Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemLanguage and thinking in action: how one primary teacher supports her students to enact and articulate their thinking( 2007)This study investigated how one teacher facilitates dialogue with and between primary-aged students, to assist their thinking, at a time when the introduction of a new curriculum in Victoria is placing explicit demands on teachers to meet rigorous standards in students' thinking. Its aim was to identify exploratory (Mercer 2002) or dialogic interactions (Wells 1999) in the context of problem-based or inquiry learning, so that educators will better understand how language-based techniques and prompts promote students' thinking and learning. A review of the current and relevant literature revealed that classroom-based research focusing on the relationship between language, thinking and learning as theorised by Lev Vygotsky and Michael Halliday, emphasises the important role of the teacher in challenging and extending students' thinking. A qualitative case study of the language generated by the teacher working mainly with a small group of her students was undertaken and discourse analytic techniques were applied to the data. The main findings of the study relate to (i) the teacher's use of some dialogic techniques that supported students' thinking and learning and (ii) alternatively the teacher's under-exploitation of teachable moments to fully promote students' thinking and learning using exploratory language.
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ItemThe influence of information and communication technology (ICT) on secondary school students' development in Japanese handwriting skills( 2008)For twenty years, researchers have suggested that Information and Communication Technology (ICT) facilitates language learning by motivating students (e.g. Rodrigues and Rodrigues, 1986; Phinney, 1989; Pennington and Brock, 1992; Felix 2001). In particular, research concludes that ICT positively changes students' attitudes towards writing, because it reduces the fear of making mistakes. Despite considerable research on the value of ICT in the learning of European languages and ESL, few studies have been conducted on its use in Japanese classes (Chikamatsu, 2003), especially at the early secondary level. Yet it is often said that Japanese is one of the most difficult languages for English native speakers to learn (Chikamatsu, 2003), and its writing system is regarded as the most complex in the world (Sproat, 2000). Hence ICT might be expected to facilitate learning the three different sets of symbols used in combination to write Japanese, but it is not commonly used by secondary students for this. In this study, the aim was to document and analyse the achievements of beginner level school learners of Japanese when ICT was introduced for learning basic Japanese using mainly the phonetic Hiragana syllabary. Following methods created by Chikamatsu (2003), the effectiveness of using ICT was determined by comparing the speed and accuracy of students' answers in vocabulary tests, and interviewing them about their learning processes using ICT. The results show that, while the use of ICT motivated students' learning and assisted the weaker students to speed up their writing and to write more correctly, the excessive use of ICT had a negative influence on students' handwriting skills, an ability required in final year examinations as well as in real life. Thus students in the experimental group who used only the computer produced more errors when transferring to writing Japanese by hand. Findings therefore suggest that computers should only be used as a supplementary tool in class to stimulate students' learning.
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ItemAn examination of the relationship between early childhood staff and parents through the question: "Is it how early childhood staff and parents see each other that enables an equitable relationship to develop or do these images become a barrier to such a relationship?"( 2009)There has been a lot of academic interest in understanding the relationships between early childhood staff and the parents of children in their care. The literature has identified that despite knowing the importance of a positive relationship with parents early childhood staff find these relationships difficult. The literature has identified many barriers to an equitable relationship forming between early childhood staff and parents. The literature also suggested possible solutions. This masters study examined the relationship between early childhood staff and parents by exploring what each thinks of the other and how they see each other.-This study asks the question: "Do the "images" early childhood staff and parents have of each other contribute or become a barrier to an equitable relationship developing"? The participants in the study were from three child care centres in metropolitan Melbourne, eleven early childhood staff and nine parents whose children attended - the centres. Three data collection methods were used: - Face-to-face semi-structured interviews - Participant Little Narrative Conference (PLNC) - Journals/diaries Grounded Theory was used to firstly code and then analyse the data. The themes that developed included: - the communication styles between early childhood staff and parents, - the types of knowledge early childhood staff and parents have of the child and the respect or otherwise each has of the other's knowledge - the roles parents play in the early childhood service and how the early childhood staff saw and encouraged those roles. The data from the semi-structured interviews and PLNC mirrored the issues raised in the literature review. It was the journals/diaries that provided new data to examine as well as offering a different perspective in which to review data from the other data collection methods. The journal/diary data from both the early childhood staff and the parents provided a new lens through which to look at the relationships between early childhood staff and parents. The study found that it was not so much the images early childhood staff and parents had of each other but the images early childhood staff had of themselves which enhanced or became a barrier to an equitable relationship forming. These new understandings offer a different way forward towards the possibility of more equitable relationships forming between early childhood staff and parents and opened up possibilities for further study.
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ItemThe motivations of youth work students in formal education: implications for instructional design and teacher/student support( 2008)Each year within Technical and Further Education (TAFE) institutions across Victoria, individuals apply to study a myriad of Community Services courses. Anecdotally, educational facilitators have suggested that many individuals undertake these courses of study for personal reasons rather than for vocational outcomes. This project explored the reasons why individuals seek enrolment into Certificate IV in Youth Work or equivalent courses, and whether these courses meet the expectations of students. Two Victorian Technical and Further Education institutions agreed to participate in the research, and students enrolled in the Certificate IV in Youth Work were invited to take part. Constructivist Grounded Theory methodology was used to explore why individuals chose to study the Certificate IV in Youth Work. Questionnaires, interviews, and follow up questionnaires were used to engage with two groups of students throughout their year of training. At the beginning of the year 64 novice youth work students were asked to complete a questionnaire that explored their reasons for enrolling in the course, their understanding of youth issues and their perception of youth work as a career. Later in the year four students participated in follow up interviews and another seven individuals who had been unable to participate in interviews, completed open ended questionnaires to explore themes that emerged out of the initial questionnaires more deeply.
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ItemIntegrating formative and summative assessments: finding time-efficient ways to support student learning and teacher reporting( 2009)This study has set out to find ways in which the formative and summative goals of assessment could be achieved using the same instruments. The motivation for this integration of goals was to achieve time efficiencies, so that teachers could implement formative assessment in a way that would have minimal impact on their time. The researcher developed five short questionnaires, referred to in this thesis as recap sheets. These consisted of questions on the Measurement topic and were used by the researcher as well as another teacher at the same school with their respective Year Seven classes. A third teacher participated in the study and did not use the recap sheets. At the end of the teaching sequence, all three teachers predicted the marks that their students would achieve on a summative test. The researcher then interviewed the other two teachers to ascertain the sources of their predictions. The quantitative analysis of the teachers' predictions has shown that they were capable of predicting the performance of the majority of their students within an accuracy margin of 10%. Furthermore, when used to allocate grades, the predictions of the most experienced teacher in the study discriminated between the students more sensitively than did the marks achieved on the summative test. Another finding of the study was that all participating teachers were most accurate in predicting the performance of the students who achieved the lowest 25% of the test marks. Furthermore, the recap sheets were found to be effective in supporting student learning. In summary, the findings of this study suggest that neither continuous formative assessment instruments nor an end of unit summative test are, by themselves, sufficient to generate an accurate report of a student's performance. The use of recap sheets and teacher predictions as described above was shown to be a minimally demanding way of increasing the accuracy of summative assessments for grading purposes, while providing great benefits to student learning.