Rarely do university departments of mathematics redesign their basic mathematics courses. Through developing an online version of our associate degree in engineering in collaboration with Open Universities Australia, we redesigned the first in a sequence of five engineering mathematics courses. The online cohort proved different to our…

Soil science, though relevant to a variety of subjects including science, geography, mathematics, social sciences and history, is typically perceived as a subgenre of agriculture. With a global need for soil scientists, and declining numbers in university soil courses, there's a growing gap between science needs and providers. One way to promote…

This article is a condensed analysis of the developing sustainability crisis of Australian universities. It is based on an address to National Council of the National Tertiary Education Union, Melbourne, 3 October 2014. Thanks to all my fellow-members, who have kept my hopes for the modern university alive.

Research Findings: The connections between parents' emotional competence (emotion expression, regulation, and knowledge) and children's social-emotional learning (SEL) have been well studied; however, the associations among teachers' emotional competencies and children's SEL remain widely understudied. In the present study, private preschool and…

Associations between experiencing child maltreatment and adverse developmental outcomes are widely studied, yet conclusions regarding the extent to which effects are bidirectional, and whether they are likely causal, remain elusive. This study uses the Fragile Families and Child Wellbeing Study, a birth cohort of 4,898 children followed from birth…

This article argues that domestic conversations taking place in a sociable context played a more important role than has hitherto been considered in the intellectual training and development of children. The centrality of conversation as an informal method of training the mind to reason had one important consequence: the publication of the highly…

Communication skills are one of five nationally recognised learning outcomes for an Australian Bachelor of Science (BSc) degree. Previous evidence indicates that communication skills taught in Australian undergraduate science degrees are not developed sufficiently to meet the requirements of the modern-day workplace--a problem faced in the UK and…

The search continues for a Chinese research university model that can balance quality and quantity in research and teaching. This paper argues that finding one depends upon deepening internationalization, defining educational sovereignty, and expanding university autonomy. The paper does this by examining selected aspects in the development of the…

A model for designing and implementing evidence-­based in­-service professional development in early childhood intervention as well as the key features of the model are described. The key features include professional development specialist (PDS) description and demonstration of an intervention practice, active and authentic job-­embedded…

In this paper we report a large-scale developmental study of early productive vocabulary acquisition by 928 Chinese-speaking children aged between 1;0 and 2;6, using the Early Vocabulary Inventory for Mandarin Chinese (Hao, Shu, Xing & Li, 2008). The results show that: (i) social words, especially words for people, are the predominant type of…

The provision of public resources to manage the expansion of the higher education system in the Philippines has been inadequate, and this has given rise to many private providers entering the HE domain. The proper regulation of higher education in the country is important if the Philippines is to respond to the challenge of producing the skills it…

The present research explores the role of inhibitory control (IC) in young preschoolers' pretense ability using an ego depletion paradigm. In Experiment 1 (N = 56), children's pretense ability was assessed either before or after participating in conflict IC or control tasks, and in Experiment 2 (N = 36), pretense ability was measured after…

The purpose of this study is to identify the current state of school-based after-school support in Japan and to evaluate programs providing such support, known as 'After-school Classes for Children'. This study focuses on the impact of After-school Classes for Children on children's everyday activities and their social and emotional development.…

Britain faces a wages crisis, underpinned by low productivity. For the last seven years, people's wages have risen more slowly than the prices in the shops. People also often become "stuck" in low pay and cannot advance their careers. This paper argues for a new National Advancement Service, providing people in low paid work a Career…

The current longitudinal study used data from the National Institute of Child Health and Human Development (NICHD) Study of Early Child Care and Youth Development (SECCYD) to examine a model of development that emphasizes early caregiving environments as predictors of social emotional competence (including classroom competence). This path analysis…