Spatial, social and academic journeys undertaken between Taiwan and Australia for doctoral education are the focus of reflection here. The discussion centres on the authors' experiences of, on the one hand, the development of a Faculty of Education's doctoral pedagogies in the early 2000s to reflect its international PhD candidature…

Physics experiments for students not majoring in physics may have little meaning for those students and appear to them unconnected in any way to their majors. This affects student engagement and influences the extent to which they regard their experiences in the physics laboratory as positive. We apply a framework for the development and…

This paper reports on a series of introductory programming workshops, initially targeting female high school students, which utilised Lego Mindstorms robots. Cognitive load theory (CLT) was applied to the instructional design of the workshops, and a controlled experiment was also conducted investigating aspects of the interface. Results indicated…

This paper reports on a joint proof of concept project undertaken by researchers from the Flinders University Artificial Intelligence Laboratory in partnership with information managers from the Education Network Australia (edna) team at Education Services Australia to address the question of whether artificial intelligence techniques could be…

Participants in 2 experiments performed 2 simultaneous tasks: one, a dual-target detection task within a rapid sequence of target and distractor letters; the other, a cued reaction time task requiring participants to make a cued left-right response immediately after each letter sequence. Under these rapid visual presentation conditions, it is…

Recent spatial cuing studies have shown that detection sensitivity can be increased by the allocation of attention. This increase has been attributed to one of two mechanisms: signal enhancement or uncertainty reduction. Signal enhancement is an increase in the signal-to-noise ratio at the cued location; uncertainty reduction is a reduction in the…

Capturing students' interest in science at the junior levels is crucial to not only improving the uptake of science at senior levels but to promoting science literacy in all students in order to prepare them for a society that is very science and technologically driven. This paper presents nanotechnology as an emerging science that is both factual…

Our study assessed implicit and explicit evaluations of overweight individuals among a sample of fitness center employees (N = 70). Participants completed a general demographics questionnaire and an explicit, self-report Antifat Attitudes Test (AFAT). Participants also completed two Implicit Association Tests (IATs) to measure implicit attitudes…

Superhydrophobic (non water-wettable) surfaces can possess the ability to self-clean (the so-called "lotus effect"). The task of devising the apparatus and method for quantifying this self-cleaning effect was offered as a project in a third-year undergraduate laboratory course. Using commonly available equipment the students devised a…

This article is based on an experiment designed to conduct an interpreting test for multiple candidates online, using web-based synchronous cyber classrooms. The test model was based on the accreditation test for Professional Interpreters produced by the National Accreditation Authority of Translators and Interpreters (NAATI) in Australia.…

A major challenge in conducting classroom experiments for larger classes is the complexity of assembling responses and reporting feedback to students. The author demonstrates how mobile phone text messaging can be used to overcome the limitations of pencil-and-paper experiments without incurring the costs of full computerization. Students submit…

We examined associative and item recognition using the maintenance rehearsal paradigm. Our intent was to control for mnemonic strategies; to produce a low, graded level of learning; and to provide evidence of the role of attention in long-term memory. An advantage for low-frequency words emerged in both associative and item recognition at very low…

This study examined three visual strategies for timing the initiation of the landing flare based on perceptions of either: (a) a critical height above ground level; (b) a critical runway width angle ([psi]); or (c) a critical time-to-contact (TTC) with the runway. Visual displays simulated landing approaches with trial-to-trial variations in…

The most recent data on stars orbiting Sagittarius A*, the black hole at the center of the Milky Way galaxy, have been used in an experiment undertaken by second-year university students to determine the distance R[theta] to the center of the galaxy. Students applied each of Kepler's 17th-century laws, in turn, to 21st-century data. The…

Remote and virtual laboratory classes are an increasingly prevalent alternative to traditional hands-on laboratory experiences. One of the key issues with these modes of access is the provision of adequate audiovisual (AV) feedback to the user, which can be a complicated and resource-intensive challenge. This paper reports on a comparison of two…