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A STEM-based faculty in an Australian university leveraged online educational technology to help address student and academic concerns associated with team-based assessment. When engagement and contribution of all team members cannot be assured, team-based assessment can become an unfair and inaccurate measure of student competency. This case study explores the design and capacity of an online self and intra-team peer-assessment of teamwork strategy to measure student engagement and enable peers to hold each other accountable during team-based assessments. Analysis of student interactions across 39 subjects that implemented the strategy in 2020, revealed that an average of 94.4% of students completed the self and intra-team peer-assessment task when designed as part of a summative team-based assessment. The analysis also revealed that an average of 10.3% of students were held accountable by their peers, receiving feedback indicating their teamwork skills and behaviours were below the required minimum standard. Furthermore, the strategy was successfully implemented in cohorts ranging from seven to over 700 students, demonstrating scalability. Thus, this online self and intra-team peer-assessment strategy provided teaching teams with evidence of student engagement in a team-based assessment while also enabling students to hold each other accountable for contributing to the team task. Lastly, as the online strategy pairs with any discipline-specific team-based assessment, it provided the faculty with a method that could be used consistently across its schools to support management and engagement in team-based assessments.

Marine science picture books have the capacity to shape what young people know and how they think about ocean environments and marine biodiversity. Despite academic scholarship on marine science literacy broadly, relatively little has been done to study the role of picture books in teaching children about this topic. This paper is an attempt to fill that gap, by analysing 100 ocean-themed books against common marine science concepts and the Australian Science Understanding Curriculum streams. A majority of the 100 books analysed were found to link with marine science and the Australian Science Understanding Curriculum (81% and 91%, respectively) where biological concepts were dominant in both cases. Chemical and physical sciences were underrepresented in the 100 books analysed. The study provides examples of books that can be used for teaching marine education in primary schools in Australia and suggest further inquiry into marine science literature for children.

One in four Australian undergraduate students participates in learning abroad during their study. Since 2012, faculty-led mobility programmes have overtaken exchange programs to become the most popular outbound mobility type in Australia. However, little has been known about how faculty-led short-term mobility programmes affect students' employability and what might be the benefits of Australian science students' participation in this type of mobility in the Indo-Pacific. This article analyses how a faculty-led programme in science to Japan affects its participants' employability, from the perspectives of students participating in a New Colombo Plan mobility program funded by the Australian government. The study found that it was changes in the students' guided learning circumstance as they navigated the transient space in off-track locations in Japan that enabled them to learn new disciplinary knowledge, acquire transferable skills, accumulate real-life Indo-Pacific experiences and develop empathy and cultural understandings. Despite the development of these qualities, the study found challenges facing students to link knowledge-skill-attribute development to employability. The article discussed implications for developing a more systemic and coordinated approach across the curriculum, career support unit and global mobility office to integrate learning abroad experiences into pedagogy and career counselling service to enhance student employability.

MotivationThe BioTIME database contains raw data on species identities and abundances in ecological assemblages through time. These data enable users to calculate temporal trends in biodiversity within and amongst assemblages using a broad range of metrics. BioTIME is being developed as a community-led open-source database of biodiversity time series. Our goal is to accelerate and facilitate quantitative analysis of temporal patterns of biodiversity in the Anthropocene.Main types of variables includedThe database contains 8,777,413 species abundance records, from assemblages consistently sampled for a minimum of 2 years, which need not necessarily be consecutive. In addition, the database contains metadata relating to sampling methodology and contextual information about each record.Spatial location and grainBioTIME is a global database of 547,161 unique sampling locations spanning the marine, freshwater and terrestrial realms. Grain size varies across datasets from 0.0000000158 km2 (158 cm2) to 100 km2 (1,000,000,000,000 cm2).Time period and grainBioTIME records span from 1874 to 2016. The minimal temporal grain across all datasets in BioTIME is a year.Major taxa and level of measurementBioTIME includes data from 44,440 species across the plant and animal kingdoms, ranging from plants, plankton and terrestrial invertebrates to small and large vertebrates.Software format.csv and .SQL.

