Australian Journal of Education

This paper discusses two conflicting perspectives on Australian schools as agents of occupational socialization. The first perspective sees Australian schools as failing in their responsibility to prepare young people for occupational roles, while the second perspective sees schools as doing much in this regard. Possible reasons which might explain away the conflict between the two perspectives are discussed. However, it is considered that a more productive approach is to treat the conflict as a genuine one between perspectives each of which has some validity. Policy considerations which might stem from awareness of this conflict in perspective are then suggested.

Considerable prior research has been conducted into grade level and sex differences in students' attitudes to school, in general, and to school science, in particular. This research generally has revealed that attitudes deteriorate with increasing grade level, that girls hold more favourable general school attitudes, and that boys express more favourable attitudes to school science. As research evidence is more scarce for school subjects other than science, the present study explored grade level and sex differences in attitudes to English, mathematics, social studies and art among a sample of 1,817 Year 7–10 students. Significant declines in attitude to each school subject occurred with grade level. Girls expressed significantly more favourable attitudes towards English, social studies and art, but significantly less favourable attitudes towards mathematics. Student attitudes generally were most favourable towards English, next towards mathematics, next social studies, and least favourable towards art.

An analysis of communication difficulties experienced by Australian children of lower socio-economic status and/or immigrant background led to the development of a program aimed at helping children in the age range 8–12 years develop linguistic selection rules necessary for effective information transfer and processing. The tasks were designed so that children were required to communicate through an opaque partition and, in turn, take the role of speaker and listener in communicating information about especially designed sets of objects and constructions. Evaluation of the materials and procedures was carried out in two metropolitan schools using a set of pretests and posttests. It was concluded that use of the materials for a period of one half day per week for nine weeks resulted in substantial gains, when compared with control groups, at two grade levels, in the children's encoding skills.

The educational orientations of 1,331 internal and external students and 154 staff at the University of New England were investigated using two recently developed U.S. measuring instruments. Significant differences between the views of staff and students were found in the areas of assessment, the role of students in decision-making, and (in the case of the internals) the vocational relevance of courses and the importance of learning for its own sake. The views of the teaching staff more closely corresponded to those of the external rather than internal students. The importance of these findings is discussed in the context of the desirability for our tertiary institutions to adapt to the possibly changing needs of their student bodies.

Drawing from a nine-year period of the writings of Noam Chomsky in which the linguist and philosopher expanded his published contributions into fields apparently remote from his strictly academic interests, this article seeks to extrapolate systematically and infer Chomsky's attitudes to the institution of Education. These attitudes and positions are presented as if they were Chomsky's own assembled views and interpreted by the author liberally in his own style within an objective context. The many attitudes deduced are collated and categorized under headings which are helpful for appreciating the range of Chomsky's comment and the relevance and coherency of his views. A final section considers the general consistency of Chomsky's attitudes and contrasts the two major strains of influence on his educational thought, the one revealed in his polemical writings and the other in his more formal and detailed academic publications during the period.

Responses from teachers, subject coordinators and school administrators in twenty-three Queensland state high schools were analyzed to ascertain the perceived importance of subject coordinators to teacher satisfaction, teacher dissatisfaction and the learning of students in classrooms. Subject coordinators were seen by respondents to make a more significant contribution to these outputs than occupants of any other hierarchical position in the schools.

The research on relationships between general self-concept and school achievement and between self-concept of academic ability and school achievement was reviewed. Findings are now sufficient to indicate that school achievement is “causally predominant” over self-concept of academic ability.

Demographic research in regard to differences relating to sex, socio-economic status, ethnicity, race, birth order, and age was also examined. Few demographically based conclusions were found to be warranted.

The primary contributing factors to self-concept of academic ability are hypothesized to be the child's actual achievement or ability; the social feedback from significant others about that achievement, dissonances between that feedback and the actual ability, and the child's comparison group.