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An increasingly complex and demanding research landscape has seen university libraries rapidly evolve their services. While research data management, bibliometrics, and research impact services have predominantly featured in the literature to date, the full scope of support libraries are currently providing to their institutions is unknown. This paper aims to present an up-to-date view of the scope and extent of research support services by university libraries across Australia and Aotearoa New Zealand. A coding process analyzed content data from university library websites. Eleven research support areas were identified. Service delivery is split between synchronous and asynchronous modes. This paper describes a lived experience of an evidence-based library and information practice approach to improving research support services at two Australian university libraries, and while it highlights continued maturation of research support services, more research is needed to better understand influences on service development.

Chinese students studying abroad have been increasing rapidly in the past decades and become a significant financial contribution to receiving countries. Accordingly, understanding their enrollment choice is essential to facilitate college marketing and admission strategies. Though the decision process is believed to be different from domestic students, empirical analysis of Chinese students' enrollment choices is still lacking. This paper fills the void by examining the influential factors of Chinese students' enrollment choice with novel student-level data. We find that in addition to factors domestic students typically consider, such as financial aid and academic quality, Chinese students particularly emphasize college ranking, reputation, and location in their decision process. Furthermore, unlike domestic students who usually prefer colleges with proximity to home, Chinese students' location preference is linked to job prosperity. We also find that the impact of the factors varies for students from different regions of China, which can be attributable to uneven economic development within the country.

In the recent Australian 2021 census, the socio-technical construct of algorithmically driven decision-making processes made LGBTQI+ data as a category of diversity, inclusion and belonging an absent presence. In this paper, we position the notion of 'data justice' in relation to the entrenchment of inequalities and exclusion of LGBTQI+ lives and consider the implications of LGBTQI+ data being missing in action. As we look at the notion of 'data justice', we consider five critical socio-technical imaginaries with different kinds of data to think through the implications of technical democracy, data justice and post-automation. Finally, we consider the imaginary of citizenship when LGBTQI+ data is habitually missing in action from systematic power integrated into forms of governance. This paper positions 'data' not as a static 'object or process' but as a dynamic ecology that carries with it a multi-faceted set of coded meanings requiring constant review and reconsideration.

The launch of new tools in late 2022 heralded significant growth in attention to the impacts of generative AI (GenAI) in education. Claims of the potential impact on education are contested, but there are clear risks of inappropriate use particularly where GenAI aligns poorly with learning aims. In response, in mid-2023, the Australian Federal Government held an inquiry, calling for public submissions. This inquiry offers a lens onto the policy framing of GenAI in education and provides the object of investigation for this paper. We use the inquiry submissions, extracting structured claims from each. This extraction is provided as an open data set for further research, while this paper focuses on our analysis of the policy recommendations made.

This paper explores how trust in teacher professional judgment has been reconstituted through the globalised trends of performative accountability and reductive data-driven logics. The article draws upon empirical research from interviews with teachers and school leaders as well as observations of teacher preparation days, classroom and staff professional learning communities (PLCs), as part of a larger study of schooling practices in two geographically and contextually bound Queensland public schools. The paper focuses attention upon the socio-political, material-economic and cultural-discursive conditions inscribed in how data are currently understood and deployed, and how these conditions constrain trust in teachers, devaluing teachers' own professional judgment. Specifically, we flag how the practices and conditions that constrained trust were manifest in (a) pressures to ensure teachers generated and collected data on an ongoing basis to substantiate their claims about student learning, and (b) a perceived mistrust amongst parents and a subsequent need to justify decision-making on the basis of 'hard evidence'.

This paper considers the subjectivation of students in light of the increasing amounts of digital data that are now being produced within schools. Taking a lead from critical data studies and the sociology of numbers, the paper draws on staff interviews in three Australian secondary schools to explore the various types of student data being generated, and the forms of student subjectivities that result. In particular, the paper contrasts the 'holistic' possibilities that some school leaders and administrators ascribe to data in terms of expanding the capacity to 'know' students, against the limited ways that data is actually being used within the schools. Most notably, the paper details how digital data appears to be configured within schools' official data procedures and practices to build student subjectivities and position students in narrow terms of performance and attendance. The paper also highlights how teachers make practical use of these limited data 'profiles' in a relational manner -- as a way of stimulating dialogue with students to know them better, rather than a source of precise calculation. In this sense, the paper considers how 'data' might be reframed in educational discourse as a practical starting-point for teacher inquiry and professional judgment rather than an imagined source of all-encompassing knowledge.

