of the technical system of education and fast becoming the province of girls, suffered from the effects of the economic depression, made some slight gains during the recovery years and achieved importance in the war years. In the post-World War II years growing community interest in education in general, and technical education in particular, reflected the social and economic climate of the rapidly changing 1950s and 1960s. High population growth and an affluent society created new educational needs, and industry required new technical college courses to meet technological developments and the continuing emergence of new knowledge. Occurring initially when Victorian resources were being channelled mainly into other priorities owing to post-war conditions, these demands caused a crisis in education in the late 1950s and in the 1960s, the Victorian Government being unable to support the expansion of tertiary education to its fullest extent. Therefore the Commonwealth Government granted, under certain conditions, financial aid to tertiary technical education and, in Victoria, the already existing Victoria Institute of Colleges became the guardian of the course standards of its affiliated C.A.E.s. Thus technical education at the tertiary level was eventually in a position to offer its own degrees and provide what promised to be a viable alternative to university education. The technical system of education appeared to represent a man's world and echoed the general education practice of the day as far as girls were concerned, thus reflecting the community's attitude to the place of women in Australian society. Tradition was the over-riding influence on what girls were taught and, as a necessary corollary, the kind of careers they followed. Hence it transpired that girls confined their abilities to a narrow range of female occupations, one of the chief of these being office work. The popularity of office work in the 1950s and 1960s was reflected in the growing number of students enrolling for commercial courses in the technical system. Technical commercial education responded increasingly to community and industrial demands, and endeavoured to maintain relevance to the changing times as it pursued higher standards and created a new concept of vocational training at both junior and senior levels. With the onset of the 1970s commercial education in the Victorian technical system provided all but one of the known commercial courses and, in keeping with the technical educational philosophy of the times, retained its established diploma. In the pursuit of professional status for the potential secretary, degree courses in secretarial work were foreshadowed in two Victorian C.A.E.s, while the Institute of Private Secretaries (Australia) sought professional status for the secretary already within the workforce.
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ItemSome approaches to differences in entrants to pre-school, primary, and secondary teaching( 1972)In Australia, because of differences in training, qualifications, salary, unions, and prestige, teachers see themselves primarily as teachers at particular levels in the, educational structure, rather than members of a united "teaching profession". But whether these institutional and prestige differences are based on more fundamental differences has rarely been investigated. The present study considered 900 recent entrants to pre-school, primary, and secondary teaching, with the aim of identifying the strongest bases of inter-group differentiation among them, according to level of teaching entered and sex of student. Community stereotypes have concentrated on differences in academic ability as most fundamental; certainly selection processes based on academic achievement ensure that these exist. This investigation has compared academic ability measures with derived scales in a number of other areas, basically in two dimensions: the choice of teaching as an occupation, and the background (social and school) of teaching entrants. In the first area, both a factor analysis of expressed reasons for entry to teaching and a derived measure of commitment to teaching revealed marked differences in response patterns, according to sex and to level of teaching entered. In the second area, social background was measured on a socio-economic status index, based on six variables, and by a status discrepancy score. With these, identification of sex and level differences was confounded by inter-college differences, resulting from the private or state nature of the institution, and the impact of residential allocation to state primary teachers' colleges. The investigation of background also included school background of students, in terms of academic achievement at final school year level, and students' recollections of their own school experience. Again marked level and sex differences emerged. Thus real differences in many areas exist; which most strongly differentiated entering groups by level or sex? Not academic achievement, despite the community stereotype. Only when reasons for entry to teaching were excluded from analysis was this the strongest discriminator, dividing students according to a hierarchy of institutions attended and scholarships awarded (university, then state colleges, then private colleges). But to understand differences among pre-school, primary, and secondary entrants, or male and female recruits, analysis had to include the reasons for becoming a teacher; these and commitment to teaching were the most powerful sources of differentiation by level or sex.
