Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAn ethnographic analysis and survey of specific attitudes of physical education teachers( 1984)Stage One utilizes an ethnographic approach by researching four teachers of physical education who graduated from Melbourne University in 1960, 1965, 1970 and 1975. Case studies were written on the four subjects. The teachers differed in their attitudes towards students with the more experienced teachers who were married and had children displaying a more caring and concerned disposition towards their pupils. It was evident that throughout his career a physical education teacher will display varying degrees of enthusiasm for his work, with the experienced teachers in this study being more enthusiastic. In addition they did not rely on strong disciplinary methods and had gradually moved away from a basic survival and control tendency which was a characteristic of the less experienced teacher. Generally, the more experienced teacher had greater job satisfaction than his less experienced counterpart. Ideas, principles, and hypotheses were generated from the ethnographic work in stage one and were used to formulate the traditional research attempted in stage two of this study. Thirty-six teachers of physical education from Education Department Secondary Schools within Victoria responded to the survey (85 percent response vote) which sought information concerning teacher attitudes, teacher enthusiasm and teacher reactions to particular issues central to their function as teachers of physical education. Data from the questionnaires was computed by the use of the Statistical Package for Social Science (Nie et al 1975). Analysis of the questionnaires involved the following statistics; mean, standard deviation, percentage, t-test and Pearson r correlation coefficients. The results revealed that the experienced physical education teacher who is married and has children will display a different set of attitudes towards the children whom he teaches than the less experienced, unmarried teacher of physical education. The enthusiasm level of teachers of physical education for their work varied greatly throughout their career. However, all teachers of physical education appear to follow the same pattern of changes in levels of enthusiasm, with subjects showing increased enthusiasm in early and late years of teaching and a drop in the level off enthusiasm in mid-career. This drop in the level of enthusiasm in mid-career seems due mainly to an increased emphasis by the teacher to his personal and family commitments.
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Item"Are you satisfied?": review of parental attitudes towards the curriculum of an independent girls' secondary school( 1985)This thesis examines the attitudes of parents to a range of issues concerning the content and application of the educational programme of a small independent girls' school in Melbourne's eastern suburbs. The material that forms the basis of the thesis was gathered from information supplied in response to questionnaires sent to all parents of daughters in the senior school, supplemented by a limited number of interviews. The intention of this review of the school was to establish the extent to which the school's educational programme reflected the wishes and needs of the present parent-body, to establish whether there were any areas of substantial dissatisfaction that need immediate attention, and to determine whether there were particular reasons why parents chose this school as such information could assist in the development of a particular style for the school. The thesis analyses the one hundred and ninety-eight responses to the questionnaire (with some illumination given by the interviews of twenty-eight parents) and suggests areas for change. However, the overall impression gained from the analysis is that the present parent-body is extremely satisfied with the school.
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ItemTrainee-teachers: can attitudes and achievement in mathematics be improved?( 1988)The aim of the investigation was to compare the effects of different class-groupings upon the Attitude to, and Achievement in, Mathematics of Primary Teacher Trainees. The experiment was of the pre-test, post-test design, with students randomly assigned to Experimental or Control classes. Lecturers taking part were assigned one Experimental and one Control group each. The treatment comprised the First Year Mathematics Education Course at Phillip Institute of Technology, with students assigned to classes which were either homogeneous (Experimental) or heterogeneous (Control) with respect to school Mathematics background. The sample was drawn from an entire entry cohort (with depletions), to give a sub-population of about one-third. The experimental conditions extended over ten months (the time between dependent variable measurings) and subjects were not treated as special in other than those (grouping) ways mentioned above. Simple graphical analyses showed results of the treatment to be quite varied. Predicted outcomes were supported in few instances (measured by Effect Sizes) but in the main, hypotheses remain unsupported by this investigation - which matches the results of the majority of studies in this field.