Purpose: This paper establishes the attitude of Australian livestock farmers toward the use of mobile applications (apps) in farmer extension, training and on-farm decision making. It also determines levels of technology adoption of smartphones and agriculture app use, as well as identifies factors that may influence app adoption. Methodology: A quantitative approach was utilised in the analysis of data from four online surveys conducted in 2017 that were completed by a total 542 respondents. Findings: Respondents had high levels of smartphone ownership and general app use but significantly lower agricultural app use. Surveys revealed a strong positive attitude and keenness to use apps. Making more informed decisions, increasing efficiency, and accessing and recording important information were the most important reasons for agricultural app use. Practical Implications: Findings suggest a lack of relevant, useful, and easy to use apps for agriculture, or an issue with their value proposition. Theoretical Implications: The perceived technology adoption gap amongst Australian livestock farmers could not be substantiated. Established fundamental factors influencing technology adoption are relevant for agricultural app adoption, but other factors appear to be less relevant and there are new motivators to consider. Originality/Value: There is little peer-reviewed information on the adoption and use of agricultural apps by Australian farmers and a perception that farmers have lower levels of smartphone and app use. This paper assesses technology adoption levels and considers the farmer perspective in identifying factors influencing adoption.

In December 2019, the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development released the latest results of its triennial Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) testing. What followed was a flurry of media reports in the participant countries about the 2018 PISA results that were interpretive rather than descriptive. Whilst there is a considerable body of literature describing PISA's impact on education policies, there are fewer studies that examine how PISA data is presented to the public by the media and how this contributes to the construction of policy truths. As part of a broader study of policy landscapes in the Asia Pacific region, this paper provides a critical analysis of the mediatisation of the 2018 PISA results in Australia and Singapore. It will be demonstrated that in Australia, much of the reporting was characterised by panic, whereas in Singapore the reporting was much more measured, exhibiting a stoicism. Drawing on a corpus of articles published in Australian and Singaporean newspapers in December 2019, and informed by the work of Michel Foucault, the analysis will make visible how dominant discourses used by the media operated as regimes of truth to advance neoliberal imperatives.

With the increasing presence of 'datafied' educational settings across Australia, critical components of teachers' educational practice and work have been quantified. Digital data collected through teachers' labour in and around the classroom links to educational practice and the commercial datafication of teachers' online persona. Often described as 'sleepwalking' towards surveillance, this paper argues that corporate marketing strategies induce teachers in a state of 'commercial and computational comatose'. It challenges the concept of 'sleepwalking' by introducing an emergent way of thinking, through the metaphor eMorpheus, to stress broader tensions concerning teachers' working conditions, rights, and employment. Drawing on in-depth interview data generated via the Apps in Australian Classrooms Project, the findings highlight how the new forms of leadership are emerging in educational settings in response through consideration of the eMorpheus metaphor.

Data governance is a relatively new and evolving discipline. It encompasses the people who are responsible for data quality (the stewards); the policies and processes associated with collecting, managing, storing and reporting data; and the information technology systems and support that provide efficient infrastructure. Higher education institutions are paying more attention to data governance as we move into a funding environment that focuses on performance measures, targets and accountability. This article describes the establishment of a university-wide Data Governance Advisory Group (DGAG) at the University of Newcastle and highlights some of the short-term achievements as well as the longer-term goals of the group. The DGAG is responsible for providing advice to senior management on data governance policies, standards and strategic approaches; data quality initiatives; data privacy, compliance and security; data architecture and integration requirements; and data warehouse and business intelligence priorities. Membership of the DGAG includes key stakeholders from planning, quality and reporting; student and academic services; human resources (HR); finance; information technology (IT); research services; library; facilities management; external relations and corporate services. The monthly meetings have provided a forum for discussion of data quality and governance across the whole life cycle from collection to reporting to decision-making for a range of teaching and learning, research, administration and services data collections. Outcomes include the establishment of a register of data collections, a mapping of how data are used in official reports and benchmarking/ranking projects; the development of a common data dictionary, the sharing of good practices and promoting a collaborative culture. [This article was first presented at the Annual Conference of the Australasian Association for Institutional Research, "Let the sunshine in," Gold Coast, 9-11 November 2011.]