Embedding learning abroad as part of the curriculum has become popular in Australia, Canada, New Zealand, the US and European countries. In Australia, the government has actively promoted and committed to funding students' learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific region which is considered to be strategic to the nation's prosperity and public diplomacy. The majority of the literature on outbound student mobility has concentrated on its benefits to students' development of global competence and employability. However, little is known about how students are engaged in curriculum-specific learning and development of discipline-specific knowledge through short-term mobility experiences. This article responds to this gap in the existing literature. It aims to examine how a short-term mobility program to Japan affects Australian undergraduate students' curriculum-specific learning. The article draws on 45 interviews with science students across three rounds (pre-departure, in-country, and re-entry). It uses Barnett and Coate's framework of curriculum and Tran's concept of mobility as becoming to analyse whether and how the short-term mobility program engages students in their knowing, acting and becoming whereby they are able to construct, organise and build on what they know and can do to arrive at new knowledge, skills and ways of being/becoming. Based on the findings of the study, we discuss implications for how learning abroad in the Indo-Pacific can potentially enhance Australian students' deep and meaningful learning in not only cultural and social but also academic aspects. Practical principles for optimising students' curriculum-specific learning through short-term mobility programs are generated. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Kelp forests provide vital ecosystem services such as carbon storage and cycling, and understanding primary production dynamics regarding seasonal and spatial variations is essential. We conducted surveys at three sites in southeast Tasmania, Australia, that had different levels of water motion, across four seasons to determine seasonal primary production and carbon storage as living biomass for kelp beds of Lessonia corrugata (Order Laminariales). We quantified blade growth, erosion rates, and the variation in population density and estimated both the net biomass accumulation (NBA) per square meter and the carbon standing stock. We observed a significant difference in blade growth and erosion rates between seasons and sites. Spring had the highest growth rate (0.02 g C · blade−1 · d−1) and NBA (1.62 g C · m−2 · d−1), while summer had the highest blade erosion (0.01 g C · blade−1 · d−1), with a negative NBA (−1.18 g C · m−2 · d−1). Sites exhibiting lower blade erosion rates demonstrated notably greater NBA than sites with elevated erosion rates. The sites with the highest water motion had the slowest erosion rates. Moreover, the most wave‐exposed site had the densest populations, resulting in the highest NBA and a greater standing stock. Our results reveal a strong seasonal and water motion influence on carbon dynamics in L. corrugata populations. This knowledge is important for understanding the dynamics of the carbon cycle in coastal regions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Rapid ocean warming is affecting kelp forests globally. While the sporophyte life stage has been well studied for many species, the microscopic life stages of laminarian kelps have been understudied, particularly regarding spatial and temporal variations in thermal tolerance and their interaction. We investigated the thermal tolerance of growth, survival, development, and fertilization of Ecklonia radiata gametophytes, derived from zoospores sampled from two sites in Tasmania, Australia, throughout a year, over a temperature gradient (3–30°C). For growth we found a relatively stable thermal optimum at ~20.5°C and stable thermal maxima (25.3–27.7°C). The magnitude of growth was highly variable and depended on season and site, with no consistent spatial pattern for growth and gametophyte size. Survival also had a relatively stable thermal optimum of ~17°C, 3°C below the optimum for growth. Gametophytes grew to single cells between 5 and 25°C, but sporophytes were only observed between 10 and 20°C, indicating reproductive failure outside this range. The results reveal complex effects of source population and season of collection on gametophyte performance in E. radiata, with implications when comparing results from material collected at different localities and times. In Tasmania, gametophytes grow considerably below the estimated thermal maxima and thermal optima that are currently only reached during summer heatwaves, whereas optima for survival (~17°C) are frequently reached and surpassed during heatwaves, which may affect the persistence and recruitment of E. radiata in a warmer climate. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study examined the effects of a guild of micrograzing harpacticoid copepods (dominated by two species of Paradactylopodia sp. nov. and one species of Scutellidium sp. nov.) and a mesograzing periwinkle, Afrolittorina praetermissa, on the early recruitment of intertidal macroalgae on a wave-exposed, rocky shore. This is the first study, to our knowledge, to examine the effects of micrograzers (, Introduction Widespread loss of canopy-forming macroalgal assemblages is reported to occur across many parts of the world's coastlines and appears to be driven by a combination of urbanisation, pollution and [...]