Edith Cowan Journal of Education

The wider social benefits of higher education: what do we know about them?

Maxwell Rabiot — 2023-06-30

There has recently been a shift towards private expenditure in the tertiary education sector accompanied by a shift of public subsidies to students themselves. Implicit in this shift is the message that tertiary education is a private rather than public good, belonging to individual students rather than society. This paper explores the research on the wider social benefits of higher education and the data and methodologies that exist to underpin it. Its focus is on benefits to society but, since individual social benefits are entangled with wider benefits, both are discussed. The paper finds that little research has been undertaken in Australia even though understanding the wider social benefits of higher education is considered important to policy development. Longitudinal survey data do exist that could be extended and harnessed for such research.

Preparing reflective teachers: An overview of instructional strategies which have been employed in preservice teacher education

Abel Trump — 2023-06-30

This chapter describes several of the most common approaches to the preparation of more reflective teachers during preservice teacher education. After identifying the characteristics of and variability within this paradigmatic orientation, six specific strategies are discussed: action research; ethnographic studies; writing exercises; and the Ohio State ‘reflective teaching’ exercises. The paper also assesses the degree to which the benefits thought to be associated with inquiry-oriented strategies have been empirically validated by research.

Electronic voting systems for lectures then and now: A comparison of research and practice

Mironga Ivy Jones — 2023-06-30

Research and practice in the use of electronic voting systems has developed over the last five years. Electronic voting systems, also known as personal response systems, audience response systems or classroom communication systems, use handsets to elicit responses from students as part of structured teaching sessions, typically lectures. The use of this information has implications for pedagogy; they are associated with the introduction of interactive, discursive and more segmented approaches to teaching. The pedagogic and organizational implications of adopting such systems are summarized, along with the perceptions that staff and students hold. Comparisons are drawn between practice up to 2002 and between 2002 and2006; these reveal how both practice and research on this topic has matured, highlighting (for example) the development of models that seek to abstract and share practice. The paper concludes by outlining the ways in which such tools can be used to improve lecturing, and identifies an agenda for future work in this area.

A prospective study of participation in optional school physical education using a self-determination theory framework.

Faith Aziz — 2023-06-30

This study examined whether contextual and personal motivational variables, taken from self-determination theory, could predict student cognitive and affective experiences in school physical education (PE), as well as participation in optional PE in the following school year. Structural equation modeling analysis with a sample of 302 British adolescents showed that need support provided by the PE teachers was related to student need satisfaction, which in turn predicted self-determined motivation. The latter predicted directly various motivational indices and indirectly future participation in optional PE. Furthermore, multivariate analysis of variance tests showed that those who opted for PE (n =171), compared with those who did not (n= 131), reported more positive motivational experiences in the previous school year. The findings call for the promotion of self-determined motivation in PE in order to enhance student positive experiences and participation rates.