This paper describes a quasi-experimental crossover trial of an outdoor adventure program for Year 9 school students in Australia. Previous studies have reported a range of positive outcomes of outdoor camps and adventure programs, but cautious interpretation of some claims may be warranted due to limitations in research methods. This study…

Obtaining oral communication competency is an important skill for engineering students to prepare them for interacting and working in any professional setting. For engineers, it is also important to be able to present technical information to non-technical audiences. To ensure oral competency, a non-graded formative assessment approach using video…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an 8-week gymnastics curriculum on children's movement competence and their physical self-concept. There were 113 children (46% girls, 49% intervention) with a mean age of 9.4 years (SD = 1.8) that participated. Intervention children underwent 8 weeks of gymnastics and the comparison group continued with…

Education for sustainable development (ESD) espouses student-centred, transformative pedagogies that promote learning through active, participatory and experiential learning. Yet, traditional lectures provide limited opportunities for engaging students in such pedagogies. This article reports on the inclusion of sustainability pedagogies within…

This study evaluated a professional learning approach using a core team (CT) model to assist primary (elementary) schools to develop whole-school collaborative conflict resolution processes. Thirteen schools were matched and randomly assigned to the enhancing relationships in school communities programme ("n"?=?10) or a non-programme…

Background: The innate ability for typically developing children to attain developmental motor milestones early in life has been a thoroughly researched area of inquiry. Nonetheless, as children grow and are required to perform more complex motor skills in order to experience success in physical activity and sport pursuits, the range of…

Social skills training is a long-standing intervention for adolescents with social anxiety, while self-esteem is often ignored. However, there is little evidence suggesting that those with social anxiety require social skills training or interventions associated with self-esteem. The aim of the research was to investigate whether social skills and…

"Thinking Science" is a 2-year program of professional development for teachers and thinking lessons for students in junior high school science classes. This paper presents research on the effects of "Thinking Science" on students' levels of cognition in Australia. The research is timely, with a general capability focused on…

The purpose of this research was to determine whether teaching argumentation to high school biology students improved their argumentation skills, informal reasoning, and genetics understanding. Using a quasi-experiment with mixed methods of data collection, five teachers participated in professional learning on argumentation and socioscientific…

The term scientific literacy is increasingly used by governments and teaching bodies, stemming from a growing international concern by scientists and government, who recognize the economic significance of developing scientific skills (McGregor & Kearton, 2010). However, in a society that requires students to be scientifically literate,…

This study examined the relationship between special health care needs and social-emotional and learning competence in the early years, reporting on two waves of data from the Kindergarten Cohort of "Growing up in Australia: The Longitudinal Study of Australian Children" (LSAC). Six hundred and fifty children were identified through the…

In order to self-regulate, students need to honestly reflect on their learning and to take appropriate corrective action. A simple procedure to cultivate student skills in self-regulated learning, known as the Task Evaluation and Reflection Instrument for Student Self-Assessment (TERISSA) is discussed in this paper. TERISSA guides students through…

The realisation to integrate science, ethics and morality is recognised with growing impetus in recent years (as noted with introducing the Australian Curriculum "Science as a Human Endeavour" strand), to develop sophisticated epistemologies of science, which includes an appreciation of the social context including ethical thinking. To…

Cooperative learning was applied in a graduate project management course to compare the effectiveness of asynchronous versus synchronous online team meetings. An experiment was constructed to allocate students to project teams while ensuring there was a balance of requisite skills, namely systems analysis and design along with HTML/Javascript…

One of the thorniest aspects of teaching languages is developing students' vocabulary, yet it is impossible to be "an accurate and highly communicative language user with a very small vocabulary" (Milton, 2009, p. 3). Nation (2006) indicates that more vocabulary than previously thought is required to function well both at spoken and…