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Various explanations and solutions have been proposed over the last decade in relation to the implications of students' apparent lack of engagement with middle years schooling in Australia. This article reports on responses to a questionnaire by 333 Year 8 students (aged about 13, in the second year of high school) on perceptions of factors relating to their engagement with the academic curriculum. While the majority of students reported a strong sense of the importance of, and opportunities in, schooling, and saw English, mathematics and science connected to those opportunities, this orientation was not matched by corresponding positive engagement with these same subjects. There was diversity in the responses of students, and it is recommended that schools take steps to identify individual students' perceptions of factors influencing their engagement, and where appropriate, deal with those perceptions. Keywords student motivation middle years student attitudes student interests academic aspiration occupational aspiration, Introduction There have been sustained attempts over the last decade to explain and to tackle student disengagement in the middle years of schooling (students aged 10 to 14) in Australia. [...]

Byline: Brian Hand (1), Vaughan Prain (2), Carolyn Wallace (3) Abstract: This paper reports on two inter-related studies that examined the use of non-traditional writing strategies within secondary school science classrooms. The first study involved Year 10 students who incorporated one letter writing experience into the learning sequence when studying genetics. The second study was with Year 9 students who used both a non-traditional laboratory writing heuristic and letter writing as part of the learning sequence when studying a topic on light. The same teacher was involved in both case studies. A higher-level analogy question was added to the teacher-prepared tests for each study to examine if students who participated in writing-to-learn activities were able to perform significantly better as a group than a group of students who completed traditional teacher directed laboratory activities and note-taking. Results indicate that for the first study there was not a significant difference using t-test analysis, while for the second study involving two writing treatments there was a statistically significant difference using t-test analysis. There was no statistically significant difference in responses between treatment and control groups when answering low level recall questions for either case study. Student interviews indicated awareness by students of the metacognitive value gained by using the non-traditional writing types. Author Affiliation: (1) Iowa State University, USA (2) La Trobe University, Australia (3) University of Georgia, USA Article History: Registration Date: 13/10/2004

Issues are presented concerning the techniques which can be used by teachers to devise and assess assignments which encourage children to write in different genres as a means of consolidating their knowledge.

An innovative program for Australian high school students endeavored to enhance the participants' writing skills by exposing them to other writers' styles and purposes in pursuing autobiographical writing. Creative writing talent of students was, nurtured by integrating their reading and writing skills.

Writing assignments can be used in physics classes to assess past learning, revise mistaken impressions and consolidate different understandings while requiring high-order thinking skills. An exercise for physics students involves explaining how a spacecraft can avoid a meteor through a short story, newspaper article, letter or science journal article and allows students to explore force and motion concepts. Redrafting is allowed after discussion to revise conceptual inconsistencies.

Research into the impact on student learning of the introduction of diversified writing tasks in secondary science indicates that most students feel that these tasks have a positive effect on the quality of their learning in science. They recognized that the metacognitive elements of these tasks required them to look in detail at their own thinking. Diversified writing gives students a greater sense of ownership and control over learning. However, many students did not really consider how different learning activities could be beneficial.

There is growing research interest in both the challenges and opportunities learners face in trying to represent scientific understanding, processes and reasoning. These challenges are increasingly well understood by researchers, including integrating verbal, visual and mathematical modes in science discourse, and making strong conceptual links between classroom experiences and diverse 3D and 2D representations. However, a matching enhanced pedagogy of representation-rich learning opportunities, including their theoretical justification, is much less clearly established. Our paper reports on part of a three-year project to identify practical and theoretical issues entailed in developing a pedagogical framework to guide teacher understanding and practices to maximize representational opportunities for learners to develop conceptual understandings in science. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

There has been extensive research on children's understanding of evaporation, but representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. This study explored three students' engagement with science concepts relating to evaporation through various representational modes, such as diagrams, verbal accounts, gestures, and captioned drawings. This engagement entailed students (a) clarifying their thinking through exploring representational resources; (b) developing understanding of what these representations signify; and (c) learning how to construct representational aspects of scientific explanation. The study involved a sequence of classroom lessons on evaporation and structured interviews with nine children, and found that a focus on representational challenges provided fresh insights into the conceptual task involved in learning science. The findings suggest that teacher-mediated negotiation of representational issues as students construct different modal accounts can support enriched learning by enabling both (a) richer conceptual understanding by students; and (b) enhanced teacher insights into students' thinking. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This study is a secondary analysis of six previous studies that formed part of an ongoing research program focused on examining the benefits of using writing-to-learn strategies within science classrooms. The study is an attempt to make broader generalizations than those based on individual studies, given limitations related to sample sizes, topics, and classroom contexts. The results indicated that using writing-to-learn strategies was advantageous for students compared to those students working with more traditional science writing approaches. Using diversified types of writing enabled students in treatment groups to score significantly better on conceptual questions and total test scores than those in comparison groups. Importantly, when the cognitive demand of the question is increased from an extended recall to a design type question, there are significant performance differences between comparison and treatment groups in favour of treatment. The authors argue that the use of writing-to-learn strategies requires students to re-represent their knowledge in different forms and, as such, greater learning opportunities exist. Traditional writing strategies tend to favour replication of knowledge rather than re-representation knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper identifies three underlying discourses on the nature of sexuality evident in two Department of Education curriculum documents on sexuality education in Victoria, Australia, over the past 15 years. These discourses are a cultural 'preservation' perspective, a risk minimisation perspective, and a view that sexual expression should enable cultural and individual enlightenment and emancipation. This analysis of underpinning discourses is used as the basis for identifying a range of issues relating to course content, implied characteristics of learners, and appropriate teaching methods that need to be addressed in future documents if diverse goals in this area relating to knowledge and attitudinal outcomes are to be met. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

As part of a long‐term research study to enhance science learning, this paper reports on an exploratory study aimed at identifying initial beliefs and practices of a group of teachers and students (Years 4–6) in Australia when the students engaged with multiple representations of the same science concepts. There is growing recognition in science education research that students need to understand and link different representational modes, such as graphic and verbal modes, in learning to think and act scientifically. This exploratory study used a multi‐site case‐study approach employing qualitative and quantitative methods. The findings indicated that while teachers used various modes to engage students and assess learning, they were not systematic in their focus on student integration and translation across modes. The study found that various factors affected students’ understanding of different modes, and that students who recognised relationships between modes demonstrated better conceptual understandings than students who lacked this knowledge. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article discusses various reports published within the issue, including one about learning opportunities and enabling teacher strategies when junior secondary students produce their own representations as part of their engagement with the topic of force and a framework to guide teachers' incorporation of student-generated representations into learning sequences in science topics.

The article discusses the value of drawing in science education, arguing that creating graphs and sketches encourages students to develop visual forms, which are frequently used by scientists in addition to words. The authors say that incorporating drawing into science lessons enhances the engagement of students, teaches students how to communicate through visual representations, and acts as a constructive strategy for learning. Drawing programs such as the Role of Representation in Learning Science (RiLS) project are discussed and science drawings created by children which explain evaporation are examined.