Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemValues and the teaching of history to junior secondary school students( 2006)Entitled 'Values and the teaching of history to junior secondary school students' this thesis aims to explore the value of history as a subject for study by junior secondary school students and the role of values in the teaching of history. A focus on the types of knowledge that teachers bring to their professional practice forms part of the groundwork for the study. Professional knowledge is considered as pedagogical knowledge and content knowledge (Darling-Hammond, 1999; Shulman, 1986, 1987). These branches of a teacher's knowledge are discussed in relation to the teaching of history. History is broadly identified as a field of knowledge (Carr, 1961; Hexter, 1971; Leinhardt, 1994; Marwick, 1983), a discipline for study (Ang, 2001; Collingwood, 1946; Leinhardt, 1994; Levstik, 2000; Marwick, 1983; Rogers, 1984; Skilbeck, 1979) and a subject within the school curriculum (Board of Studies, 2000; Foshay, 2000; Macintrye, 1997; Mays, 1974; Victorian Curriculum and Assessment Authority (VCAA), 2004, 2005). The value of teaching history to junior secondary school students is broadly considered in terms of the knowledge and understanding that can be developed through the study of history as a school subject. The embedded nature of values within teaching is acknowledged and distinctions drawn between social/community values, general educational values taught through history and more specific values associated with the study of history. The research is situated within the qualitative paradigm (Denzin & Lincoln, 2000, 2005; Flick, 2002; Strauss & Corbin, 1990) and involved a case study (Bassey, 1999; Denzin & Lincoln, 2000; Merriam, 1988; Stake, 1995, 2000, 2005; Stenhouse, 1985; Yin, 2003a, 2003b) conducted at the junior secondary level that included the participation of the researcher, three other history teachers and students from Year 7 and Year 8 history classes. The methods used to collect data included an initial session with the teacher-participants and, at the conclusion of the study, a debriefing focus group with the teacher-participants, lesson observation and post lesson small-scale student discussions. The data gathered from this investigation is presented as a number of narratives (Bage, 1999; Bruner, 1986; Clandinin & Connelly, 2000; Connelly & Clandinin, 1990; Freebody, 2003; Mishler, 1986; Stake, 2000). The researcher contributes to these narratives as a teacher of history. The study affirms the value of teaching history to junior secondary students, recognizing an association with broad educational values (Department of Education, Science and Training (DEST), 2005; Gilbert & Hoepper, 1996, 2004) and subject specific values, such as, sharing knowledge about the past (Fitzgerald, 1977). Values that are imparted through the study of history are categorized as general and specific and are closely linked to skills. The study is premised on the beliefs that thinking about practice (the past and the present) may enlighten future history teaching and learning (Schtin, 1996) and that 'mindfulness' (Leinhardt, 1994) is an essential characteristic of history teaching that engages both the teacher and student in the learning process.
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ItemLaying the foundations for surgical excellence: strategic alignment of questions in program evaluation( 2006)The question of how to prioritise program evaluation questions in the best way is an important issue for evaluation practice. This is because the prioritisation of evaluation questions can determine how resources are allocated to the program evaluation effort. Obviously, if critical questions are not addressed, then the information obtained may not be the most useful in terms of program improvement. In the area of Program Theory Evaluation (PTE), prioritisation of questions, emerging from a program theory, has been highlighted as a need. This thesis used case study methodology to investigate a novel method of prioritising evaluation questions in a program theory evaluation, with the intention of creating a strategically-aligned evaluation plan. The case study concerned the Basic Surgical Training (BST) program of the Royal Australasian College of Surgeon (RACS). The thesis set out first to develop the program theory for the BST program, and to construct a balanced score card (BSC) with respect to education within the RACS. Subsequently, the aim was to develop a strategically aligned evaluation plan for BST using the BSC as a quality framework of reference. Multiple data collection methods were used including document analysis, focus group interviews, and individual interviews. The findings from the data analysis were used as a basis for both the BST program theory and the BSC, termed the "RACS Education Quality Framework". The application of the BSC to the program theory then resulted in an evaluation plan for an aspect of the BST program, which was considered to be a priority by the RACS. The outcomes of this thesis illustrate the utility of this approach in prioritising evaluation questions in program theory evaluation. There are, however, a number of caveats that relate primarily to the commitment needed to develop the BSC and the complex program theory. Despite this, a number of recommendations relating to evaluation within the RACS, evaluation practice in medical education settings, and evaluation practice more widely have been made. Finally, the processes and outcomes described in the thesis provide the basis for further exploration of prioritisation of questions in program theory evaluation, and the concepts explored should have wider applicability to evaluation practice. Further work in other case settings would assist in defining the utility of this approach.
