Again I am pleased that Issues in Educational Research includes a wide range of papers concerned with new pedagogies for physical education teachers, learning in nurse education, assessing teacher effectiveness, testing a model of curriculum dissemination, and a concern for school effects on student attitudes to their schooling. Not only are the topics quite different, there is also a good variety of research methods on exhibition.
Alexander, Taggart and Thorpe claim that a particular sport education curriculum model provides a student-centred social system which gives coherence to organised physical activity in schools. Their concern is that a particular curriculum innovation addresses what they refer to as "a crisis in physical education". Also related to curriculum, the paper by McBeath outlines a strategy for improving curriculum dissemination and adoption in TAFE. The strategy involves two-way communication, collaboration, and the encouragement of lecturer reflection on their teaching. The paper also includes assessments of the effectiveness of curriculum implementation strategies.
Cantwell's paper continues his interest in nurse education in a report of relationships of nurses' course expectations with their approaches to learning and beliefs about control. As might be expected, those with an academic focus tend to see nursing as a discipline while those more career oriented tend to see nursing as a clinical pursuit. The study also draws attention to a third group who do not seem to have either a discipline or a clinical orientation to their nursing studies.
In his consideration of the purposes and methods of assessing teachers' effectiveness, Dunkin first discusses the concept from a variety of perspectives and follows with a review of traditional and more recent methods that have been reported. The traditional methods are described as belonging to a "bureaucratic" model of teaching, with the newer (or "emergent") methods as belonging to a "professional" model. Question s are raised about the validity and legality of teacher assessment and particularly the emergent methods.
As I indicated was my aim in the previous Issue, Mok and Flynn have provided a paper considering the relationship between school size and student affect. This paper is a sequel to their previous paper in this journal (Vol. 6, No.1) which reported that, other things being equal, students at larger schools had higher achievement. In the present paper Mok and Flynn found no significant effect of school size on Year 12 student quality of school life in Catholic schools. Taking an equity perspective the authors present such a result as positive for most students, and go on to suggest that it is the quality of the staff/student and student/student interactions which are clearly more important than school size.
As editor, I am constantly looking for good manuscripts for Issues in Educational Research. Papers for publication in 1998 are still needed so, if you would like a quick result, please send me your contribution. All papers received are sent out for blind review and I am pleased to be able to state here that over the last two years only a few papers have been returned to the authors as not publishable. Most papers eventually accepted (but not all) have required some changes before publication, but our aim of assisting relatively new researchers to get published would seem to be working thus far.
May I add a note for librarians and others concerned about completeness of journal sets. There was only one number of Issues in Educational Research in 1996 (Volume 6) and there will be only one number for 1997 (Volume 7). From 1998 (Volume 8) the Editorial Board intends to return to the practice of having two numbers of the journal each year. Of course achieving this intention is subject to the availability of sufficient high quality papers for publication.
Sid Bourke
Editor
| Associate Professor Brian Devlin Northern Territory University Darwin, NT 0909 Ph: 08 8946 6105 Fax: 08 8946 6151 email: bdevlin@banda.ntu.edu.au |
Dr John Hall Faculty of Education Curtin University of Technology GPO Box U1987, Perth WA 6001 Ph: 08 9266 2177 Fax: 08 9266 2547 email: hallj@educ.curtin.edu.au |
| Dr John McCormick School of Education Studies University of NSW Sydney, NSW 2052 Ph: 02 9385 4917 Fax: 02 9385 6153 email: j.mccormick@unsw.edu.au |
Associate Professor Glenn Rowley Faculty of Education Monash University Clayton, VIC 3168 Ph: 03 9905 2830 Fax: 03 9905 1595 email: glenn.rowley@education.monash.edu.au |
| Ms Maxine Shepherd Graduate School of Education University of Adelaide Adelaide, SA 5005 Ph: 08 8379 0157 Fax: 08 8303 4455 email: iris@arts.adelaide.edu.au | |
|
Book Review Editor Dr Andrew Taggart Faculty of Education Edith Cowan University Mt Lawley WA 6050 Ph: 08 9370 6806 Fax: 08 9370 6664 email: a.taggart@cowan.edu.au |
Business Manager Dr John McCormick School of Education Studies University of NSW Sydney, NSW 2052 Ph: 02 385 4917 Fax: 02 385 6153 email: j.mccormick@unsw.edu.au Subscriptions To the Business Manager |
All articles published in this journal have been subjected to a blind peer-review process.
The views and styles expressed in the articles in this publication are those of the individual authors and are not necessarily shared by the editor or members of the editorial advisory board.
Copyright © 1997 The Institutes for Educational Research in NSW, NT, SA, Victoria and WA
Published by the Institutes for Educational Research in NSW, NT, SA, Victoria and WA. All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced in any form or by any means without prior written permission from the Institutes. Desktop publishing (1997) by Clare McBeath. Printed (1997) by Printing Services, Curtin University of Technology, Western Australia.
ISSN 0313-7155
| Please cite as: Bourke, S. (1997). Editorial. Issues In Educational Research, 7(1), iii-iv. http://www.iier.org.au/iier7/editorial.html |
© 1997 Issues in Educational Research
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