The Role of the Doctoral Consortium: An Information Systems Signature Pedagogy?

The doctoral consortium is a well-established, widely endorsed event in the information systems (IS) discipline that occurs adjunct to mainstream IS conferences (e.g., ICIS, ECIS, PACIS, AMCIS). Anecdotal evidence suggests that PhD students’ experience of these events is almost universally positive; some have referred to the events as “life changing” or “magical”. Further, both participating students and scholars strongly perceive the events’ value. To extend the experience to more PhD students, doctoral consortia are more recently being run locally and unaffiliated with any conference. By reviewing the literature and historical documents and conducting a series of interviews and email exchanges with past conference co-chairs, we explore the merits of IS doctoral consortia (consortia). We position the IS doctoral consortium as distinct from forms of doctoral student development in other disciplines, a veritable “signature pedagogy” for IS. In examining the practices and motivations underlying doctoral consortia, we explain related phenomena to improving future consortia. In addition, by appending much historical detail, we add to the IS discipline’s organizational memory

NAPLAN and the performance regime in Australian Schooling: a review of the policy context

The National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is a Federal Government initiative directed at providing parents, teachers, principals, state and federal governments with diagnostic information on student performance. As a national performance measurement system (PMS), its implementation has been swift, although contentious. It sits at the nexus of the Rudd-Gillard education reform efforts and is positioned as the tool for effecting change. This summary attempts to describe the complex policy context from which the Rudd-Gillard education reforms emerged. It reflects on the contested relationship between the commonwealth, state and territory governments, school accountability, the development of a national curriculum, the emergence of the knowledge economy and an international policy agenda as well as teacher professionalism. It then examines the justifications behind NAPLAN and briefly details the strategy employed to ensure its successful implementation as a PMS within a wider performance regime

Medicare Locals and the performance regime in Primary Health Care: a review of the policy context

Historically, the Australian Government’s driver of performance in primary health care was dominated by the use of levers to effect change in General Practice. Accordingly, performance measurement directed at achieving population health outcomes has not received much traction and in its place, ad hoc strategies have been attempted. However, with the general trend to greater transparency and accountability and in an effort to address the challenges of chronic disease, Australia has more recently taken an alternative approach to performance management. This strategy has involved the establishment of Medicare Locals (MLs), a primary health organisation, targeted at the delivery of population health outcomes. A core responsibility of MLs is to provide data for a national system of public reporting on primary health care. The initiative marks a significant shift in thinking about performance measurement in Australia’s health system. This paper examines the policy contexts that have underpinned this move from the use of levers to the use of outcomes as a means to improve the quality of primary health care. It ends with a reflection on the possible challenges, tensions and contradictions that may be encountered with the implementation of MLs

“Schooling” performance measurement: the politics of governing teacher conduct in Australia

Performance measurement (PM) in the public sector has progressively broadened to cover the operation of professionals traditionally framed as independent and autonomous. How PM reconstitutes the role and conduct of professionals is critical for understanding contemporary dynamics of policy and governance, and service provider–service user relationships. Building on Lipsky's classic Street-level Bureaucracy, this paper examines the ways in which street-level professionals are reconfigured in their roles as evidenced by the operation of Australia's schooling PM, NAPLAN. The paper reports findings from a project examining the effects of PM in social policy. Attention is given to the ambiguous and conflicting goals arising from measuring literacy and numeracy performance and the varied ways performance numbers are used by management for teacher governance at the street-level. These considerations have implications for the effectiveness of PM in delivering service improvements, the experience of service users, and the achievement of policy objectives

RELEVANCE OF ORAL LANGUAGE SKILLSThe Relevance of Oral Language Skills to Performance on State Literacy Testing

Purpose: Investigated correspondences between performance on an array of literacy and oral language abilities with the proficiency ratings on the reading portion of the New England Common Assessment Program (NECAP). Method: Tested 106 fifth-grade students on measures of word-level reading and oral language (i.e., vocabulary, syntax, discourse) near the time when students completed the NECAP assessment. Analyses of performance were conducted with three NECAP outcome groups (Above Proficient, Proficient, Nonproficient (combination of Partially Proficient and Substantially Below groups). Results: Large effect sizes were obtained for differences in oral language and word-level reading skills among the three groups. Decoding, syntax and discourse each accounted for significant variance in state reading scores and differentiated NECAP reading proficiency groupings. Notably, students at all levels varied in their patterns of skills. The majority of Nonproficient students had low scores on word-level reading skills; yet 100% had weaknesses in syntax and/or discourse. Similarly, many students ranked as Proficient had word-level deficits; even more had oral language weaknesses. Conclusions: Treatment of students’ reading weaknesses should be differentiated according to the specific needs of individual pupils. This practice should apply to all critical components of reading comprehension, including oral language skills in syntax and discourse

