Eureka! Engaging classroom students in inquiry-based science lessons using local experts and contexts

This article illustrates an enhancement and lesson-delivery process used to engage classroom students in primary school science lessons. In the enhancement process, university educators and pre-service teachers collaborated with local experts to prepare lessons based in local or regional contexts. Lessons were designed to enable students to think like scientists in inquiry-based or problem-solving tasks. The enhancement process, along with a reflection process, was developed as part of the project: It's Part of My Life: Engaging university and community to enhance science and mathematics education (IPOML). This collaborative project, undertaken from 2013 to 2017 across six regional universities, aimed to improve the confidence of pre-service teachers of mathematics and science and address the lack of student interest in these subjects. As well as providing an overview of the project, this article illustrates the sequential process of enhancement, followed by a teaching lesson and reflection using two exemplar lessons designed for Year 5 and 6 students. These project processes, acting sequentially and repeated in several iterations, identify ways that teachers can engage their students in broad aspects of the Australian Curriculum: Science. Classroom students and pre-service teachers experienced "eureka" moments during this process, not only because one of the topics was based around gold

Anytime Anywhere Learning Pilot Programme. Evaluation summary report

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Anxiety, resistence and disruptive innovations : a methodology for measuring receptivity of eye surgeons to disruptive laser technologies

Attempting to measure receptivity to new innovations based on subjective methods is fraught with challenges. This is especially true in medical markets, where new technologies offer a possible way out to control increased patient demands, rising costs, and the ethical needs to treat a broader range of patients with more predictability and safety. Based on the literature on adoption of technology in the dental field, quantitative measurement of physiological changes, such as blood pressure, heart rate and blood volume may represent a better way of measuring surgeon resistance or receptivity to new products. This is a study that provides a literature review and conceptual development justifying a pilot study in the eye surgery market conducted in Australia. Results from this ophthalmic study support the theory contained in the literature that it is disruptive technologies that often ‘leapfrog’ or jump ahead in health care markets which are often resistant to innovation

Enhancing science and mathematics teacher education: Evaluating an enhancement module for science pre-service teachers

Copyright © 2017 Inderscience Enterprises Ltd. Motivated and well-trained science and mathematics teachers are a requirement for sustaining an industrialised economy. The Australian government has funded several projects to satisfy this requirement designed to improve pre-service teacher (PST) education in regional and rural Australia. One such project uses a collaboration nexus model with lesson feedback and Reflection Module in an iterative process using a repeated sequence comprised of an Enhancement Module, a subsequent Teaching Lesson and a Reflection Module. This paper reports on qualitative investigations of the effectiveness of the collaboration nexus in the Enhancement Module and comments on the value of the iterative process. Results from small-scale trials with PSTs indicate that the module positively engages participants, PSTs, university scientists and specialist educators. The module and its iterations appear to be effective in grounding PST education in targeting regional contexts relevant to the daily lives of both PSTs and their classroom students

Cycles of satellite and transposon evolution in Arabidopsis centromeres

Centromeres are critical for cell division, loading CENH3 or CENPA histone variant nucleosomes, directing kinetochore formation and allowing chromosome segregation1,2. Despite their conserved function, centromere size and structure are diverse across species. To understand this centromere paradox3,4, it is necessary to know how centromeric diversity is generated and whether it reflects ancient trans-species variation or, instead, rapid post-speciation divergence. To address these questions, we assembled 346 centromeres from 66 Arabidopsis thaliana and 2 Arabidopsis lyrata accessions, which exhibited a remarkable degree of intra- and inter-species diversity. A. thaliana centromere repeat arrays are embedded in linkage blocks, despite ongoing internal satellite turnover, consistent with roles for unidirectional gene conversion or unequal crossover between sister chromatids in sequence diversification. Additionally, centrophilic ATHILA transposons have recently invaded the satellite arrays. To counter ATHILA invasion, chromosome-specific bursts of satellite homogenization generate higher-order repeats and purge transposons, in line with cycles of repeat evolution. Centromeric sequence changes are even more extreme in comparison between A. thaliana and A. lyrata. Together, our findings identify rapid cycles of transposon invasion and purging through satellite homogenization, which drive centromere evolution and ultimately contribute to speciation