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ItemEnglish in the training of primary teachers( 1975)in 1968 a three year course of training for primary teachers was introduced in Victorian State teachers' colleges. The course was founded upon the report of an Advisory Committee on the Three Years' Course of Training for Primary Teachers published in March 1967 and commonly termed the 'Pryor Report'. One of the objectives of this course was to develop a well educated cultured person (with) the desire to read widely. with discrimination and appreciation of all that is best in literature . Means of achieving this objective included a compulsory two years' study of English, incorporating the best in traditional and contemporary writing', and children's literature. There is need for some evaluation of the degree to which this objective has been achieved. in this study, twenty-one young teachers who completed the three year course at one provincial teachers' college, and who were teaching in one-teacher rural schools, were visited and invited to discuss the subject of English, particularly English literature. in their college courses. Their current reading habits. and views and attitudes to literature were also discussed. The data collected from these discussions suggest that the objective of the three year course referred to above is not being achieved in the case of this small and possibly unrepresentative sample of graduates of the course. These teachers do not read widely. Their attitudes to literature are disappointing and the effects of these attitudes on the children they teach represent a matter of grave concern. It Is suggested that the compulsory study of 'adult' literature In a course of training for primary teachers is educationally doubtful. On the other hand compulsory study of the immensely rich field of children's literature appears justified on literary, sociological and educational grounds. The need for clear aims and procedures for studies In the language arts and methods of teaching English In the primary school Is also suggested by the lack of confidence shown in these areas by the young teachers. The presentation of the views and attitudes of a group of young, inexperienced teachers in a difficult and sometimes lonely school environment is an attempt to give life to problems in teacher training which statistical data may illuminate. No firm conclusions are possible from data obtained in this study but the study indicates a need for thorough evaluation of the efficacy of courses of training of teachers such as those founded on the 'Pryor Report.'
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ItemRelation of anxiety and adjustment to educational environment( 1975)This investigation was concerned with the effect of different educational environments on factors associated with personality development, particularly adjustment and anxiety. The report was divided into two parts. The first part was concerned with a critical analysis of certain contemporary theories of education and with the empirical evidence relevant to these theories. The second part used the major beliefs of the theories as grounds for hypotheses which were tested with one hundred and seven tertiary students doing the Diploma of Education at the Melbourne State College in 1973. The theories in question all assume the intrinsic goodness of man and his urge for "self-actualization" when he is operating in a free and unconstrained manner. These theories derived from the writings of humanistic psychology and particularly from the work of Carl Rogers and Abraham Maslow and are expressed in the writings of educators including John Holt, Everett Reimer, and George Dennison. In the first part of the investigation the theories were scrutinized both from the point of view of logical consistency and from that of empirical evidence relating to such concepts as self esteem, persuasibility, adjustment and anxiety in educational and non-educational contexts. In the second part, Rogers' own non-normative definition of adjustment was used to ascertain whether there were any changes during the course of the year in the adjustment of students in three different types of educational environment. Rogers (1954) believed that good adjustment was characterized by a small discrepancy between self and ideal self concept. He argued that good adjustment occurred when people were allowed to act freely and make their own decisions without interference from others. It was therefore hypothesized that students in an unstructured group, given maximum opportunity to decide their own educational activities, would exhibit superior adjustment to students in either a semi-structured or highly structured group. The adjustment of students in the semi-structured group was hypothesized to be next best to that of students in the unstructured group, while the adjustment of students in the highly structured group was hypothesized to be the worst of students in any of the three groups. Adjustment in this study was taken to be the distance between the concepts "Myself" and "The Person I'd Like To Be". These concepts and eight others judged to be of importance to either self esteem or education, were rated on a seven point semantic differential scale in relation to eighteen bi-polar adjectival scales (Osgood, Suci and Tannenbaum, 1957). It was also hypothesized that both the trait anxiety measured on the first testing occasion, and state anxiety measured on three occasions over the year, would be lowest in the unstructured group, higher in the semi-structured group and highest in the most highly structured group. The measures of anxiety used were devised by Spielberger, Gorsuch and Lushene (1970). Pre-test analyses of variance, repeated measures analyses and covariance analyses in which scores on the third testing were covaried for scores on the first testing, all failed to support the two main experimental hypotheses. A hierarchical grouping analysis, which is a purely descriptive technique for examining data, lent tentative support to the hypothesis regarding