This paper addresses the entanglements of the earth's becoming in a multi site cross hemisphere study of the infinite moments of young children's world making, recorded in multimodal videos, still images, and children's productions. The postqualitative project was informed by new materialist and posthuman theorising. The researchers conducted their research at seven different early learning centres in NSW, Queensland, Victoria, and Finland. At the end of the project the researchers came together to make sense of the data across all sites and realised that their postqualitative data was BIG and that their 'little big data' was generated in the context of the increasing impact of 'big Big Data.' We discuss our approaches to posthuman and new materialist big data in order to create a conversation between the two and to highlight the alternative methodological processes we developed to make sense of large bodies of postqualitative data.

The increasing datafication of teachers' work and schooling practices as evidenced through various metrics of student testing and school improvement measures have continued to grow unabated across many OECD Countries. Such practices have been fuelled by global competition for league tables such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) with 'big data' having a major impact on how teachers are expected to gather, analyse and report data. For schools in Australia, the turn of the millennium has heralded the 'high stakes' data trend and the roll-out of standardised testing. This paper reports on an Australian study's findings, against such a backdrop, to explore the impact and challenges of an overly data-rich environment for educators, teachers and system leaders and what might be the enabling conditions to move towards a more research-rich teaching profession. The findings suggest that perhaps standards and data are not the enemy for teachers, rather it is standardisation and the datafication of students that creates an amplification of the effects of institutional rankings and league tables. Enabling conditions are offered to adopt a more comprehensive and inclusive view of what counts as research and who conducts research, key to enabling a mature teaching profession.

This paper establishes that system-generated data profiles are influencing the work of principals in three Queensland state schools. Drawing upon Foucault's notions of governance, as well as research emphasising performative cultures and the importance placed upon numbers and data in education, this paper uses the tale of the Emperor's map as a metaphor to explore the way principals' work is being influenced by specific sets of data compiled by the department. These data profiles are representative of external accountabilities and high stakes testing regimes, as seen in systems that have adopted neoliberal policies which attempt to quantify the work being undertaken in schools. The paper demonstrates that principals are being constructed in part by discourses from a system that emphasises these system-generated performance data as a driver for school improvement.

Purpose: This paper argues that in a well-organised school with strong leadership and vision coupled with a concerted effort to improve the teaching performance of each teacher, student achievement can be enhanced. The purpose of this paper is to demonstrate that while macro-effect sizes such as "whole of school" metrics are useful for school leaders in their professional development roles, there are important micro-conditions that can be uncovered in a more detailed analysis of student achievement data. Design/methodology/approach: Evidence of student achievement in a variety of standardised and non-standardised assessment tasks was subjected to examination in a "post hoc," case study design. The assessment tasks were the South Australian Spelling Test Waddington Reading Test, a school-wide diagnostic writing task, teacher running records and National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy. Performance in selected classrooms was compared on these tests utilising a variety of parametric quantitative statistics. Findings: School-based reform initiatives require external criteria on which to base decision making. Without such criteria based on data and the capacity to interpret it, interactions in the school culture have unanticipated consequences that have the potential to neutralise school improvement strategies. Further, findings suggest that fewer but sharper and quicker data collection tools are more valuable in such teacher decision making, but these require expertise to produce and interpret them. Research limitations/implications: This paper provides insights from one school, but the reported data are embedded in a sustained five year school reform programme. Practical implications: This paper documents a whole school organisational reform model devised by a school head and leadership team to improve student academic performance. The paper offers a process for developing a data-based school reform strategy for professional development to enhance both student achievement and school outcomes. Social implications: The paper outlines a model for school reform that is focused on all students increasing their academic outcomes. By emphasising collaborative teacher work based on research-justified teaching approaches, the model shows that social inequalities can be reversed. Originality/value: The paper outlines a whole of school reform model focused through a combination of distributed leadership, data-driven decision making, within a context of a coaching, mentoring and feedback regime for teachers. Together this model is an application of theoretical ideas to school reform.

