http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/services/Feed ${session.getAttribute("locale")} 5 http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:9900 This quantitative study intends to better understand the impact of the location of the first deleted word upon the estimation of text difficulty yielded by successive cloze tests based on random deletion from a single passage. The variation in sampling of language features across five cloze tests based on the same passage is random and thus not statistically significant. However, there is a statistically significant difference in result distributions of matched groups after scoring for exact replacement. These differences in performance appear partly due to differences in the frequencies of nouns, verbs, and grammatical metaphor between the different tests derived from the base passage. Although the differences between the tests in this investigation appear to fall within the tolerances indicated by commonly used criterion scores, the range of mean scores for particular school grades suggests that more generalised estimation of text difficulty should be based on exhaustive sampling rather than relying on one test based on a specific passage. This study is significant because it illuminates widespread concerns regarding the usefulness of cloze techniques for the purpose for which they were first devised and suggests reasons for the impact of two forms of sampling error. 2012-02-02T03:10:03.601Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:8217 This paper describes an investigation of the interaction between teaching method and school locality in aligning student environmental beliefs, attitudes and intentions. Data for this study were collected from 236 adolescent upper secondary school students and chemistry teachers in Indonesia who were completing environmental topics from the local science curriculum. Analysis of surveys and interviews revealed a complex relationship between the beliefs, attitudes, and intentions exhibited by students and the location of the schools they attended. More active learning approaches seemed to promote cohesion between beliefs, attitudes and intentions, with participation in community issues having a greater impact on student ecological affinity than field research projects. The results of the study are discussed with regard to the concept of environmental citizenship whereby participating in local environmental issues can enhance strategies to create democratic and responsible citizens. 2011-07-11T05:40:03.452Z ]]> http://nova.newcastle.edu.au/vital/access/manager/Repository/uon:4546 This study investigates how teacher education students responded to a particular suite of educational products that involved media based educational learning objects, and their attitudes to them in fostering student centred learning in general, and problem based learning in particular, with the ultimate goal of enhancing and improving the quality of teacher training. Two lines of inquiry have been followed throughout the investigation: i. to identify and describe student attitudes to the newly developed video rich PBL courseware for teacher education; and ii. to explore how such educational courseware can be used, enhanced, and presented as examples of learning objects in actual teaching situations. The implications and recommendations arising from the findings obtained in this research project will provide teacher educators with some initial insights when using similar media based products in teacher education. 2010-04-27T05:19:11.057Z ]]>