the superior adjustment of the unstructured group. On the pre-test analyses there were significant interactions between group membership and anxiety level. There were also significant results obtained from group differences alone and from differences in the level of trait anxiety. However, none of these differences revealed superior adjustment or significantly lower trait anxiety for the unstructured group. Further, when covariance analyses were carried out only one significant difference between groups remained. This concerned School Principals and Unpleasant and Bad Things. The structured group judged these concepts to be significantly further apart than did the unstructured group. This suggested different attitudes towards authority figures by students in the two groups. While the unstructured group failed to show the superior adjustment expected by the Rogerian hypotheses, or a significantly lower level of either trait or state anxiety, there were significant group differences on initial trait anxiety as revealed by an analysis of variance. There were also significant differences in state anxiety as revealed by a repeated measures analysis over three occasions. For both measures of anxiety, it was the semi-structured or core-elective group which exhibited significantly lower levels of anxiety than either the unstructured or highly structured groups. Contrary to the hypotheses the unstructured group and the highly structured group had anxiety levels (both trait and state) of a markedly similar kind. It was concluded that membership of the group allowing most freedom, did not have the hypothesized effect of producing superior adjustment or lower levels of either trait or state anxiety. Further, the lack of significant results after the covariance analyses suggested that educational environment, regardless of whether it was unstructured, semi-structured or highly structured, did not radically alter the adjustment or anxiety levels of the tertiary students who were the subjects of this investigation. Implications for education were discussed.
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ItemNon-professional and non-governmental organisations and the provision of public education, 1850-1969( 1971)The beginnings of the public education system in New South Wales are briefly examined to set the background for the development of public education in Victoria. An examination is made of the system of patrons instituted under the administration of the National Schools Board and the Common Schools Board. The 1872 Education Act replaced the patrons with boards of advice, and the 1910 Education Act replaced the boards of advice with the present system of school committees and councils. The effectiveness of the boards of advice and the school committees and councils is also assessed. A common theme is shown to have emerged from the earliest time, that the professional educationist has firmly maintained that the non-professional and non-governmental organisation has only a minor contribution to make in the control of public education. The final chapter indicates that there appears to be some change forthcoming in this attitude, because the non-professional and non-governmental organisations are beginning to realize the need for political rather than organisational action.
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ItemThe movement to establish a higher technological institute in Victoria, 1940-1963( 1976)The general thesis is that the series of episodes during this period, during which attempts were made to establish a higher technological institute, constitute an important background to the policy adopted with respect to non-university tertiary education in Victoria as a result of the Martin Report of 1965. In 1940 demands were made within the Technical Schools' Association of Victoria and the Council of Public Education by W.G. McRobert and G.R. King for degrees in technical science to be awarded by Melbourne Technical College. This is seen as initiating a series of moves forming a continuous thread, ending about 1963 with the Ramsay Report on the future of tertiary education in Victoria. The course of a number of proposals for a higher technological institute are traced: the movement for an institute of technology, 1943-1947, including the Seitz Committee and Report; the joint college of technology proposal by the University of Melbourne and the Melbourne Technical College, 1948-1950; the University of Technology Committee of 1955-1956 and the impact of the Murray Committee; the establishment of Monash University, 1958 and the search for alternative solutions to the problem of higher technological education; and the impact of the Ramsay and Martin enquiries during the early 1960s. Some themes developed include the effect of the 1939-1945 war on the public esteem for technical education; the attitude of the University of Melbourne towards proposals for other degree-granting institutions; the significance of the failure of the draft institute of technology bill, 1947; the failure of the university of technology proposal and the crisis over student demand for university education of the early 1960s; and the tension between state and commonwealth attitudes to the development of tertiary education in Victoria in the early 1960s. A continuous thread throughout the story is the aspiration of the Royal Melbourne Institute of Technology to attain an unquestioned pre-eminence in higher, technological education. Victoria was not, in fact, able to establish the higher technological institute which had been supported by a number of important groups in Victorian education during the period. An important conclusion is that the role of the technical colleges prescribed by the Martin Committee in fact pre-empted the situation by diverting the largest of Victoria's technical colleges from its possible destiny as a higher technological institute. Rather it became one of a number of colleges of advanced education whose purpose was to extend, in an economical manner, tertiary education opportunities on a broad front.