In recent years, the Australian government has encouraged open access to administrative data, providing new opportunities for examining life course pathways and evaluating social policies. This paper demonstrates the importance of establishing partnerships in the use of administrative data for social research. In collaboration with the data custodian, we used administrative welfare data to investigate a policy-relevant topic: the association between income support receipt and relationship separation. Our results provided greater statistical power for detecting associations for minority groups than is possible with panel survey data, highlighting the benefits of administrative data for understanding the outcomes of population groups that are not well represented in surveys. The collaboration between university researchers and data custodians was critical to enable appropriate sharing of data for research and for accurate interpretation of the data and outcomes for relevance to policy.

This paper examines collaborative researcher-practitioner knowledge work around assessment data in culturally diverse, low socio-economic school communities in Queensland, Australia. Specifically, the paper draws on interview accounts about the work of a cohort of school-based researchers who acted as mediators bridging knowledge flows between a local university and a cluster of schools. We draw on the concept of recontextualisation to explore the processes of knowledge mediation in dialogues around student assessment data to design instructional innovations. We argue that critical policy studies need to explore the complex ways in which neoliberal education policies are enacted in local sites. Moreover, we suggest that an analysis of collaborative knowledge work designed to improve student learning outcomes in low socio-economic school communities necessitates attention to the principles regulating knowledge flows across boundaries. In addition, it necessitates attention to the ways in which mediators navigate dilemmatic spaces, anxieties and affects/feelings in order to generate innovative learning designs in the current global context of high-stakes national testing and accountability regimes.

This paper explores the results that arise from asking different, cross-disciplinary questions of vocational education and training data. Commencement and completion results from the Australian National Apprentice and Trainee Collection from a two decade-long period of time were geographically categorised into the tropical north and temperate south. Statistical analyses identified a clear difference between the two regions in the timing of cancellations and withdrawals from training contracts in the trade occupations as well as an unexpectedly strong distinction in the annual pattern of non-trade commencements in training. Regionally-specific climate variables are briefly examined to determine if there is "prima facie" support for a climatic explanation for the commencement of non-trade traineeships. Exploration of the data set suggests that the seasonal motivation to commence formal study in the non-trade occupations may come from sources outside the national training system and have implications for policy-making.

Using the notion that research should "enlighten" policy responses, this paper considers the complex locational factors that affect and underlie patterns of Indigenous student mobility in Queensland, Australia. The paper presents data, captured through an action research project, to explore mobility "in and through" two environments. In so doing, it argues that the complexity of local sites and experiences, and distinct "push-pull" factors in remote, regional and urban settings, are critical considerations when developing a "policy package" in response to Indigenous student mobility. In this regard, more effective use and analysis of administrative data are required. (Contains 2 figures and 8 tables.)

Indigenous Australians have often been described as highly mobile people, particularly in historical and remote "wilderness" contexts. To date though, very little research has examined the relationship between Indigenous temporary mobilities and formal education systems, which assume and require "settled" residency practice. This paper situates one such analysis in the northern tourist town of Broome, Western Australia. It draws on both qualitative and quantitative data from educators and schools in and around the town to paint a detailed picture of Indigenous temporary mobilities as they relate to the formal school sector. It demonstrates that Indigenous temporary mobilities, though largely invisible to policy makers, occur frequently and require more intentional and informed responses. The paper concludes by discussing some locally practiced and/or imagined responses. (Contains 3 figures and 4 tables.)

