Australian Journal of Education

This study investigated the impact of word processors on students' writing by examining three critical elements of the writing situation: writing context, process and product. Using a pretest-posttest control group design, the study compared two intact Year 8 classes, one using pens for composing and the other using computers, within the context of an all-girls school. A major emphasis of the research was the computer's impact on the quality of texts, representing three genres, which the students produced over a school year. The findings suggested that the computer classroom was more student-centred, less teacher-dominated and more work-focused, and the atmosphere was more co-operative and collaborative. Students' composing behaviours varied according to the genre of the task rather than according to the influence of the writing tool.

The present study considers the problem of multidimensionality in Tertiary Entrance (TE) scores where a single TE score is the desired goal. Using data from the 1988 cohort of the ACT college system, course scores as assessed by teachers were shown to distinguish performance in a four-dimensional space. TE scores, computed using both a modified multiple regression strategy and the Daley's (1989) Other Course Score scaling method, were shown to be related to, at best, two of the four dimensions. A second phase of the study revealed the presence of multidimensionality in the choices of courses that students made when assembling their college curricula. These dimensions of course choice were subsequently related back to the demographic characteristics of the students and to the two types of TE scores. Conclusions were drawn regarding the dubious validity of assuming that a single TE score carries all the information needed to summarise the performance of secondary school students.

This article looks at organisational and curricular responses to cultural diversity which are presently operating alongside one another in New Zealand schooling. It begins with a critique of the minimal curricular response now recommended for government schools: the incorporation of programs in taha Maori (things Maori) within the mainstream curriculum of schools. It then looks at two recent responses which are structural and curricular: the modification of existing schools to take account of Maori student presence within them; and the development of Nga Kura Kaupapa Maori (Maori culture and language immersion primary schools) which are founded upon organisational and pedagogical features which are consistent with Maori cultural values. Conclusions are drawn relevant to the education of ‘involuntary minority’ cultures in Australia whose structural values and mores are very different from the dominant culture. A comparison of the values of Koori and Maori lends support to the view that Australian education could borrow with profit from the New Zealand example.

This study explores students' responses to social comparisons made within and between gender groups about perceptions of their own achievement. The social comparisons were made explicit, in this case, compared with most boys and with most girls in the class. Students rated their perceptions of performance and effort in contrasting subject domains of mathematics and English. The results were consistent with traditional gender stereotypes in an interaction between the comparison group and gender, but only for English. In comparison with the opposite sex, females rated their English performance higher and males rated their performance lower, with corresponding opposite effects for effort. At least for English, gendered social comparison is one way traditional gender stereotypes are reflected in students' perceptions of their own achievement.

This paper outlines and analyses the debate in South Australia between 1981 and 1984 about entry to trade training and highlights the contradictions between government policies on equal opportunity for women in technical and further education and reform of trade training through the implementation of prevocational training courses. The debate about selection to prevocational courses was dominated till 1984 by those who argued that the persons chosen should be quality entrants, already exhibiting skills well beyond any minimum level of acceptability. Ways of aiding women to enter and succeed in these courses were not pursued and advocates for women, excluded from the tripartite decision-making processes, were unable to have arguments about equality for women considered in the debate until late in the process of reform of trade training.

Government rhetoric and policies exhort Australian universities to be ‘productive’ and to build a ‘clever country’. Academic award restructuring is an important element in this re-shaping of Australian higher education, although the increasingly fashionable term ‘intellectual property’ enters higher education discourse and re-defines academic labour and the ways in which academics perceive themselves and their roles. It is argued that the term intellectual property carries within it a range of meanings extending beyond the legal world of patent and copyright and that this privatising and capitalising discourse has the capacity to transform universities. The individualising and formalising of academic labour goes against the tradition of university collegiality and, crucially, contradicts the processes by which ideas and skills are constituted within a university. Inappropriate intellectual property discourse has the potential to devalue university work by positing a model drawn from the world of the managerialists within the bureaucracy and private sector.