Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemCitizenship, democracy and full-service schooling integrated services(University of Melbourne, 1998)
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ItemPALS: aid or method? : a study of children's responses to learning a language through interactive satellite television(University of Melbourne, 1998)This research considers the role of Interactive Satellite Television (ISTV) in primary Languages Other Than English (LOTE). It investigates the response of students in three Year 5 and 6 classrooms, where the same ISTV material was being used in two different ways. Student response was noted as it was revealed in learning behaviours and these were considered in relation to factors considered significant in the literature: interactivity, learner needs and learning styles, the role of the facilitator, including facilitator attitudes, and the impact of program content on motivation and learner interest. The study addresses the questions � How is Primary Access to Languages Via Satellite (PALS) being used? Can it serve equally well as an aid, one among many resources available to a qualified teacher in a classroom, and as a total method for a language class managed by a facilitator? The study shows there is considerable difference in how teachers and facilitators employ PALS, some using it as designed, direct to air, some as videotaped material. The data show PALS to be more effective when used as a method. However the key factor in success would appear to be how the material is used, provided there is the opportunity for student interactivity and the classroom adult, whether teacher or facilitator, has good pedagogical skills. PALS can be used successfully as either stand-alone in e t hod for a facilitator, or as aid, a supplementary resource available to a teacher. The conditions for success in either case appear to rest on the professional attitudes and skills of the facilitator or the teacher, on the ability of the content to be motivating and interesting, and on the opportunity for students to interact live-to-air.
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ItemFamily story women: a comparative study of femaleness in family story literature for adolescents, in the 1890s and the 1990s.(University of Melbourne, 1998)Written in the late nineteenth century, Ethel Turner's first and most famous novel Seven Little Australians was significant to the development of Australian children's literature. Turner's writings have been well-documented by the critics of Australian children's literature and notable features of her work were the family setting, the construction of young women, the realistic character development and the content appropriate to adolescents. While the family setting in adolescent literature remains important, and the critics connect Turner's texts with modern adolescent literature, there has been little critical examination of the 1990s family story and the construction of young women, and there have been no published systematic comparative examinations over one hundred years from the 1890s to the 1990s. Thus, this comparative literary analysis examines the femaleness of the family story young women in the adolescent literature written by two middle class female authors Ethel Turner in the 1890s and Joanne Horniman in the 1990s. The texts were chosen because they were written approximately one hundred years apart and the main characters are young women in a family setting. As well as analyzing and comparing the construction of the femaleness of the main female characters in the selected texts, this research critically examines the similarities and differences in terms of the boundaries of acceptable behaviour, gender issues in the texts and what the authors think females are and should be like. The research concluded that there has been significant change in the construction of the young women by these two authors. Turner's approved young women were conventional, compliant, obedient and domestically successful in a confining patriarchal society. In contrast Horniman approves of young women who are capable, problem solvers, independent and personally responsible, but also accepts unconventionality in a society that encourages individuality.
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ItemTowards a model for colleague support : matching support to needs and contexts( 1999)This thesis explores the issue of colleague support in schools observed in five case site schools over several years. The study sought to ascertain how colleagues perceive, rate, utilise and value colleague support and the effect of colleague support across a school culture. The research study is predominantly qualitative using participant observation and interviews, over several years. The interviews are based on an earlier pilot study (conducted in 1995-96) and a later survey of each of the five case site schools that make up this research study. The thesis outlines how colleagues describe, value, and utilise colleague support and proposes a typology of support based in grounded theory. This typology asserts that schools have definable `colleague-shape; based in characteristics and protocols of support that have an increasing degree of school-wide consciousness. The typology, and emerging protocols, it is hoped, have both a descriptive and diagnostic facility and an adaptive utility. This thesis concludes with a chapter on adaptive facility proposing suggestions, arising from this study, that might increase a school's conscious awareness and use of colleague support.
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ItemConversational or instructional discourse : the opportunity for production of language by high school age students in English conversation classes in Japan( 1999)Some recent views on English language teaching suggest that one of the goals should be to use natural or genuine conversation in the classroom in preference to more traditional classroom communication. This study set out to find if naturalistic conversation used by the teacher was able to promote more active production of language by learners in a classroom of Japanese high school learners of English in Japan than in comparison to instructional classroom discourse. The length of responses to both referential and display questions were measured in terms of the mean length of utterance of the responses of the students to teacher questions in order to gauge the relationship between the type of language used and the potential for production of language. It was assumed that referential questions were characteristic of more naturalistic language and that display were characteristic of more 'traditional' classroom language. Opportunities for the negotiation of meaning were also sought by measuring the frequency of occurrence of echoic questions, associated with negotiation of meaning for both conversational discourse and for instructional discourse. The results for this particular study initially showed that in terms of the length of response and opportunities for the negotiation of meaning, both display questions and referential questions produced longer responses in instructional discourse than in comparison to conversational discourse. This suggests that in the case of the students studied, traditional classroom language or instructional discourse showed more potential for production of language than did naturalistic conversation, regardless of the question type. The results also showed that display questions promoted longer segments of classroom talk and negotiation of meaning than did referential questions suggesting that classroom conversation, as characterised by display questions, holds more potential for the negotiation of meaning than natural conversation. The results also showed, however, that there may be difficulties in producing conversational discourse and instructional discourse in a lesson in this context suggesting that the research questions and design of this particular study may be in need of reconceptualisation.
