An Exploratory Study of Food and Nutrition Instruction in Australian Primary Schools

Many Australian children have unhealthy dietary behaviours. These unhealthy dietary behaviours have been linked to rising rates of childhood obesity. Food and nutrition education plays an important role in shaping children’s dietary behaviours and schools have been identified as ideal location for such education to occur. Despite recognition of the importance of food and nutrition education evidence suggests adequate time is not being allocated to food and nutrition education in primary schools. To effectively educate, support, and encourage teachers to include food and nutrition education in their programs, it is critical to understand the influences that enable or constrain their current instructional practices. The international literature and a number of small exploratory studies in Australia point to possible influences, including poor food and nutrition related knowledge and lack of appropriate teaching resources. The research presented in this thesis aimed to investigate the influences on Australian primary school teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices at the intrapersonal, interpersonal, organisational, community, and policy levels. The study utilised a convergent mixed-methods design, applying both quantitative and qualitative methods to explore influences on teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices. The quantitative phase of the research cross-sectionally surveyed primary school teachers’ (n=271) food and nutrition related attitudes and beliefs, knowledge, self-efficacy, and instructional practices. The qualitative phase of the research used in-depth semi-structured interviews (n=18) to explore teachers’ experiences and perceptions of food and nutrition education, including enablers and barriers to food and nutrition instruction. Primary school teachers, on the whole, had positive attitudes and beliefs towards food and nutrition education. Teachers were motivated to teach food and nutrition content because of the positive influence they believed it could have on children’s health outcomes, wellbeing, and learning. Furthermore, teachers had moderately high levels of food and nutrition knowledge and high levels of self-efficacy to teach food and nutrition content. The likelihood of teaching food and nutrition content increased the more a teacher felt prepared to teach such content. Furthermore, the number of hours spent teaching food and nutrition content appeared to be positively associated with self-efficacy to teach food and nutrition content. Despite teachers’ positive attitudes and beliefs, moderately high food and nutrition knowledge, and self-efficacy, the number of hours spent teaching food and nutrition was limited. Eighty-five percent (84.8%) of the teachers surveyed reported they currently taught, had taught in the past or planned to teach food and nutrition content in the future, however over half of these teachers (51.8%) taught five hours or less of food and nutrition content per year. Barriers to teaching food and nutrition content included: a crowded curriculum, pressure to prioritise ‘core subjects’, and limited access to appropriate resources. Enablers of food and nutrition instruction included: support from school leadership and parents, reinforcement of food and nutrition messages through school policies and planning, and embedding food and nutrition education into daily routines. The findings of this thesis highlight the importance of a multilevel approach to supporting food and nutrition education in primary schools. While teachers must be supported at an individual level to develop food and nutrition related knowledge and self-efficacy, it is essential to reduce the barriers that constrain teachers’ food and nutrition instructional practices at the school, community, and policy levels. By acknowledging and addressing the range of influences that shape teachers FNIP, a multilevel approach to supporting food and nutrition instruction has the potential to embed food and nutrition education in primary schools and in so doing, support children to develop healthy dietary behaviours for life

Evaluation of the intercultural understanding field trial

In 2011, the Innovation and Next Practice Division (INP) of the Department of&nbsp;Education and Early Childhood Development (DEECD) conducted a field trial&nbsp;on intercultural understanding in partnership with a research and evaluation&nbsp;team from the University of Melbourne and La Trobe University. The field trial&nbsp;was sponsored by the Languages, English as another Language (EAL) and&nbsp;Multicultural Education Division of DEECD.The primary research question guiding the field trial was:1. What is the impact on student outcomes of teaching and learning&nbsp;practice for intercultural understanding?2. The secondary research questions were:3. What knowledge and skills do both learners and educators need for&nbsp;intercultural understanding?4. How is effective practice identified and measured?5. What intercultural understanding capabilities can be developed at&nbsp;each developmental stage of children and young people in different&nbsp;cultural contexts?In order to explore these questions, schools across Victoria were initially&nbsp;nominated by International Division, the Multicultural Education Unit and by&nbsp;regional directors and INP based on three core criteria, which included school&nbsp;culture, capability and connections within the school and the wider community.&nbsp;Following an expression of interest process, 26 schools, including one&nbsp;independent school and two catholic schools were selected. Participation in&nbsp;the field trial included the following aims:&bull; to stimulate thinking about current school policy and practice around&nbsp;intercultural understanding and interaction (ICU)&bull; to trial projects that support the field trial&rsquo;s primary research question&nbsp;&bull; to evaluate innovative &lsquo;next practice&rsquo; and consider its relevance for&nbsp;the education system&bull; to support the intercultural understanding general capability under&nbsp;consideration for inclusion in the Australian National Curriculum in&nbsp;2013.The field trial was implemented by DEECD INP from February 2011 to&nbsp;December 2011 over three stages.</div