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ItemNew cars, new work, new learning: productive workplace learning at a lean manufacturing site( 2007)This study investigates the construction of knowledge through action, teamwork and problem-solving. Within the context of a competitive global industry, the vehicle manufacturing industry, production workers and font-line supervisors from a component manufacturing company, Toyota-Boshoku, were interviewed about their work. Workers in a production environment are active and participative and the fieldwork indicates that they learn most effectively from the practical performance of tasks. Clearly, the embodied actions of workers are epistemologically significant because it is the doing of the task that their learning, knowledge and understanding are expressed. Therefore, learning practices that emerge from the performative nature of the work are most likely to present workers with opportunities to display their skills, knowledge and understanding. The whole person is involved in such learning - the cognitive, social, psychomotor and affective domains - and helps to shape knowledge for workers as expressive bodies. Knowledge is constructed in the social and atmosphere of the workplace as workers learn from one another in their everyday work practices. The thesis concludes that there is significant epistemological value in the embodied actions of the workers and in this respect the thinking and the doing are intertwined and interdependent, rather than separate entities.
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ItemReconstruction of leadership in a situation of significant organizational change( 2006)Leadership and Change are two diverse and yet intertwined complex fields. Leaders in many organizations continually undergo, lead and introduce change to their workplace. These individuals and others reconstruct their leadership differently according to the situation and the group of which they are a part. Some organizations are changing their leadership practices to include managing teams in remote locations using a virtual organization model rather than a face to face approach. This change invites organizational leadership to develop new perspectives to meet new challenges. This thesis is concerned with this question, "How do middle and senior managers implementing this kind of change reconstruct their leadership as they manage their roles, departments and the transition?" The research investigated the above question in relation to eight middle/senior managers at an Australian national public health provider going through a major restructure process. Some survived the restructure and stayed in the organization. Others did not survive and had to leave the organization because they no longer identified with the new organization or the people in the organizational leadership. The study was an interpretivist inquiry that documented the perceptions, meanings and interpretations of the changing organizational situation by the participants through two semi-structured interviews conducted with each manager about ten months apart. Significant changes were experienced by the participants in this study. These changes were at organizational, relational and personal levels. The middle managers reported feeling a great deal of pressure. Their organizational relationships were changed, disrupted and to some of them were damaged. The participants rethought their skills, roles, functions and their emotional investment in the organization due to the change process. The length of the transitional period became burdensome. A matrix of interaction between six research factors identified from the literature and seven emergent themes was constructed and tested against the empirical data. The matrix successfully accommodated the data categories of the study, establishing its validity as an informative and useful Change Management Framework. The Framework was used to compare and contrast the perceptions, feelings, and ideas of the different individuals to understand how they reconstructed their leadership in a change situation. Furthermore, a model for the reconstruction of leadership in a significant organizational change was developed based on the grounded research. The researcher believes that the work presented in this thesis adds to the richness of the tapestry of perspectives in the arena of leadership and change research. It is also hoped that the framework and model developed in this study will contribute to the practice of change leaders in many circumstances.