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ItemRater consistency and judgment in the direct assessment of second language writing ability within the certificates in spoken and written English( 1998)The introduction of competency-based models of language and literacy education in Australia has, to a large degree, coincided with an increased emphasis on direct assessment as the most common means of evaluating second language writing ability within the Adult Migrant English Program. The key problem in directly assessing writing ability is having two or more raters arrive at a similar judgment or rating for the same piece of writing. While there is a long tradition of research on rater consistency and judgment in the holistic assessment of writing ability, similar research on the direct assessment of second language writing ability within the context of competency-based language and literacy education is almost non-existent. This study aims to determine the degree to which the performance criteria designed to assess second language writing ability within the Certificates in Spoken and Written English can ensure acceptable levels of rater consistency, and to describe the decision-making behaviours and strategies used by raters when reading for the purposes of assessment. The think-aloud verbal reports of six experienced ESL raters assessing three texts written by intermediate level adult ESL learners were transcribed and subjected to a rigorous interpretive analysis. In terms of rater consistency, analysis of raters verbal reports indicated that while there was generally a high degree of rater consistency at the overall performance or text level there was considerably tess agreement at the level of individual performance criteria. Analysis of the data revealed that raters adopted distinctive styles or approaches to reading for the purposes of assessment and that raters interpreted and applied the performance criteria statements in a range of different ways. These findings have significant implications not only for the development of competency-based assessment procedures but also for the training of raters. v11
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ItemStudents, computers and learning : a conversation with the cognitive apprentices and their learning tools( 1998)Wertsch (1991) asserts the mind "extends beyond the skin", that is, it is socially distributed and is a function of activity involving cultural tools. From this perspective the mind is unlimited in the sense that it is developed and inseparable from tools of mediation of which the computer is a corporeal thing that extends out into the material world. The computer as a means of mediation can be invisible yet powerfully influential in shaping thought and communication.. In this small-scale case study in an academic independent school a representative focus group of year 9 students suggests to the Author, their school's computer specialist, that their teachers are not to be providing mediated learning with computers. The students who are the metaphoric "cognitive apprentices" feel the school as an institution has not 'grasped the idea.' Bryson and De Castell (1994, 215) observed that " ... the divisive playing field of educational technology is populated by various teams who are telling altogether different 'true stories,' each having different settings, characters and plots ..." The new age believers and the non believers were not listening to the users. Hargreaves (1996) offered a parallel critical assessment, after Plummer (1983) and Wood (1991), of the use of "voice" in contemporary educational research. He stressed the need for active participant voices outside conventional conversations, from different contexts, different positions and particularly the marginalised. In both educational practice and research, student's voice has frequently been considered " a nuisance; literal noise in the instructional system" (Cazden 1986, 448). However, if teachers and schools as agents of parents and society are to embrace computers as cognitive tools, and accept them into the educational context as a means to gaining one or more educational ends, then there is need to research the voices of the cognitive apprentices on their learning with computers. The collaborative nature of the ethnographic research was grounded in the mutual regard of the researcher and the practitioners (students) as change agents in their own school. Central to the research was the development and exploration of a clue structure to understand how student practitioners saw computers being used in their classrooms. The initial core questionnaire asked the students to position their opinion of the school's , and their teachers' use of computers in the provision of the curriculum on a continuum between; "Are computers instructional tools used by teachers to impart knowledge to you", or, "Are computers used as cognitive tools to afford students' opportunities to construct representations of their knowledge and understandings of the concepts being taught ?
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ItemThe ontological and epistemological basis of Senge's The fifth discipline( 1999)This thesis will establish, through academic, philosophical analysis. that two of Senge's five disciplines in The Fifth Discipline (1990) rely on a Cartesian construction of the worker and a Correspondence theory of truth. Drawing on Ryle, Dewey and Wittgenstein, the thesis will analyse Senge's core statements defining his disciplines of Mental Models and Personal Mastery to show their Cartesian philosophical basis. As Senge's entire theory of management learning relies on his Cartesian construction of the worker and his Correspondence theory of truth, it will he argued that his theory of management learning, which attempts to lay claim to a new approach, would be better served by a philosophical basis in the new organic science of quantum theory and complexity theory. The alternative philosophy which will be proposed is based on organic science. quantum theory and complexity. theory. it will rest on a basis of a philosophy which is both atomistic and integrationist at the same time, and on a Coherence theory of truth.
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ItemManagers perceptions of workplace learning( 1999)This thesis sets outs the post-industrial organisation as the learning context in which the manager manages. By highlighting the set of skills that is required of the post-industrial manager it then examines how the manager learns these in the course of daily work. This was achieved by conducting interviews with a limited range of managers who are employed by the same retailing company but work across two store locations. What is apparent is that the successful manager needs to be able to respond to the emotionality of the workplace by having well honed 'people' skills of which communicability is uppermost. It was found that the 'people' skills were not only the hardest to learn but also contributed to the definition of the successful manager. The thesis also establishes that managers learn to manage in and through the workplace experiences of managing thereby supporting the contention that learning is fundamentally a socialisation process which occurs within a specific context and, within that, the most meaningful individual learning is, indeed, experiential. Learning to manage is very much about dealing with 'people' issues and, in this respect, the experiences of trial and error, then reflection, are the manager's teacher.