Pedagogy beyond compliance: teachers providing opportunities for students to self-regulate their learning in the primary-secondary transition years of schooling

This study explored how teachers provided opportunities for young adolescent students to be empowered as learners. Despite the crucial role that self-regulated learning plays in enhancing students’ achievement at school and beyond, few studies have created a practice-based pedagogy aimed at enabling students to rationalise their goals, to accept responsibility for their learning and to develop their capabilities as resourceful learners in social learning environments. The research was conducted as dual case studies within a primary school and a secondary school as transitionally connected settings in Queensland, Australia. The middle years of schooling, Years 5 to 9, have been identified as being a critical stage of development in young adolescents’ lives for effective lifelong learning. How schools and teachers can contribute to fostering these learning qualities was highlighted as a topic relevant to current Australian and international educational policy and debate. Rich qualitative data were collected through semi-structured interviews and classroom observations from eight teacher participants in the middle years of schooling. Thematic analysis methods were used in inductive intra-case and cross-case processes of generating codes, categories and themes. The findings were reported as interpretations that were intertwined with snapshots of data that represented the voices of the teacher participants. The data foregrounded teachers’ practices to identify that in striving to foster students’ effective learning they implemented pedagogical approaches aimed beyond the management of students’ behaviour for compliance and they sought to empower students as resourceful learners. As an original contribution to knowledge, the findings were synthesised to construct a practice-based pedagogical model for self-regulated learning. The study found that the teachers endeavoured to provide opportunities for the students to regulate their own learning through pedagogical approaches that connect the learning, facilitate the learning, diversify the learning, socialise the learning and reflect on teaching. Extending this model, the transition pedagogy framework for self-regulated learning presents key elements that attend to the distinctive needs of young adolescent students in the primary–secondary transition years of schooling. This study’s findings offer a proactive pedagogical approach to behaviour management within classroom environments that focuses on potentiating students’ self-regulation of their learning

A STUDY OF SINGAPORE FEMALE PRIMARY TEACHERS’ SELF-EFFICACY FOR TEACHING SCIENCE

According to Bandura, self-efficacy is defined as an individual’s judgment of their capability to organize and execute the courses of action required to attain designated types of performances. It has been proposed that there is a strong relationship between Science teaching efficacy beliefs and Science teaching behaviors (Sarikaya, 2005). Research has shown that the self-efficacy of teachers affects the performance of their students. Female teachers in Singapore primary schools made up more than 80% of the teaching population and with many reports that teachers are shunning Science and that women possess low Science self-efficacy, one would expect that could be the case for Singapore female teachers as well. Despite this, the ‘Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study’ (TIMMS) 2007 reported that the scores of Singapore primary four students were amongst the top internationally and this was not the first time they had achieved such accolade. There was also no significant difference between the boys’ and girls’ results in the TIMMS. The aim of this study is to determine the self-efficacy of Singapore female primary Science teachers relative to their male counterparts (N=80), and identify enablers and barriers faced by high and low efficacy female Science teachers. A mixed methods approach was used in this research. Analysis of the Science Teaching Efficacy Belief Instrument (STEBI - A) revealed that although male teachers reported significantly higher PSTE scores relative to female teachers, an independent samples t-test showed that the difference was not significant. For the STOE, again Male teachers scored higher than females but given the very small difference between the means, the difference was not significant. It is believed that the trend is probably reflective of a phenomenon that male teachers have higher PSTE than their female counterpart but naturally the data does not support this claim. From the STEBI-A scores, four female teachers were selected for a semi-structured interview to explore in depth accounts of Singapore female primary teachers’ attitude towards teaching Science. Recommendations are made to raise self-efficacy of the female teachers and to optimise primary Science teaching in Singapore

