Melbourne Graduate School of Education - Theses

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    Statistics of public expenditure on education in Australia : requirements for the formation of national policy
    Segall, Patsy (1942-) ( 1976)
    In Australia's federal system the provision of educational services is the responsibility of the state governments. However, the federal government has also acquired responsibilities for. education. Since the second world war, the state governments have been dependent on the federal government for a large proportion of the funds needed to discharge their responsibilities. More directly, the federal government has greatly extended the scope of its activities in education, mainly through the use of specific. purpose grants to the states. By 1970 these grants affected all levels of education in the states. To be effective, national 'educational policies should take account of differences between the states as well as of 'national needs. Necessary information includes national statistics which are compiled on the same basis for each of . the states. The coverage and quality of national educational statistics has improved considerably, but there are still deficiencies. In particular, the statistics of public expenditure on education do not provide an adequate account of the states individually, or of national trends. Unpublished records of the Australian Bureau of Statistics provide the basis for a set of figures of public expenditure on education which are both more comprehensive and more detailed than those published. Analysis of these figures for the period 1963-64 to 1973-74 shows large differences in the patterns of educational expenditure in each of the states. Nationally there have been considerable changes in the composition of total public outlay on education, the rapid growth of the tertiary sector outside universities being particularly noteworthy. Official statistics of this kind are needed to make possible an effective assessment of the priorities and directions of Australian education.
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    Sources of maladjustment in male sixth form students
    Conway, Ronald Victor ( 1974)
    Following Hohne (1951) and a pilot study by Conway (1960) an in-depth investigation was made of 96 sixth form boys from two large metropolitan private secondary schools - one a Catholic college, the other a grammar school. It was planned to test hypotheses that there would be significant differences in personal adjustment between both schools and curricular groupings (Maths-Science versus Humanities- Commercial). It was further planned to investigate the sources of various kinds of maladjustment by qualitative analysis, using individually administered projective tests and interviews. Apart from an appreciable difference in I.Q. between the two curricular groups, no really significant difference was found between schools and groups. There were, however, some differences in the kind of values espoused by contrasted schools and contrasted groups. Furthermore, qualitative analysis established, with a large measure of confidence, that the chief sources of stress experienced by students in their terminal secondary year were not curricular or scholastic. Maladjustments from domestic and extracurricular sources were found to decisively outrank those deriving (or believed to have derived) from the requirements imposed by the syllabus and school milieu. This finding was considered to have some value as a basis for criteria for further enquiry into the relationship between intrapsychic stresses and educational performance.
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    A comparison of the educational set of students in two introductory physics courses
    Blazely, Lloyd David ( 1972)
    The P.S.S.C. physics course and a traditional physics course taught in Tasmania were examined for differences in aims that might lead to differences in the educational set developed in students taking the two courses. A six-category model of educational set in physics involving recall of specifics, practical applications, mathematical generalizations, verbal generalizations, constructive criticism and destructive criticism was developed and a 24 item test instrument (Test E.S. (Physics)) constructed, subsequent to two different trials. Test E.S. (Physics), the Educational Set Scale of Siegal and Siegal and tests AL and AQ were administered to a sample of 389 students made up as follows:- Form IV - 97 in Tasmania and 58 in Victoria Form V - 49 in Tasmania and 82 in Victoria Form VI - 51 in Tasmania and 50 in Victoria Classes from two schools were included in each sub-sample. AL plus AQ was used as the covariate and the appropriate corrections were made before the technique of planned comparisons was used in a variety of within-state and between-state comparisons. The only significant between-state difference detected was in the categories of mathematical generalization. Within each state the comparison between Form IV students and students in later years resulted in significant differences in all comparison except for category 1 (specific facts). A number of correlations were investigated without any clear pattern emerging although category 3 (mathematical generalizations) was involved in several significant correlations. An off-shoot of the major study lead to the development of an Education Set Test based on Bloom's Taxonomy of Educational Objectives. The administration of the test gave results consistent with the order between categories suggested by the Bloom model. The major finding of the study was that both physics courses probably produced significant changes in students' educational set but these changes did not seem to be consistent with the differences between their aims.