Catholic Teachers’ Postgraduate Qualifications and Students’ End of Schooling Outcomes: A Large Scale Queensland Based Comparative Study

Abstract A key feature of the current era of Australian schooling is the dominance of publically available student, school and teacher performance data. Our paper examines the intersection of data on teachers’ postgraduate qualifications and students’ end of schooling outcomes in 26 Catholic Systemic Secondary Schools and 18 Catholic Independent Secondary Schools throughout the State of Queensland. We introduce and justify taking up a new socially-just measurement model of students’ end of schooling outcomes, called the ‘Tracking and Academic Management Index’, otherwise known as ‘TAMI’. Additional analysis is focused on the outcomes of top-end students vis-à-vis all students who are encouraged to remain in institutionalised education of one form or another for the two final years of senior secondary schooling. These findings of the correlations between Catholic teachers’ postgraduate qualifications and students’ end of schooling outcomes are also compared with teachers’ postgraduate qualifications and students’ end of schooling outcomes across 174 Queensland Government Secondary Schools and 58 Queensland Independent Secondary Schools from the same data collection period. The findings raise important questions about the transference of teachers’ postgraduate qualifications for progressing students’ end of schooling outcomes as well as the performance of Queensland Catholic Systemic Secondary Schools and Queensland Catholic Independent Secondary Schools during a particular era of education

Difficulties in developing a curriculum for pre-service science teachers

Course outlines for science teachers, designed and developed at 6 universities, were critically analysed and compared with the guidelines for science education set out in the national policy framework known as the Minimum Requirements for Teacher Education Qualifications (MRTEQ) to identify the characteristics of a competent science teacher. Researchers used qualitative means to elicit data from the curriculum documents and in-depth interviews with science teacher educators at the institutions that participated in the study. The analysis of data focused on identifying views and perspectives that informed selection and organisation of curriculum content and pedagogical approaches. The findings that emerged from the data analysis point to both convergence and divergence among science teacher educators in terms of (i) interpretations of the policy on the minimum requirements for teacher qualifications, (ii) conceptualising hybridisation of academic content knowledge from different disciplines in the fields of science, and (iii) conceptualisation of pedagogical content knowledge for integrated approaches to teaching and learning of knowledge. A lack of uniformity in the conceptualised academic content and the conceptual framework to develop pedagogical content knowledge for the interdisciplinary school subject, Natural Sciences, pointed to the challenges facing departments of sciences education to produce competent teachers.Keywords: conceptualisation; curriculum development; knowledge integration; science disciplinary content knowledg

Teachers\u27 Conceptions and Enactment of Disciplinary Literacy in Elementary Science Instruction: A Comparative Case Study

This case study explores elementary teachers’ conceptions and enactment of disciplinary literacy in elementary science instruction and the interaction between the two. Specifically, the purpose of this research was to describe how four fifth-grade teachers view literacy appropriate to science. Participants for this research were invited to participate by responding to an online survey and were selected based on criteria. Data sources include interviews, teacher artifacts, and observation. Qualitative data were coded, the codes compared to ideas in the field (overall themes), and global themes were generated as sense making tools to describe trends found in each case, case comparisons, and all cases together. The final written report includes narratives describing individual and comparison cases as well as the overall themes, global themes, and graphics displaying relationships between codes and themes for all cases. Findings suggest these educators’ view literacy as reading, writing, speaking and listening; text as written words; and science text as written words that contain science content. Additionally, teachers’ conceptions of disciplinary literacy were heavily focused on general literacy ideas of speaking, listening, reading, and writing to comprehend information. In practice, disciplinary literacy in science instruction again presented as general literacy acquisition. However, during enactment, each teacher’s unique conception of what is entailed in overall effective instruction interacted with general literacy ideas to personalize instruction. This suggests that teacher preparation programs and in-service teacher development opportunities should explicitly help educators to understand what disciplinary literacy is, how it is different from general literacy, what it looks like in instructional resources, and how to implement it during science instruction