The Duke of Edinburgh's International Award (as it is named in Australia) is an extremely widespread and popular youth development program. Participants (14-25 year olds) navigate the Bronze, Silver and Gold Award levels by completing: (1) Service, (2) Skills, (3) Physical Recreation, and (4) Adventurous Journey (recognising that at Gold level…

Sleep problems in children with autism spectrum disorder are prevalent and persistent but also treatable. Little is known about how and why parents of such children seek help for sleep disturbance. Via an online survey (n = 244 respondents), we gathered information about parents' attributions about children's sleep problems and beliefs about…

Teachers' motivation and the conditions that support their resilience to sustain motivation in the profession impact on their decision-making and outcomes for students. Yet a less commonly explored issue in educational research is the interdependence of the contextual influences on being a teacher and those teachers' thoughts and behaviours. This…

This study of 105 Australian in-service teachers investigated the relationship between teacher self-efficacy and teachers' causal beliefs towards students with and without specific learning disabilities. Results found that teachers reporting higher levels of teacher self-efficacy provided more positive feedback, less frustration, and held lower…

The question of when moral identity first develops in childhood deserves more considered investigation. In this article, we examine the claim that moral identity first emerges in middle-childhood (8-12 years). An approach is taken here whereby a tendency to attribute moral shame under conditions entailing moral identity failure is considered as…

Disruptive student behaviour is a major concern for teachers, causing classroom conflict and emotional fatigue. Whilst student-teacher closeness is known to reduce student aggression and improve behaviour, it is not yet known why some teachers experience close relationships with disruptive students and others do not. This qualitative study…

Purpose: This review article summarizes a program of longitudinal investigation of twins' language acquisition with a focus on causal pathways for specific language impairment (SLI) and nonspecific language impairment in children at 4 and 6 years with known history at 2 years. Method: The context of the overview is established by legacy scientific…

A common perception exists in the media that university instructors are a liberal elite who use their positions to instill a biased perspective in their students. Exploring student attitudes in the United States and Australia, the present study examined how students' academic beliefs are related to their inferences of instructor ideological bias…

This comparative case study adopts a process implementation perspective on neoliberal regulation to explore developments in national curricula and standard-based reforms in the USA and Australia. Date sources include research reports, books, OECD data, and local survey data. The comparison of the dynamic of two countries reveals that whereas…

Despite widespread utilization, research exploring associations between playgroup and child development is scarce. We analyzed a national data set measuring the holistic development of children aged 4 to 6 years who commenced school in Australia in 2015 (n = 104,767), the Australian Early Development Census, to explore developmental differences…

Claims of the importance of having positive perceptions and expectations of students with learning disabilities (LD) have been repeatedly made over recent years. This article aims to raise awareness of the importance of attributional beliefs in relation to the educational outcomes of students with LD in Australia and China. Australian and Chinese…

This investigation was designed to determine whether there are significant relationships between the reasons teachers provide for aggressive classroom management techniques and the type of professional education created to help them reduce their reliance on such techniques. The study reports data from a survey of 192 Australian teachers showing…

This mixed methods study describes attributions for improvement following reductions in victimization for children who were bullied at school. It also tests hypotheses from attribution theory about attributions associated with improvements. The sample was a subset of families who participated in an RCT of a family cognitive-behavioral program to…

Although Indigenous and non-Indigenous teachers, administrators, and educational policy makers have made efforts to improve Indigenous educational outcomes, slow progress limits the opportunities available to Indigenous learners and perpetuates social and economic disadvantage. Prior Canadian studies demonstrate that some teachers attribute low…

Integrating an online component into a university course is typically done to improve the student experience. However the intent of the teacher's blended design may not always align to the students' experience of it. Their experience may be mediated by a number of factors including student perceptions of the online environment and their approach…