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ItemComputerised accounting systems, curriculum and business needs( 2007)Globalisation, information technology, and in particular the development of sophisticated Computerised Accounting Systems (CAS) software, have become driving forces that continue to enhance and transform business needs and practices. A review of the literature suggests that the design of current accounting curricula does not sufficiently expose students to the concepts of globalisation and technology. This study aimed to discover the extent to which existing Australian CAS curriculum models did reflect business needs. Guidance was sought from the literature and from academics' accounts of how they develop the CAS curriculum, and the perceptions of business needs of business professionals, (key knowledgeables and young gun managers), and current students with business experience were explored. The study also considered the match between the CAS curriculum offered at the university where the researcher is employed as a lecturer and business needs, through an exploration of what the cohort of current students with business experience perceived the subject to offer. A mixed-method research strategy of enquiry, using two separate methods of data collection, was used, to better understand the relationship between curricula and business needs. This approach provided numeric trends from the quantitative research and detail from the qualitative research. The study was conducted in three phases: a survey gathered data relevant to the current students with business experience and the young guns, an Internet search for appropriate subject descriptions was made and an analysis was undertaken, and interviews provided rich data as the perceptions of academics, key knowledgeables, young guns and current students with business experience were explored.. Rogers' (2003) adoption-diffusion study influenced the analysis of data gathered from the Internet search for Australian relevant subject descriptions. Academics were classified into adopter categories on the basis of innovativeness of curriculum content, and thus provided a basis for understanding the aims of their CAS curriculum, their perceived importance of business needs to the curriculum, and why a particular software became a feature of the curriculum. The data was analysed thematically and the key findings were drawn from the participants' experiences in business and at university. All participants were aware of the increasingly dominant role of CAS in business but a variety of different opinions and beliefs were presented as to the value of CAS as a part of university curricula. However, the overall view was that the academic's response must prepare students to participate in the business world, by ensuring curriculum content included learning processes, teaching practices and software offerings that would provide appropriate business solutions. The findings showed a number of impediments to future curriculum design that need to be addressed. These include academic inadequacies, pedagogical beliefs and practices related to the place of software applications in curriculum design, the need for different software solutions for different business problems, and cost factors related to the decision to introduce new technologies. Recommendations were made as to appropriate topics to include in future curriculum design. All cohorts agreed that enterprise resource planning (ERP) solutions will be the future business software solution of choice to both large and small to medium enterprise (SME) businesses, and a solution was proposed for innovative curriculum design in order to master the complexity of such applications.
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ItemEducational accountability and organisational capacity in school science departments: a material critique of management models of mandated curriculum reforms( 2007)In Sociology, Bourdieu (1977), Giddens (1984) and Schatzki (2001) have developed theories of practice to offer an alternative to rational and normative concepts of action and to solve the problem of the relationship between agency and structure. They argue that cultural, political and economic processes are mutually constitutive of social agency, as agency can be productively read as a historically specific confluence of discursive and material processes. In applied disciplines such as organizational and management studies (Niccolini, 2001) as well as in education (Southerland, Smith, Sowell and Kittleson, 2007), practice has been adopted to redefine the concepts of knowledge and learning and to understand change in working life. In these contexts, practice-based research has become part of new research areas, such as organizational learning, knowledge management, innovation and workplace studies and this research is in this modern tradition. This is a study of the praxis of two groups of science teachers, in different countries under different policy regimes of state mandated curriculum management. It is a study towards an understanding of the pedagogy of resistance and transformation. The significance of the resistance of material entities for the objectivity of knowledge is an important theme in the sociology of knowledge. The practice theorists in science and technology studies (for example Pickering 1993,1995, Latour 2000, Miettinen, 2006) have taken this resistance manifesting itself in experimental activity as a constitutive factor in accounting for the emergence of facts and scientific concepts. Pickering (1955: 560) talks about the temporal emergence of experimental activity in research as a "real-time dialectic of resistance and accommodation". Resistance refers to the blockage in reaching a goal or realization of a hypothesis. Fleck (1981) proposes that a fact is understood as a resistance expressed in experimental work and interpreted by the practice community. The widespread notion of "constraint" is usually understood as some kind of external condition that objectively limits scientific activities and epistemologies of transformative material activity more generally. "Resistance" is to be preferred, Pickering argues, because resistances are genuinely emergent in time, as a block arising in practice to a passage of goal-oriented practice" For Latour (200) objectivity refers to the presence of things that "object to what is told about them". This study uses surveys of whole school and science department staff as well as interviews conducted over a year in each of two schools, one in England and one in Melbourne Australia. It looks at the agency of science teachers as a transformative material activity, its relationship with policies of State mandated standards, and the objectivisation of teacher knowledge. Whereas subjective identity operates here in terms of types of experience that are available, agency of these teachers has to do more with a distribution of acts. Bhaskar's (1993) Transformational Model of Social Action has been applied to the analysis of staffroom praxis and offers an informing under-theory to the study of teacher agency and practice.
