Underlying the generally oblivious attitude of teachers and learners towards the past is insufficient respect for the role of memory in giving meaning to experience and access to knowledge. We shape our identity by making sense of our past and its relationship to present and future selves, a process that should be intensively cultivated when we…

Purpose: Contemporary standards-based reforms to teaching and teacher education are characterised by appeals to technical orientations to teacher professionalism. In addition, the standardisation agenda has targeted literacy education as a focus for interventions. This has highlighted an incongruence between standardised approaches to literacy and…

Prospective middle school pre-service teachers' knowledge and affect in Australia has had little empirical research. In this study, 108 graduate entry pre-service teachers were surveyed for their knowledge of middle years' mathematics, confidence, and self efficacy at the commencement of a mathematics curriculum course. It was found that their…

This review highlights some areas of current interest in teaching students to spell and how spelling skills develop. The topics covered in the paper include: theories of spelling acquisition, theories guiding effective teaching, the importance of word study approaches across the age range, the influence of technology on learning to spell, spelling…

It was week three of the first semester of the author's Master of Teaching degree at Monash University in Melbourne, Australia, and already lecturers were talking about first assignments. In the English method unit, students were required to write a reflective autobiographical narrative inquiring into particular critical incidents from past…

War memorials and related exhibition spaces are commonplace in Australian cities and towns. As critically reflected upon in this paper, there is much "hidden" or alternative history that tends to get ignored when it comes to official memorials and conventional places of remembrance. The particular focus of our paper is the exploration of…

Linguistic relativity, the idea that language affects the way that people think, and that people who speak different languages think differently, has implications for mathematics education because people use different languages to teach, learn and practice mathematics. This paper reviews research on linguistic relativity and number, looking at…

Lorna Quinnell and Merrilyn Carter examine the use of symbols in teaching mathematics and outline the difficulties students experience in "reading symbols and abbreviations." We are sure teachers will appreciate the way the authors have examined the use of symbols and abbreviations in NAPLAN testing and organized them into five distinct…

This article, based on my PhD empirical study, was conducted in a qualitative and holistic approach. It had examined how students had used formal and informal strategies, styles and situations while improvising and composing for the research task. Eighteen research groups made up of a total of 40 males and nine females had participated in…

This paper aims to illustrate how the historical novel may be used as an engaging teacher/learning strategy for undergraduate student teachers in pre-service teacher education units, the vast majority of which simply provide for a single 10-credit point unit in order to prepare student teachers for the classroom. First, this paper will argue the…

Contemporary debates on effective pedagogies for K-12 mathematics have called for shifts in the way teachers and teacher educators conceptualise mathematics as a subject and how it should be taught. This is reflected by changes in the curriculum including the inclusion of a strand called Working Mathematically within K-12 mathematics curriculum…

This document, which was developed as a resource for adult basic education teachers in Victoria, Australia, contains six units of science activities to help students develop literacy and numeracy skills while learning basic scientific concepts. Presented in the introduction are guidelines for using the material and a table detailing those basic…

This paper discusses a study of learning retention among junior high school students involved in a field trip in a geography course. The study was based on a model of memory proposed by Robert Gagne and R.T. White. This model of cognitive processes, postulated on the belief that recall of any element is a function of its degree of interlinking in…

For the twenty-eighth year, the Research and Theory Division of the Association for Educational Communications and Technology (AECT) is sponsoring the publication of these Proceedings. Papers published in this volume were presented at the National AECT Convention in Orlando, Florida. The Proceedings of AECT's Convention are published in two…