Dorit Maor

Science inquiry has been at the forefront of science learning and teaching theory for over half a century and is considered fundamental to the science curriculum in many countries, including Australia. Despite government strategies to improve student attainment and engagement, and support for teachers in facilitating effective inquiry-based pedagogy, there is still much to learn about how inquiry is enacted in science classrooms. This qualitative study combined teacher surveys, observations, and interviews to investigate how primary and secondary teachers enacted science inquiry in 56 observed lessons, and the reasons behind their chosen inquiry pedagogies. Classroom observations revealed that primary teachers predominantly used guided inquiry, while secondary teachers mainly used structured inquiry. Although teachers implemented all essential features of science inquiry, these features were spread across multiple lessons, limiting students' exposure to the complete inquiry process and the opportunity to understand how the features work together during an investigation. Interviews with teachers provided insights into their reasoning for their practice. These findings contribute to a better understanding of current science inquiry implementation in classrooms and have implications for informing teachers' pedagogy and sharing best practices.

For over 50 years science inquiry has been positively associated with student achievement. Recently, the role of science inquiry as a means of effective science teaching has come under increased scrutiny after analyses of international large scale assessments found an overall negative association between science inquiry and student achievement. Unclear in the research is how teachers are enacting science inquiry in the standard classroom, as previous research was based on classroom interventions and student reports. This mixed methods research describes upper primary and lower secondary teachers' science inquiry enactment in 56 science lessons using a two-dimensional model of science inquiry. The findings show primary teachers enacted more inquiry than secondary teachers, and used predominantly guided inquiry, while secondary teachers used mainly closed inquiry. Although primary and secondary teachers enacted all the essential features of science inquiry, students did not experience science inquiry in its entirety. Further, students' exposure to the nature of scientific knowledge was limited. This research provides a contemporary and multifaceted account of how teachers enacted science inquiry in their science lessons. The findings can be used by educational researchers and policy-makers to make informed decisions when seeking to improve science education.

In this presentation I will describe the initial stages of an OLT project which aims to investigate how the use of Web2.0 technologies can enable a more participatory process to support higher degree research supervision and bring reform to this field. According to the Grattan Institute Report, Mapping Australian Higher Education, most Australian universities are not ranked in the top 50 in the world for research, although they have been improving their standing over time (Norton, 2012, p. 7). One way to improve research outcomes in the higher education system is by dramatically changing training for higher degree research in universities. There is a strong need to improve supervision of higher degree research students in order to increase completion rates, reduce the high level of dropouts and improve low levels of completion within the time limits. The project team will take an innovative approach to this issue by using technology to facilitate the process of training higher degree research students. With a seed grant, this project will involve trialling existing technologies to support supervisors and students in two universities and conducting a feasibility study.

Increasing flexibility in higher education is being provided to meet the needs of a diverse student body. Technologies such as lecture-capture systems, e.g. Lectopia, have been employed by many universities to provide flexibility through on-demand access to recorded lectures. The analysis of student access to these systems is a growing area of interest for teachers in higher education wishing to improve the student learning experience. This presentation reports on the development of a learning analytic tool to examine Lectopia usage logs to identify usage patterns among students. It then describes a case study conducted as part of a wider multi-university study which offers a detailed snapshot of four students whose access to Lectopia recordings were tracked and analysed. These students were subsequently interviewed to confirm or disconfirm assumptions made about their study methods from the analysis. The data suggest that patterns of use of Lectopia vary greatly across the student cohorts studied. The analysis also revealed that a surface analysis using learning analytics was largely insufficient to determine student study characteristics, but qualitative data provided rich information to supplement that analysis. Suggestions are made for further research into how this emerging methodology can be further developed and strengthened.

An ARC Small grant has enabled us to develop a questionnaire - the Constructivist On Line Learning Environment Survey (COLLES) - to support the use of the World Wide Web for teaching in higher education, especially for postgraduate professional development programs for which social constructivism is a key referent of instructional design. The efficacy of innovative Web-based teaching for engaging distance learners in a community of reflective inquiry can now be evaluated by including a measure of learners’ perceptions of their on-line classroom environment. The COLLES comprises the following scales. •Professional Relevance - the extent to which engagement in the on-line classroom environment is relevant to students’ professional worldviews and related practices; •Reflective Thinking - the extent to which critical reflective thinking is occurring; •Interactivity - the extent to which communicative interactivity is occurring on-line between students and between students and tutors; •Cognitive Demand - the extent to which challenges and communicative role modelling is provided by tutors; •Affective Support - the extent to which sensitive and encouraging support is provided by tutors; and •Interpretation of Meaning - the extent to which students and tutor co-construct meaning in a congruent and connected manner. The COLLES can be used on-line by university teachers, teacher-researchers, researchers and evaluators who are interested in the educational role of the Web for promoting much-needed epistemological reform of university distance teaching and learning. In this presentation we shall demonstrate how to gain access to the COLLES web-site and complete the questionnaire, and how to access the results which are generated automatically and displayed in tabular and graphical formats. Participants will be invited to make use of the COLLES in their own on-line teaching.

This presentation describes the development and implementation of a postgraduate 'Computer Education' Unit that utilises Computer Mediated Communication (CMC) via a graphical World Wide Web interface. The Unit was designed to be used by science and mathematics teachers from different places in Australia. Various categories of Computer Mediated Communication, including specific characteristics of distance education CMC and on-line classroom communication paradigms, such as activity room, were used to achieve purposeful interactions amongst the students involved in the Unit and between the students and the lecturer. These interactions focused on the major content areas of the unit which included examining theories of teaching and learning with computers, and evaluating educational software using the 'perspectives paradigm model' (Squires and McDougall, 1995). Students also presented their action research activities on a project page which provided extra resources for the other participants. My personal aim in conducting this unit on the Web was to create a community of learners where the common goal is learning with computers. I was enthusiastic about the opportunity to facilitate conversations with the students and expected students to be engaged in discussions, collaboration and reflections which is best suited to Computer Mediated Communication (CMC). My research agenda was to investigate the opportunities that learning via the Web provide for distance education students (ie teachers) who will conduct action research in their own classrooms and introduce it to the other learners in the group via the Web. This created opportunities to discuss problems associated with the use of computers in the classroom and provide the other students with additional on-line resources. I anticipated that the regular feedback provided by the individual in the group, together with the instructor feedback, would provide a great contribution to the participants which is one of the primary advantages of this unit. This on-line teaching and learning experience was new to the me, the lecturer, and for all of the postgraduate students who participated in the Unit. As a university researcher and lecturer, the use of internet for communication with colleagues and students was a familiar tool for me, however, talking "in public" through the 'net' was a new and somehow threatening experience for me. Subsequently, it became more dynamic because I responded to students' comments regularly, and slowly the students became more involved and engaged in the discussions. This unique experience for me and for the students created a new situation, sometimes caused tension because of uncertainty, and sometimes was pleasurable as a result of a feeling of achievement and discovery learning. In this paper, I describe my personal experience as I progressed during the semester and the advantages and disadvantages of teaching this unit through the World Wide Web. I discuss students' perceptions of the Unit as well as my own perception. Evaluation of the Unit was conducted formatively in the unit in the Activity Room discussion and summatively via a questionnaire at the end of the semester. This on-line distance education Unit is currently available through the Science and Mathematics Education Centre and the Teaching Learning Group.