AISWA Literacy Project B P-3 assessment : teachers developing effective literacy assessment strategies

This project originated from recommendations from Phase 1 in the development of the National Literacy Plan for the Association of Independent Schools. These recommendations included the need for a systematic approach to literacy assessment and teaching. The current project aimed to address this situation. The primary purposes of the project were: to explore how teachers can best improve outcomes for children by understanding assessment measures more effectively; to provide time for reflection and discussion about what participating teachers find out from using the assessment procedures; to explore how this knowledge will help teachers select appropriate teaching for all children, particularly those at risk; and for teachers to record and report what they found out

Representations of law in popular culture: Knowledge constructions, media deconstructions

This thesis investigates law and analyses its representations in popular culture. Law is a powerful institution within western society with a regulatory role that is supported by a range of complementary discourses that accord with society\u27s dominant cultural values. This thesis proposes that while such institutional hegemony is never stable as there is always an expectation of challenge or resistance, law is currently experiencing a series of challenges on numerous fronts. Legal commentators themselves acknowledge that law now faces a ‘crisis of confidence\u27 that may affect its status and impact on its power to control and regulate. Media are cultural phenomena that can point to changes occurring in society and this thesis, in examining law\u27s representations in popular culture, seeks to determine whether challenges, as oppositional discourses, are present and available to media audiences. Law is generally regarded as \u27over-represented’ in popular culture, and television in particular has developed a special relationship with the stories of law based on a shared preference for ideological closure. This thesis uses textual analyses to examine to what extent the challenges to law are allocated textual space within the texts of popular culture as oppositional discourses and alternative versions of reality

Literacy at a distance: language and learning in distance education

This study provides a description of the practices and strategies of distance learning for students in Years 6 to 10. It describes the materials and modes of delivery of distance education, and identifies three influences on achievement. A model for improvement is proposed, identifying ten prospective areas for improvement of distance education services..

AISWA literacy working party (Project No.3): a review of the establishment of databases for literacy achievement

Project Three of the AISWA Literacy Research Project reviewed the establishment of databases in Literacy achievement at a systems and schools level with a view to providing resource information for schools. The purpose of Project Three was to provide information to facilitate schools\u27 ability to respond to requests for evidence of literacy achievement. This report begins with a summary of the history of the national, state and territories move to outcomes based learning over the past decade. In 1993, the responsibility for implementing this change was given to the states and territories which has resulted in great variation across Australia. A detailed summary of each state and territory can be found in the Resource Section of this report. In order to map the landscape of AISWA schools\u27 involvement in the creation and maintenance of literacy databases, a survey was conducted with a small sample of AISWA schools. The purpose of the survey was to identify current practice in literacy achievement and performance. The results of this survey are discussed in this report. It is intended that this document provide a resource for schools as they plan for Curriculum Framework implementation. As implementation is a mandated procedure, schools will be asked to report on their progress

Caught in the middle: Improving writing in the middle and upper primary years

This chapter reports on a project that aims to build teacher capacity in assessing and teaching the linguistic, textual, and contextual levels of writing to students in Years 3-8, who are not meeting the benchmark standard. It has built on a pilot study funded by the Fogarty Learning Centre at Edith Cowan University. An extension of the pilot study throughout 2007 resulted in a collaborative arrangement between theFogarty Learning Centre and the Association of Independent Schools of Western Australia (AISWA). This collaboration illustrates the power of productive partnerships in research with the education sectors and professional associations of Western Australia. We used a Formative Experimental Methodology (Jacob, 1992; Reinking & Bradley, 2004; Ivey & Broaddus, 2007), with the teachers as co-researchers, to develop a model of writing that provided teachers essential knowledge about what to assess in writing in order to support the further development of underperforming writers

Evaluation of a simple approach for crop evapotranspiration partitioning and analysis of the water budget distribution for several crop species

