The Higher School Certificate is a certificate that recognises the successful completion of secondary education in New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The most recent enrolment information available suggests that at least 13,472 students undertaking the NSW Higher School Certificate (HSC) in 2019 conducted research projects that involved human…

Early millennial arguments tended to regard young people's out of school literacies with enthusiasm, with school print literacies by comparison seen as lacking currency. More recent critiques of such binary positioning of home-school digital practices instead recommend seeking connections and continuities. However, with teachers rarely gaining…

Much current debate about undergraduate student research involves a focus on 'students as partners' and co-constructors of knowledge (Healey, Flint & Harrington 2014, 2016). This debate reveals interesting tensions between student freedom and the role of structuring frameworks. Undergraduate lecturers and research supervisors might feel we are…

Inspiring children to pursue a career in science is a worthy pursuit for many reasons. One way to achieve this is to actively engage children in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics (STEM) learning from an early age. However, it is not always possible to integrate all the STEM fields in one activity. Rather, careful consideration of…

Research skills are fundamental to the building of the evidence basis of professional practice, are at the core of lifelong professional learning and are the keys to discovery, innovation and knowledge transfer. Research competency is thus increasingly recognised as an important educational goal for graduates in many professions. This paper…

This study considers the conceptual space, or extent of autonomy, given to coursework Masters students before, during and after a Business Ethics course that explicitly developed and assessed their research skills. This vocationally oriented and academically challenging course used the "Research Skill Development framework" as its…

This study reports on findings from a research project that investigated the extent to which pre-service teachers at a major metropolitan Australian university engage with research, and the factors that influence their level of engagement or disengagement. Results from survey responses (n = 235) and focus group interviews suggest that attitudes…

A "knowledge society" relies on a workforce with high-level skills in Information and Communication Technology (ICT). Continuing development of ICT will arise partly from research undertaken by doctoral graduates. However, compared to other cognate disciplines, ICT has relatively few students taking up doctoral studies. This article…

Undergraduate research experiences provide students with opportunities to engage in high-impact experiential learning. Although prevalent in the sciences, there are now extensive banks of case studies demonstrating the use of undergraduate research as an educationally enriching activity across many disciplines. This study investigated the…

Although there is a clear body of evidence supporting the idea that undergraduate students benefit from participation in original research projects, many units of study--particularly in the creative arts and humanities--have been slow to embrace curriculum renewal along these lines. In this paper, we detail a pragmatic approach to meeting this…

This paper puts forward a set of criteria for ensuring trustworthiness in design research studies undertaken by Higher Degree Research (HDR) students. Design research is aimed at exploring educational problems and refining theory and practice by defining a pedagogical outcome and is a methodological approach often associated with the Learning…

Honours research projects in the School of Civil, Environmental and Mining Engineering at the University of Adelaide are run with small groups of students working with an academic supervisor in a chosen area for one year. The research project is mainly self-directed study, which makes it very difficult to fairly assess the contribution of…

During this past decade the level of interest in building research capacity has intensified in Australia and internationally, with a particular emphasis on the development of postgraduate research students, but also extending to undergraduate research experience. This study investigated the student experience across a diverse range of fourth-year…

This paper describes and analyses a method of self- and cohort-directed design of research training tutorials for final-year research-oriented undergraduate students at the University of Queensland, Australia. The design methodology centered on a research skills self-assessment document used at the university, and utilized Personal Response System…

There is a paucity of studies investigating how early career academics (ECAs) form attitudes towards aspects of their work and gain skills in research, teaching and service. This is especially the case with respect to research. A review of the pertinent literature revealed the prominence of a notion of research self-efficacy (or confidence) and…