Disability and challenging behaviour: An exploration of social relations in a school environment through critical realism

In light of the premise that student behaviour serves to communicate a child’s experience of problematic environments, this thesis seeks to understand and explain how, despite inroads into more inclusive forms of education, the support of students with disabilities who are perceived to have challenging behaviour (SWDPCB) continues to confront the system. It investigates how a contentious and still divided knowledge base, foundational to professional practice, sets the conditions under which adults negotiate environments to support students with disabilities. As such, the research concentrates on the social effects of a divided knowledge base, its implications for student outcomes and its consequences for the transformation of a school towards more inclusive practices. The research has applied a critical realist lens to address dual objectives; the first to find a methodological strategy for researching a complex and conceptually confused phenomenon. The second to separate, and engage with, the problematic nature of knowledge in light of the object of study. In addition, the research has had to consider the methodological consequences of a critical realist strategy, given its permissive direction for applied research, to determine if the approach could contribute to the inclusive education project. An exploratory, qualitative case study was undertaken of an independent school in South-East Queensland. An initial analysis of the school revealed co-occurring yet philosophically different structural conditions in place to support SWDPCB. Despite the potential of these contexts to provide holistic and meaningful responses, their contested theoretical foundations generated conditions in which emergent structural conditions were produced. A second phase of data collection was followed by a re-focusing and narrowing of the study. In conjunction with a cross-case comparison, analysis revealed a set of generative mechanisms occurring within the context of the professional culture of the school that produced both inclusive and excluding outcomes for students. Accordingly, the research contributes to the debates over the adequacy of professional knowledge characteristically described as the special education divide. More specifically it examines how tensions in knowledge can trigger mechanisms that undermine the confidence of parents in schools to destabilise partnerships and threaten student outcomes. In summary, this study provides a deep understanding of the complex causal pathways between a contested professional knowledge base to its social effect. This explanation brings attention to a number of issues. First it addresses the problematic nature of professional knowledge and its implications for developing parental confidence and trust in schools. Second, it provides further insight into school reform efforts through its exploration of agent action in light of unstable and contradictory structural conditions. In addition, through its attention to professionalism it throws focus on the necessary social relations between parents and teachers required to facilitate school capacity and produce a more inclusive system of education. Third, the research identifies mechanisms occurring within a particular layer of the phenomenon. Here the findings have implications for: disability theorising and its application to students and schools; our understanding of dysfunctional adult interactions and their consequences for the inclusion of SWDPCB; as well as providing insight into the dynamics of home-school collaboration and its impact on student outcomes. Finally this research, through its methodological reflection on the contribution of critical realism to the inclusion project opens new research territory for examining the practical adequacy of research and theory currently informing practice, fills a methodological gap between psycho-social and sociological interrogations of home-school partnerships and provides a research strategy to link collaborative practices to student outcomes. In addition the research examines the boundaries and limitations of a critical realist approach. It concludes that a critical realist application brings potential for more interdisciplinary research and analysis of school responses to students with disabilities in order to build holistic understandings and better theoretical frameworks for action

Disability theorising and real-world educational practice: a framework for understanding

This paper is concerned with the contradictions and tensions in disability theory that have generated an uncertain professional knowledge base in relation to the education of students with disabilities. This tension has produced concern regarding the enculturation of teachers into reductionist understandings of disability that limit the development of inclusive educational environments. A critical realist lens is employed to better understand the boundaries and contributions of three disability models and their connections to education practice. This perspective asserts that the models are social constructions of a real phenomenon requiring critical reflection on their adequacy for explaining and informing real-world practices. It draws upon the work of Bhaskar and Danermark to present a framework for positioning disability theory in a manner that may prove a useful theoretical guide for practitioners