International audienceClimate variability and climate change induce important intra- and inter-annual variability of precipitation that significantly alters the hydrologic cycle. The surface water budgets and the plant or ecosystem water use efficiency (WUE) are in turn modified. Obtaining greater insight into how climatic variability and agricultural practices affect water budgets and regarding their components in croplands is, thus, important for adapting crop management and limiting water losses. Therefore, the principal objectives of this study are: (1) to assess the contribution of different components to the agro-ecosystem water budget and (2) to evaluate how agricultural practices and climate modify the components of the surface water budget. To achieve these goals, we tested a new method for partitioning evapotranspiration (ETR), measured by means of an eddy-covariance method, into soil evaporation (E) and plant transpiration (TR) based on marginal distribution sampling (MDS). The partitioning method proposed requires continuous flux recording and measurements of soil temperature and humidity close to the surface, global radiation above the canopy and assessment of leaf area index dynamics. This method is well suited for crops because it requires a dataset including long bare-soil periods alternating with vegetated periods for accurate partitioning estimation. We compared these estimations with calibrated simulations of the ICARE-SVAT double source mechanistic model. The results showed good agreement between the two partitioning methods, demonstrating that MDS is a convenient, simple and robust tool for estimating E with reasonable associated uncertainties. During the growing season, the proportion of E in ETR was approximately one-third and varied mainly with crop leaf area. When calculated on an annual time scale, the proportion of E in ETR reached more than 50%, depending on the crop leaf area and on the duration and distribution of bare soil within the year

Supporting students with learning difficulties in a school of the air

This project was funded by Edith Cowan University and the Centre for Inclusive Schooling (Department of Education, formerly Education Department of Western Australia) as an Institute for the Service Professions Collaborative Grant. It was carried out in order to examine the following questions: • What are the ways in which identification, assessment and teaching processes make provision for students with learning difficulties who are enrolled in a School of the Air? • In what ways do Support Officers Learning Difficulties support these children, their home tutors and their teachers

Title: Implementing the National Accelerated Literacy Program in Northern Territory: Findings of survey, focus groups and observations of teaching practice

Abstract This is the first of two papers on outcomes of the evaluation of the National Accelerated Literacy Program (NALP) in the NT. NALP was an attempt to rapidly improve literacy outcomes for Indigenous students in 100 schools in the Northern Territory by implementing a method of teaching known as Accelerated Literacy (AL). The authors present findings of the evaluation of the implementation of NALP (2006)(2007)(2008), focusing on the degree to which the implementation program was effective in changing teaching practices according to the requirements of the Accelerated Literacy method. The evaluators conducted a survey of practitioners, focus group interviews with teachers and coordinators in schools and systematically observed AL teaching in 68 classrooms in 36 schools. It confirms that within four years, NALP had achieved the implementation of AL in a large number of NT schools such that teachers and principals in close to the target number of schools had been engaged in the process of change. However, notwithstanding this progress in implementation of the program in NT schools, the results of this evaluation suggest that by early 2008 there had been uneven success in changing teacher practice to achieve the levels of teaching of AL to desired standards in classrooms. The evaluation questions whether the policy commitments were always insufficient to support and sustain the implementation of AL to appropriate levels in terms of quality and completeness of systemic support

Agro-hydrology and multi temporal high resolution remote sensing: toward an explicit spatial processes calibration

The recent and forthcoming availability of high resolution satellite image series offers new opportunities in agro-hydrological research and modeling. We investigated the perspective offered by improving the crop growth dynamic simulation using the distributed agro-hydrological model, Topography based Nitrogen transfer and Transforma­ tion (TNT2), using LAI map series derived from 105 Formosat-2 (F2) images during the period 2006-2010. The TNT2 model (Beaujouan et al., 2002), calibrated with dis­ charge and in-stream nitrate fluxes for the period 1985-2001, was tested on the 2006-201O dataset (climate, land use, agricultural practices, discharge and nitrate fluxes at the outlet). A priori agricultural practices obtained from an extensive field survey such as seeding date, crop cultivar,and fertilizer amount were used as input variables.Con­tinuous values of LAI as a function of cumulative daily temperature were obtained at the crop field level by fitting a double logistic equation against discrete satellite-derived LAI. Model predictions of LAI dynamics with a priori input parameters showed an temporal shift with observed LAI profiles irregularly distributed in space (between field crops) and time (between years). By re-setting seeding date at the crop field level, we proposed an optimization method to minimize efficiently this temporal shift and better fit the crop growth against the spatial observations as well as crop production. This optimization of simulated LAI has a negligible impact on water budget at the catchment scale (1 mm yr-1 in average) but a noticeable impact on in-stream nitrogen fluxes(around 12%) which is of interest considering nitrate stream contamination issues and TNT2 model objectives. This study demonstrates the contribution of forthcoming high spatial and temporal resolution products of Sentinel-2 satellite mission in improving agro-hydrological modeling by constraining the spatial representation of crop productivity