Australian Journal of Education

This paper summarizes the results of a number of Queensland studies of selection of students for admission to tertiary institutions. Data presented allow a comparison of external public examinations, school assessments moderated through a process of teacher consultation, and school assessments moderated by rescaling against a measure of scholastic aptitude in terms of their use as a basis for such selection. The value of each approach for students and tertiary institutions is considered and appropriate selection indices for each are described.

Evidence of the validity of the scholastic aptitude measure for the rescaling task and of the predictive validity of all the different selection indices is provided. This evidence suggests that statistically rescaled teacher assessments predict tertiary success as effectively as external examinations.

A comparison was made of the effects of a topic-centred lecture and a skill-centred practice session on creativity, as measured by two tests of divergent thinking. Ninety undergraduate university students were randomly allocated to one of the two treatments. No significant effects of experimenter or sex of subjects were found in the posttest. Subjects high on pretest measures of creativity were significantly higher on the posttest measures regardless of which treatment they received and, for three of the four posttest scores, those subjects receiving practice in creative skills were significantly better than those subjects hearing the lecture. Results were interpreted as supporting De Bono's claim that thinking skills are best taught by focussing on techniques which, with practice, can be deliberately applied to a number of situations.

Ninety-six adolescents, aged between fifteen and sixteen, and drawn from contrasted social class and sex groups, were administered a battery of cognitive style tests. It was hypothesized, largely on the basis of socialization theory, that different patterns of intellectual functioning would be apparent. The results indicated that middle-class boys exhibited a cognitive style that was differentiating, analytic and flexible; middle-class girls one that was creative, inferential, high on psychological concepts but low on category estimation; working-class boys and girls displayed little differentiation, categorizing flexibility, or creativity but revealed a marked preference for inferential and physical concepts.

Data gathered from three Papua New Guinea samples on a range of tasks derived from the theoretical positions of Piaget and Bruner were analysed at the level of individual language/culture groups. This analysis suggested that the differences within the groups of Papua New Guineans chosen were more significant than the differences between the Papua New Guinea agglomerate sample and samples of Western European children previously reported (Philp and Kelly, 1974). Indeed the important variable appears to be a language/culture one rather than one related to schooling. In other words, current school procedures in Papua New Guinea are probably having an effect on cognitive development only in the direction that existing cultural forces are already moving the child.

This paper analyses the pattern of responses of a representative sample of 841 Western Australian secondary school teachers to the Kerlinger Education Scale VII. The analysis shows clearly the two dimensional factor structure commonly postulated, with one factor bringing together the “progressive” educational referents, and the other bringing together the “traditional” educational referents. Interesting bivariate relationships, some of which may challenge conventional stereotypes, occur between scores on these orthogonal factors, and background variables of the teachers and situational variables of the schools. Not surprisingly, however, only a small proportion of the variation between teachers in progressivism and traditionalism can be accounted for by such variables.

With the decentralisation of educational policies in Australia and in other countries, more teachers, and to a lesser degree, students, are likely to be involved in the development of curricula. This paper argues in favour of greater student participation in curriculum planning in secondary school. An “interactive” curriculum development model is thus proposed to accommodate student/teacher participation in curriculum development, based on a phenomenological approach to education and on three examples of curriculum development which appear to implement phenomenological ideas and provide alternatives to traditional approaches.

This paper offers a case study of the difficulties involved in associating teachers' college and university in teacher preparation through the device of joint appointment of professor-principal. The dual post, which was created in Melbourne in 1919, terminated in 1939 in an atmosphere in which the aims and ideals of university and State education department respectively were patently in conflict. Compromise negotiations in 1938–1939 served largely instead to underline incompatibilities between bureaucratic control and academic freedom. Even more fundamentally, the 1938–1939 experience demonstrated the difference between departmental stress on “technical” training and university emphasis on liberal education for teachers.