Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemAn investigation of the impact of LEGO® robotics on the learning of scientific and mathematical concepts at primary level( 2013)This study analysed the way students at grade 3 and 4 learned to manipulate the design projects that are part of lessons from the LEGO® Mindstorms Robotics Invention system. Students worked in cooperative groups of three to four members. Within the hour allocated for each lesson the participants swapped roles, being either a programmer or LEGO® designer. The students were required to utilise many skills, including design, directional language, communication and evaluation. The research methods of the study are qualitative. To find out what the students were learning the research relied on observational notes, written records and photographs. The research aimed to compile evidence of how this style of learning affected the outcomes of student’s achievement and attitudes. Students were required to analyse something that was active. They had to write observational notes to show their understanding of what was occurring and they also had to document how they changed the program to effect the robot’s movements.
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ItemDo New South Wales Catholic schools deliver equitable education for senior school students?( 2012)This thesis investigates the equity of provision and access to senior school curriculum in New South Wales (NSW) Catholic schools. Via a quantitative and survey investigation into student enrolment, enrolment trends, engagement, outcomes, transition, satisfaction and access, the thesis draws conclusions as to the equity of the provision to senior students (post-compulsory) in NSW Catholic schools. The thesis concentrates in particular on Higher School Certificate English, mathematics, science and Vocational Education and Training. The research relies in part on quantitative data for senior student (N=23,221) participation and outcomes in the NSW Catholic sector linked to social demographic data as contained in the Australian Bureau of Statistics (ABS) census collection district data. The multi-method quantitative research approach also includes the analysis of survey data collected through phone and email surveys of students (N=1,566), parents and carers (N=647) and teachers (N=1,184). The research finds that students from low SES backgrounds are disadvantaged on all measures. The thesis analyses the restraints that impact on NSW Catholic schools preventing them catering better for those of greatest need of their service. The research recommends that these restraints be challenged to better serve the poor as is the mission of Catholic schools. It challenges NSW Catholic schools to be more audacious in the manner in which they approach the delivery of the senior school experience.
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ItemThe dilemmas of junior school science at Caby High School: societal expectations, school structures, student experiences and teacher accounts( 2012)Public claims about the “failure” of science teaching have a 100 year history, which is almost as long as science has existed as a subject in schools. These claims which have evolved to proclamations of a social “crisis” in the post war period have been based in various iterative assertions about the failure of school science to meet its assumed social function to induct young people into a modern scientific structural-economic or functional world view and hence to reproduce a technical class in society. Public discussions of the broader cultural value of science education and scientific humanism, in the education of the person and citizen have been rare. This may be interpreted as a response to the essentially subversive nature of scientific knowledge or the significance of the technical training function that secondary science education is required to perform. Science teaching has been institutionalised as value free, and the skills of science teaching defined in terms of practical epistemologies in various scientific domains. Studies of teachers’ habits of action, of interpretation, of belief and validatory belief have been rare, particularly juxtaposed to the experiences of their students in their classes. Studies of life in science classrooms have attended to teachers or students, rarely both and more rarely even the school as the unit of analysis. Such studies have been small in scale and very poorly funded compared to the numerous formal enquiries into declining enrolments in senior pre-professional subjects in secondary schools. It is a history of social enquiry that seems to be reproduced in each period at the point where the imperfection of the writers’ memory of their experiences in science classrooms meets the past inadequacies of documentation of practice. The current small investigation takes its rise not from an interest in the so called facts about falling enrolments in senior science subjects or to establish a new theory of cause and effect, but from an urge to put together in a new way what everyone knows is there in science classes in the accounts of students and teachers, but not noticed. At Caby High School, an urban, multicultural secondary school, seeking to improve student participation and achievement in secondary education, my three collaborating science teachers and I were not looking for new facts but to better understand what is in plain view to them and their students in their everyday experience in junior science education. In that sense my considerations in this study were not scientific or hypothetical ones, to advance a kind of theory. I have not sought explanations of the supposed “failure” of science teaching in terms of what students fail to accomplish, expect or experience but rather to document what the students’ experiences and expectations are of science classes and how the teachers responded, not directly to the students’ expectations, but in terms of balancing both the social order to which the teachers are retrospectively accountable and the constitutive order in the classroom which requires mutual attention and cooperation. Through the teachers’ dramaturgical interpretation of their day to day practice my brief analyses are aimed at improved understanding of teacher agency in relation to the dilemmas of general science teaching.