Australian teacher educators and teachers are become increasingly familiar with the notion of "Productive Pedagogies", itself the product of longitudinal research on school reform undertaken in Queensland, Australia (Lingard et al. 2001). One of Productive Pedagogies' strengths has been its efficacy for teachers to use as a language to talk about…

The late 20th Century saw the rapid rise of quality assurance and effectiveness measures in most industries and organisations. These trends were very much reflected in education at all levels. An associated emergent trend in primary and secondary education in Australia was growth in the use of standardised measures of student achievement that…

Leadership, professional and other transferable skills are embedded in the expected attributes of Australian research postgraduates at the successful completion of their degrees. This paper reports on the development of an evaluation process for a postgraduate transferable skills program at The University of Melbourne, Australia. Existing and…

This article reports on the development of a new measure entitled: "Reactions to Teaching Situations" to indicate levels of emotional intelligence among beginning teachers. This article discusses the concept of emotional intelligence and defends the development of such a measure specifically related to the situations in the teaching environment,…

Teacher shortages have encouraged initiatives to tailor training programs to meet the demand in both past, current and future contexts. Such programs have been streamlined to ensure a rapid response to shortages, in addition to also drawing participants from non-traditional groups as a source of potential educators. Within teacher education,…

The purpose of this study was to explore teachers' perceptions of physical education classes in an urban Korean primary school. Furthermore, this study tried to interpret how teachers' beliefs were reflected in their teaching. One primary school with seventeen teachers was selected as the site for a case study. Data were collected by participant…

In many fields and in education in particular, researchers, such as teachers, are inclined to believe that because they are enmeshed in the field or have good relationships with students, issues of politics, power and status will exert minimal influence and that access to the field will be smooth and unproblematic. In this paper, three doctoral…

This study considers one way to make more productive use of information in a recognised survey instrument, the "Parental Attitudes to Inclusion" (PATI) scale and, thus, to enhance inclusive classroom practice for students with special needs. The instrument, designed to elicit views about inclusion, was initially administered to a large sample of…

This paper focuses on the experiences of an early career researcher involved in a mentoring relationship at the University of Western Sydney (UWS), Australia. A discussion of the research literature is reported to highlight the attributes of mentoring relationships and the different forms of mentoring. The mentoring relationship that the author is…

This report examines the "Performance Indicators in Primary Schools" (PIPS) test as a reliable and cohesive instrument to assess early literacy and numeracy skills among Indigenous children. The process includes the examination of the reliability of the PIPS test using the Cronbach Alpha and the Split-half method with Pearson's r correlation…

The study reported here focuses on the factors that contribute to the production or non-production of refereed publications by academics. A literature review revealed that factors associated with an academic's personal characteristics, attitude to work, and workplace circumstances could influence publication output. Academics from a large…

This paper outlines one researcher's reflections on the development and use of a conceptual framework as a research tool. Firstly, it discusses the conditions upon which a conceptual framework was devised and used in a major research study. Secondly, it provides evidence concerning the efficacy of the conceptual framework for its purpose in that…

The concept of learning strategies has become quite familiar to most professionals in teaching English as a foreign language. The aim of this study is to discover gender differences in language learning strategies used by foreign language learners in a Turkish University. 184 university students who participated in this study were enrolled in the…

Two seminal reports on the state of education advantage and disadvantage in so called "rich nations" were released in 2002 by the international agencies OECD (2002a) and UNICEF (2002). These complex reports are brought to the attention of those at the very centre of the education debate, the general public, through the public media. What the…