Faculty of Education - Theses
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ItemParents in the classroom( 1987)The aim of this study was to investigate the impact of the presence of parents in the classroom on children, parents, and teachers. The study took the form of a sequenced set of action research style interventions in an outer-suburban secondary school and an inner-city primary school. Attitudes of parents of students in year 7 to creativity, frustration, control, play, and teaching/learning were measured with Strom's Parent as a Teacher inventory, P A A T. Achievements of the children in word knowledge, comprehension, spelling, and maths were measured with tests of ACER. There were some significant correlations between attitudes of parents and achievements of their children. For example, attitudes of mothers to control and the achievement of their children in maths were very highly correlated (N=105, p=.001). After one year of secondary schooling, there was no significant difference between the entering and final achievements of the year 7 students in this study in comprehension and maths (N=123). End-of-year scores of students for word knowledge and spelling were below the scores that would have been expected of students one year younger (N=175, 174). The numbers in these comparisons differ because of absences from school. Classroom experiments were conducted with parents in classrooms in a junior secondary and a primary school. "Parents" means adults who may be parents, other relatives or friends of the students, or friends of the school. In year 7, three different treatments for six weeks were compared, namely, two parents for two classroom periods a week (T), two parents for four periods a week (F), and no parents (Z). There was a significant interaction between mathematical aptitude and treatment (p=.021) such that at the low level of aptitude, achievements in maths with treatments F and T were superior to treatment Z. Also, with the low and medium levels of aptitude combined, treatment T was superior to treatment F (p=.038). With respect to attitude to learning maths, treatment T was superior to treatment F at both the low and medium levels of mathematical aptitude. However the effect on post attitudes was not significant. The attitudes of students in one grade 2 and two composite grades 3/4 were measured to sixteen items that were related to their school and TV. Coincident with the presence of parents in the classrooms of grade 2 and two composite grades 3/4 , there was an increase in positive attitudes of students to eight items in which there was a high level of teacher/parent involvement (HTPI) compared with eight low TPI items (grade 2, N=26; grades 3/4, N=50). In grades 3/4, the presence of parents in the classroom over a period of eight weeks had useful cumulative effects on time on task, teacher stress, and inappropriate class behaviour. Parents, students, and teachers in this study recommended that experience with parents in the classroom should be expanded.
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ItemHenry Lowther Clarke and educational policy in the Anglican diocese of Melbourne 1903-1920( 1990)The episcopate of Henry Lowther Clarke as fourth Anglican Bishop and first Archbishop of Melbourne in the years 1903 to 1920 saw the most explicit and comprehensive formulation and application of educational policy in the Melbourne Diocese prior to or since that period. In the tertiary sector, there were moves made to establish a Faculty of Divinity at the University of Melbourne, the foundation of the Melbourne College of Divinity and provisions for the theological training of non-matriculated ordination candidates. In the secondary sector of education, thirteen schools were established, acquired or, in some manner, brought under the aegis of the Anglican Church. There was a particular emphasis on the founding of schools for girls. Attempts were made to establish a bureaucratic structure to monitor the acquisition of schools and religious instruction within them. The movement for the introduction of Bible reading integrated into the programme of the State's primary schools continued, having been strongly active during the episcopates of James Moorhouse (1876-1886) and Field Flowers Goe (1887-1901). In the parishes of the diocese, Archbishop Clarke initiated a review of the Sunday School system with teacher training and a common syllabus receiving particular attention. Clarke was also central in the encouragement of the foundation of Anglican free kindergartens in the inner-city region of the diocese. Yet these achievements were not entirely consistent with Clarke's stated objectives. Major influences affecting the partial success of the achievement of objectives are seen in: - the experiences, assumptions and personality of an expatriate bishop elected at the age of fifty; - the nature of Anglicanism in Victoria: its demography, divisions within on issues of churchmanship, its concept of a constitutional rather than absolutist episcopacy, the widespread acceptance of voluntarism and limited financial resources; - the extent of a secularist approach in Australian thought, both in an ideological sense and in the pragmatic sense congruent with the experience of ecclesiastical divisions and antipathy; overt sectarianism, in particular the lack of unanimity or harmony in and between Roman Catholic, Anglican and Protestant faith and order. The widespread sectarianism during the First World War which centred upon Archbishop Daniel Mannix highlights this influential factor. Thus, while describing and recognising the achievements in Anglican educational activity in the years 1903 to 1920, the failure to achieve explicit objectives has to be evaluated and recognised as part of a complexity of factors, not all of which were appreciated by Henry Lowther Clarke.