This paper draws from research conducted as part of an Australian Research Council funded Linkage Project "Teaching effective 3D authoring in the middle years: multimedia grammatical design and multimedia authoring pedagogy", which is a collaboration between the University of New England, the University of Tasmania and the Australian Children's Television Foundation. This project is being conducted in over 20 schools around Australia. The data presented in this paper focuses on one such school, located in Tasmania. It explores one school's endeavour in the teaching and learning of multimodal narrative. Data includes interviews from students and multimodal analysis of student narratives. The paper showcases the kinds of semiotic choices the children are making for their stories, and includes excerpts from the interviews to illustrate how they are able to articulate justifications for their choices. In particular, it focuses on how children are establishing literary concepts such as genre, characterisation and point of view using all semiotic resources. In doing so, it considers the pedagogy behind the creations to explore how effectively it works as children create new kinds of texts which are innovative, critical, creative and "of quality". (Contains 8 figures, 3 tables, and 3 notes.)

The ability to visualize student engagement and experience data provides valuable opportunities for learning support and curriculum design. With the rise of the use of learning analytics to provide "actionable intelligence" on students' learning, the challenge is to create visualizations of the data, which are clear and useful to the intended audience. This process of finding the best way to visually represent data is often iterative, with many different designs being trialled before the final design is settled upon. This paper presents a case study of the process of refining a visualization of students' learning experience data. In this case the aim was to create a visual representation of the continuity of care students were exposed to during a longitudinal placement as part of a medical degree. The process of visualization refinement is outlined as well as the lessons learned along the way. (Contains 5 figures.)

Mathematics competency is fast becoming an essential requirement in ever greater parts of day-to-day work and life. Thus, creating strategies for improving mathematics learning in students is a major goal of education research. However, doing so requires an ability to look at many aspects of mathematics learning, such as demographics and psychological dispositions, in an integrated way as part of the same system. Large-scale assessments such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) provide an accessible and large volume of coherent data, and this gives researchers the opportunity to employ data-driven approaches to gain an overview of the system. For these reasons, we have used machine learning to explore the relationships between psychological dispositions and mathematical literacy in Australian 15-year-olds using the PISA 2012 data set. Our results from this strongly data-driven approach re-affirm the primacy of mathematics self-efficacy and highlight novel complex interactions between mathematics self-efficacy, mathematics anxiety and socio-economic status. In this paper, we demonstrate how education researchers can usefully employ data-driven modelling techniques to find complex non-linear relationships and novel interactions in a multidimensional data set.

Documenting sociolinguistic variation in lesser-studied languages presents methodological challenges, but also offers important research opportunities. In this paper we examine three key methodological challenges commonly faced by researchers who are outsiders to the community. We then present practical solutions for successful variationist research on indigenous languages and meaningful partnerships with local communities. In particular, we draw insights from our research with Australian languages and indigenous languages of rural China. We also highlight reasons why such lesser-studied languages are crucial to the further advancement of sociolinguistic theory, arguing that the value of the research justifies the effort needed to overcome the methodological difficulty. We find that the challenges of sociolinguistics in these communities sometimes make standard variationist methods untenable, but the methodological solutions we propose can lead to valuable results and community relationships.

Personal information is among the most significant assets for businesses today, and clear transactional rules are becoming increasingly important. Organizations, including universities, are charged with more responsibility than ever to protect the personal information used during the course of their business, specifically student data. The paper provides a broad contextual overview of the effects of data protection rules and presents a succinct, easy to digest introduction to the complex, often technical arena of student data management for universities. It highlights specific legal and ethical considerations on which universities, and particularly open distance learning institutions, will need to focus in order to ensure legislative and ethical compliance. Given the absence of precedent in South Africa, a comparative policy and practice review was applied to analyze available international legislation governing data privacy and protection to establish some of the trends, risks, and best practices.

Computer-assisted personal interviewing (CAPI) offers many attractive benefits over paper-and-pencil interviewing. There is, however, mixed evidence on the impact of CAPI on interview "length," an important survey outcome in the context of length limits imposed by survey budgets and concerns over respondent burden. In this article, recent experimental and quasi-experimental evidence derived from a large, nationally representative household panel study is used to investigate CAPI's impact on interview length. We find that effects very much depend on how CAPI is implemented, including the hardware and software adopted, the extent and nature of dependent data, and even interviewer workloads--a finding that helps explain the conflicting results from previous studies. Overall, our study leads us to the conclusion that, absent dependent data, CAPI is likely to increase interview lengths, but the potential reductions from dependent data are very large, such that even modest levels can lead to net reductions in interview lengths.