Editorial

This issue of the Australian Journal of Education includes three articles that examine various impacts of COVID-19 on educators and students, a report on development of an instrument for measuring young peoples’ creative self-beliefs, a policy analysis of guidelines regarding resource selection and treatment of (potentially) controversial topics in primary and secondary schools and a demonstration of how a model first proposed four decades ago may be applied to measuring growth in student achievement today.

In the first article, Paul Burke, Sandy Schuck and Matthew Kearney present a study focusing on primary and secondary teachers’ views of emergency remote learning (when physical attendance and face-to-face learning was restricted and most teaching and learning was conducted online) during COVID-19 lockdown periods in New South Wales. An online questionnaire asked teachers whether various aspects of teaching and learning had been positively, negatively or not impacted by the move to emergency remote learning, and how their wellbeing and that of their students had been affected. Analysis of responses from 297 teachers identified three latent constructs – student learning experiences, assessment and feedback experiences and interactions and relationships – with students’ peer-to-peer interactions most negatively affected by the remote schooling period, according to their teachers. More than 90% of teachers reported that students’ opportunities to develop or maintain relationships with other students, and students’ opportunities to interact with other students, had been negatively affected to some extent over the period. Student learning experiences and their peer interactions were found to be strong predictors of students’ wellbeing outcomes, as reported by teachers, while assessment design and teachers’ feedback to students were significant in predicting teachers own levels of wellbeing.

The second article, by Tamara Van Der Zant and Katherine Dix, examines how educators’ worry (defined as an emotional response to an actual or potential threat and the associated uncertainty of the negative impact of the threat) in relation to the COVID-19 pandemic compared to their worry about other extreme events, such as natural disasters and critical incidents (a death or suicide of a child, young person or colleague). The study was conducted as a secondary analysis using an item that was included in two evaluations of wellbeing initiatives implemented in Australian schools during 2021, with a total of 3210 responses from those in an active teaching role in a preschool or kindergarten, primary or secondary school. Overall, educators reported the highest level of worry for virus pandemics like COVID-19, followed by critical incidents like death or suicide, then extreme weather and bushfire events. Those working in preschools were more worried about COVID-19 and natural disasters than those in primary and secondary schools, while worry regarding critical incidents tended to increase with the age of students taught, from preschool through to secondary school. The authors conclude that worry, as a key component of anxiety and potential predictor of burnout, is an essential factor to consider in the development of support systems for educators.

The third article investigating the impacts of COVID-19 on teaching and learning focuses on Australian university students’ academic motivation and engagement. Andrew Martin reports results from two related studies, the first using responses from 500 undergraduate university students to an online questionnaire including measures of COVID-19 learning disruptions, alongside a measure of motivation and engagement – the Motivation and Engagement Scale (MES, Martin, 2021). Results of a multivariate analysis of responses indicated that being in a state of lockdown or isolation was associated with problematic motivation and engagement – with lockdown significantly predicting higher self-handicapping and disengagement among students and isolation significantly predicting higher failure avoidance, self-handicapping and disengagement. Interestingly, remote and hybrid learning did not significantly predict motivation and engagement after accounting for the effects of lockdown and isolation. The second study compared the mean motivation and engagement of Study 1 participants (the COVID-19 group) with results from four published studies that also used the MES, to assess whether the COVID-19 cohort differed in motivation and engagement to these other groups. Results indicated that the COVID-19 pandemic sample scored significantly lower on the adaptive motivation and engagement factors, and significantly higher on the maladaptive motivation and engagement factors.

Next, Paul Ginns, Andrew Martin, Kelly Freebody, Michael Anderson and Peter O’Connor report on their development of an instrument to measure aspects of young people’s creative self-beliefs. The instrument is based on a multidimensional model of creative self-beliefs that comprises creative self-efficacy (a young person’s beliefs in their potential and ability to act in creative ways or manage creative challenges), growth-creative mindsets (a belief that creativity is trainable or teachable, e.g. ‘With enough time and effort I think I could improve my creativity level’) and fixed-creative mindsets (a belief that creative skills are unchangeable, e.g. ‘I don’t think I can do much to increase my creativity’). Using data collected from 2980 children and adolescents as part of a larger study on school experiences of creativity, the authors conducted confirmatory analyses to establish the construct validity of the three scales/dimensions, and report on the reliability and validity of their instrument, as well as the multidimensional nature of creative self-beliefs of young people. On average, students tended to describe themselves as having relatively high levels of creative self-efficacy and growth-creative mindsets, with lower levels of fixed-creative mindsets. The authors conclude that the framework and measures developed in this study have potential to inform educators, researchers and policy makers in their efforts to developing creative capabilities in Australian schools.

Moving away from research conducted directly with educators and students, the next article presents a critical policy analysis of five Australian policy texts that deal with resource selection and controversial issues in schools. Rebecca Cairns applies Bacchi’s (Bacchi, 2012; Bacchi & Goodwin, 2016) What’s the problem represented to be? (WPR) approach in her analysis and compares the ways in which policies from New South Wales, the Northern Territory, South Australia, Victoria and Western Australia represent the ‘problem’ of resource or text selection and the sorts of policy ‘subjects’ and ‘objects’ that are constituted by each policy. Her analysis highlights the tendency of government departments to problematise resource selection as a process that must be managed for the purpose of mitigating contestation – the risks outweigh any potential educational value of engaging with controversial materials. An alternative approach, she argues, could be to treat resource selection and controversial issues as an opportunity to enhance inclusion. Rather than education departments and teaching staff acting as gatekeepers, this approach presents resource selection and inclusion of controversial topics as a responsibility to be shared and discussed among department staff, school communities and students.

The final article demonstrates a different approach to comparing growth rates in student achievement. Leigh Patterson presents his work applying the Rasch Growth Model to a set of longitudinal data (2013–2019) from the reading domain of the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in order to establish whether Rasch’s Growth Model can be used to measure differences in achievement trajectories by representing growth as a function of time. A final data set of results of 7000 students (1000 from each of 7 jurisdictions) with complete data from Year 3 through to Year 9 was used, with jurisdiction serving as the time-invariant grouping variable. The parameter estimates that result from the application of the Rasch Growth Model (and estimation of the meta-metre) are then used to compare relative rates of growth for students in the different jurisdictions. As the aim of the exercise was to provide an example of how the model could be applied, rather than to provide commentary on any differences in the growth rates across jurisdictions, the jurisdictions are not identified. Instead, the parameter estimates are used to plot growth trajectories and to illustrate how these graphic representations can highlight differences between groups of students.

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