The Healthy Kids Queensland Survey was commissioned by Queensland Health as part of the Queensland Government’s ongoing commitment to promoting healthy weight, nutrition and physical activity for Queensland’s children and young people. This survey provides important data to help plan, develop and implement effective policies and programs to improve young Queenslanders’ dietary and physical activity behaviour, and to achieve healthy weight. This summary report is complemented by a full report that provides more detailed methodological information and data sets.
This paper presents evaluation outcomes from an externally funded research project involving the online clinical assessment of practical skills (eCAPS) using web-based video technologies within a university medical programme. eCAPS was implemented to trial this web-based approach for promoting the efficacy of practical skills assessment in knee joint examinations for a pre-clinical cohort of second year medical students. eCAPS involves a progressive organisation of online video experiences and task expectations for formative and summative assessments of selected competencies. Data are presented from semi-structured interviews with the medical students (N = 40). eCAPS successfully supported students’ skill development in knee joint examinations on fellow students and allowed remote assessment of candidates’ performances by clinicians experienced in musculoskeletal examinations. An ‘indicative standard’ paradigm, involving formative assessment of one randomly selected performance from the submission of all students’ responses within a small group, offered an efficient and efficacious avenue for providing consolidated feedback to students and promoted desirable learning behaviours. Overall, there was evidence of reciprocal learning benefits to the ‘blending’ of an online learning and assessment approach with an existing face-to-face environment. The medical students were able to successfully engage online with high quality and consistent practical skill-based materials in a flexible, independent and individual manner.
This paper analyses the current Australian policy and research context in relation to developing quality teachers. Like other countries, many educational authorities in Australia are developing professional standards for teachers and the evaluation of teachers against those standards as a mechanism for ensuring and extending the quality of teaching in schools. A key policy consideration involves the use of professional standards as tools for extending professional learning and/or for credentialing and appraisal. This paper considers these uses of standards by drawing on an evaluation of Education Queensland's Professional Standards for Teachers pilot. The pilot focused on using a set of standards as a framework for professional learning. Teachers' perspectives on the standards and their intended use, their engagement with the standards during the pilot and the nature of professional learning associated with that engagement are discussed in light of current policy debates about professional standards.
Despite the fact that this is a research methods book, you should not assume that research begins with methods; it does not. Research begins with questions and researchers often care very deeply about both the questions and the potential answers. The identification of a viable research question is not, however, a straightforward process; the selection of questions is influenced by myriad factors including personal background, interest and skills, personal preference, available funding, sociopolitical factors and current trends. The primary purpose of this chapter, therefore, is to focus on how and why research questions are developed, and to encourage you to identify two or three questions against which the methods chapters that follow can be considered.
Young people are physical (as are adults) and their bodies are significant in relation to who they are, what and how they learn, and who they can become. Consistent with middle schooling philosophy, but often not reflected in practice, a balanced approach to all aspects of the growth and development of young people is supported. Much research has shown the middle years is an important time assigned to 'identity development' and 'physical development' while it is also a time when many young people become less physically active and less engaged in learning at school. This paper reviews current research about physical activity, physical education and physicality in order to locate the place of the physical in the lives of young people and encourage practices in the middle years that acknowledge this physicality.
Background and aims: Concerns about physical inactivity in children and growing levels of obesity are expressed by politicians, health economists and those involved with the health and well‐being of children. As this has the potential to be a major health issue, the aim of this investigation was to explore any contributing socioenvironmental considerations. Methods and results: Census‐matched survey data were analysed from 318 parents of 6‐ to 7‐year‐old children, revealing that family socioeconomic status (SES) influenced the places where children engaged in physical activity. Children from low SES backgrounds spent significantly more time playing close to their homes, and their families were less able to afford access to commercial physical‐activity facilities, than those from middle and high SES families. Although neighbourhood‐based activities are generally associated with more spontaneous free play, such activities may not provide the same opportunities for supervision and physical skill building available through commercial‐based activities. Conclusions: Given that access to ‘enriching’ physical‐activity spaces may be limited by the capacity to pay, these findings have implications for professionals such as occupational therapists who can take on a role in advocating for equity in access and promotion of a more engaging urban design. Dialogue with urban planners is central to this process.
In this chapter we explore the construction and reception of a critically oriented Australian Curriculum: Health and Physical Education (AC:HPE). We begin with a review and mapping of sociocritical perspectives in the Australian HPE curriculum documents of the 1980s and 1990s, and the research of sociocritical scholars informing the design and implementation of these. We then introduce two analytic concepts: principled position and threshold concepts (Cousin 2006; Hunter 1994; Meyer, Land, and Baillie 2010), which provide a useful lens through which we can understand and respond to the journey of the most recent iteration of a critically oriented AC:HPE. In conclusion, we contend that sociocritical perspectives pose a source of troublesome knowledge and, as a result, are particularly sensitive to the principled positions that stakeholders adopt in their efforts to influence the intent, knowledges and practices of HPE in schools.
for the preservation of health, .... that it will now be in the power of every considerable person, to ascertain what rules are suited to his particular situation, and to adopt those which are likely to be most efficacious. (Sinclair 1818: 13) Motivating Sir John’s tome nearly two hundred years ago was his concern that ‘people seldom attend to their health till it be too late’ (p.12) and that ‘the attainment of longevity, if accompanied with good health, is not only an important consideration to the individual, but also to the community to which he belongs’ (p.12).
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