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ItemFrom general coping orientation to task-specific responses: how does coping style influence self-efficacy, interest, and task performance?( 2006)Adolescence involves a number of challenges and stressors. To manage the demands that confront them, adolescents draw on their coping resources. The main purpose of this study was to investigate the relationships between general coping styles and task specific responses in a sample of Australian high 'school students. An interactive computer program presented students with the Adolescent Coping Scale (ACS) - Short Form (Frydenberg & Lewis, 1993a) and two problem-based curriculum tasks: the first task required students to make recommendations to their school council about the types of food that should be sold in their school canteen; the second task invited students to write a letter to their local politician stating whether charges should be put on plastic bags in their local supermarket. The ACS was used to measure students' use of 18 coping strategies. A principal component analysis of the ACS was performed to determine the coping styles represented by students in this sample. As well as recording students' ACS responses, the computer program recorded students' task selection, task specific self-efficacy, levels of situational interest immediately before and immediately after the task, and task solutions in their real-time sequence. All solutions were subsequently scored by two independent scorers. In confirmation of previous studies investigating the coping strategies used by adolescents, female students reported more use of the coping strategy, social support than male students, and older students reported more use of the strategy tension reduction than younger students. It was also found that male students reported greater use of the strategy invest in close friends than female students, and younger students reported greater use of the strategy wishful thinking than older students. The principal component analysis of the ACS showed that two factors described the students' coping styles, a maladaptive coping style and an adaptive coping style. This study identified a number of paths linking coping styles with task-specific responses. Importantly, the results revealed that maladaptive coping style was negatively associated with self-efficacy, and that adaptive coping style was positively associated with self-efficacy and situational interest at both points. In addition, self-efficacy was positively associated with situational interest before the task, which, in turn, was positively associated with task performance and situational interest after the task. These findings provide a unique insight into the relationships between adolescent coping orientations and responses to a specific task, and have clear implications for programs that attempt to enhance the coping skills of young people.
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ItemDeveloping better practice: towards a reconceptualization of clinical nursing education( 2007)On the commencement of professional practice, most nursing graduates experience difficulties in making the transition from student to beginning practitioner. New graduates, as well as their more experienced colleagues, consider the inadequate clinical practice component of undergraduate nursing education preparation as a major factor contributing to poor graduate performance on entering the workforce. In the education of nurses over the past forty years, emphasis has been placed on the development of theoretical knowledge. During this time contemporary learning theories from general education have been employed to support nursing education. These learning theories, developed specifically for classroom learning, have extended beyond the classroom to support clinical learning as well. The underlying assumption is that knowledge learnt in the classroom will transfer to the clinical area when required. This thesis is a critical examination of past and present approaches to clinical practice in nursing education. Specifically, it is argued that contemporary learning theory supporting nursing education is insufficient for clinical practice, and that learning does not transfer in the manner assumed by current nursing educational practices. While situated learning theories, developed specifically in practice, are more suited to clinical practice, they remain limited because they do not account for how humans actually learn. Recent advances in the neurosciences can give an inclusive scientific account for learning, and are therefore more suitable to support both the theory and practice of nursing education. It is argued that viewing clinical nursing as vector coding, processing, and neural weight development, frees nursing practice from the conception that it is a subsidiary of the theoretical knowledge developed as part of the theoretical component of nursing knowledge. In order to develop better nursing practice, nursing education requires a new theoretical framework that properly reflects our current best knowledge of human learning and information processing.