Pre-service teachers constructing positive mathematical identities: Positing a grounded theory approach

Mathematics anxiety in pre-service primary teachers is an important issue in teacher education. This leads to the question of how pre-service primary teachers with mathematics anxiety perceive their mathematical identities. The paper explores the potential to develop a research-based model to identify the process whereby pre-service primary teachers with mathematics anxiety could develop more positive identities as learners and potential teachers of mathematics. It indicates emerging themes from previous research using subsequent preliminary data analysis and argues that a grounded theory approach to building a theoretical model for this process would make a valuable contribution to teacher education

Teaching with difference : barriers and enablers for teachers with impairments in their professional roles

Amidst the current groundswell of inclusive practices adopted in learning institutions, there would appear to be a paucity of research regarding the barriers and enablers experienced by teachers with impairments in Australian education systems (Burke, 2016; Pritchard, 2010; Sheridan & Kotevski, 2014). This thesis presents an examination of national and international literature where an imprecise range of issues for teachers with impairments is identified. The social model of disability has been adopted as the overarching theoretical perspective for this study. The conceptualisation of teaching with impairment, rather than about impairment, embodies the notion of teachers with impairments as being culturally relevant educators (Pritchard, 2010). Narrative inquiry, in conjunction with Clandinin and Connelly’s (2000) three-dimensional space approach as a thematical analysis methodology, has been employed and supports the investigation of ten teachers with impairments working in professional education roles within Australia. Narrative interviews were conducted with each of the ten participants with the aim of identifying barriers and enablers within the lived experiences of teachers with impairments. This study identified a silence in relation to teachers with impairments, and to address this silence has amplified the voices of teachers with impairments. Five primary themes emerged from the data to provide insights into barriers and enablers experienced by teachers with impairments. These themes are: Thinking about becoming a teacher; The limiting attitudes of others; Connecting with students and parents; Notions of teaching spaces; and I get by with a little help from my friends. This study found that teachers with impairments do experience adverse attitudes and biases in Australian teaching institutions despite there being laws that have been specifically designed to prevent disability discrimination. Bias, experienced as discrimination towards teachers with impairments, extends to career promotion and workplace advancement opportunities. Conversely, the study also found that respectful conversations about impairment which took place both inside and outside teaching places, highlighted how having open conversations about reasonable adjustments can lead to actions that become enablers for teachers with impairments. This study commences the important work of giving voice to teachers with impairments and creates a space to challenge dominant perspectives. The thesis concludes that more needs to be done to challenge the constructed normative attitudes that are responsible for setting teachers with impairments apart and resulting in them being mostly undetected within the teacher population; Doctor of Philosoph

Factors impacting on the integration of digital technology in learning and teaching in educational establishments

Digital technology is seen as a way of transforming conventional education. However, this transformation has not happened: digital technology is mainly used to support traditional learning and teaching. In order to transform, digital technology needs to be integrated into pedagogy. I research factors (enablers and inhibitors) that impact the integration of digital technology in learning and teaching in educational establishments. Interviews were carried out with two sets of people: first, staff including teachers, in two Scottish local authorities who had undertaken professional learning on the implementation of Google G Suite, and second, those who developed and implemented the Scottish Government’s (2016) Digital Learning and Teaching Strategy on Enhancing Learning and Teaching Through the Use of Digital Technology. The findings indicate that two sets of factors, professional and institutional, impact the implementation of digital technology. The professional sub factors are teacher’s perceptions and attitudes, curriculum and assessment and the impact of professional development on teachers’ digital literacy skills. The institutional sub factors are connectivity, cybersecurity and hardware and ecological issues. Professional and institutional factors are not mutually exclusive and can be enablers or inhibitors in the integration of digital technology in learning and teaching in educational establishments. This complex picture is best examined through an ecological perspective. The study outlines a series of recommendations to improve the integration, and, therefore, transformation, of digital technology in learning and teaching