The medical workforce shortfall in rural areas is a major issue influencing the nature of undergraduate medical education in Australia. Exposing undergraduates to rural life through rural clinical school (RCS) placements is seen as a key strategy to address workforce imbalances. We investigated the influence of an extended RCS placement and rural…

Nursing students typically do not undertake clinical training in school settings. However, they are well placed to have a role in providing health screening and education in schools or community health venues under supervision of qualified nurses. This study provides a description and outcomes of a vision and hearing screening programme delivered…

Children with Developmental Language Disorder are likely to experience difficulties with morphosyntax, especially regular past tense marking. Few studies have evaluated the effectiveness of intervention to improve morphosyntax in young school-aged children with DLD. This study investigated the efficacy of combined explicit and implicit…

This paper describes a national statistics-oriented project-based learning activity, which has been delivered annually for five years in Australia and the outcomes of a particular collaboration of this initiative with the discipline of environmental sustainability. The national initiative engages primary- and secondary-school students from varied…

Service-learning as a transformative pedagogy within university education is becoming increasingly popular in Australia. Advocates of service-learning indicate that the practice of combining community based voluntary work with theoretical in-class academic knowledge leads to a greater awareness about diversity and difference in students. While…

Reading difficulties may have multiple causes. Effective approaches to reading intervention need to target the specific causes for individual readers. The Early Reading Intervention Knowledge program comprises three intervention pathways: a phonological-phonemic pathway, a phonic-orthographic pathway, and an oral language pathway. This study…

The "Tutors@UQ" programme provides an example of a formalised, institution-wide, cross-discipline, academic development programme to enhance the quality of teaching that has been maintained for seven years despite a pattern of substantial organisational change. We present a case study of the programme framed around a four-phase model of…

Background: The advent of technology use in physical education is upon us. But the implications of using exergames as a substitute for traditional physical education instruction for some students raise questions. Although exergames have the potential to increase energy expenditure and motivation in some children, it is less clear whether they can…

This study evaluated the effectiveness of an 8-week gymnastics curriculum on children's movement competence and their physical self-concept. There were 113 children (46% girls, 49% intervention) with a mean age of 9.4 years (SD = 1.8) that participated. Intervention children underwent 8 weeks of gymnastics and the comparison group continued with…

The primary objective of this study was to evaluate the efficacy of a continuing professional development (CPD) intervention in producing changes in physical education (PE) teaching practice and PE teaching quality by generalist primary school teachers when the CPD addressed the use of a game-centred approach. A cluster randomized controlled trial…

An evaluation of the effectiveness of a large-scale professional development (PD) programme delivered to 258 schools in Queensland, Australia is presented. Formal evaluations were conducted at two stages during the programme using a tool developed from Desimone's five core features of effective PD. Descriptive statistics of 38 questions and…

Objective: Alcohol media literacy (AML) programs have achieved positive results for alcohol prevention; however, gender may moderate program effectiveness. This study investigated gender differences for an Australian AML intervention. Method: Fifth and sixth graders (N = 165), allocated to an intervention or wait-list control group, participated…

An earlier series of pilot studies and small-scale experimental studies had previously provided some evidence for the efficacy of a small group early literacy intervention program for young struggling readers. The present paper provides further evidence for efficacy based on a much larger sample of young, socially disadvantaged, at-risk readers.…

Early manifestations of anxiety in childhood confer significant distress and life interference. This study reports on the first controlled trial of the "Get Lost Mr. Scary" programme, a Cognitive Behavioural Therapy group intervention for children with anxiety aged 5-7 years. Participants were 134 children (65 males and 69 females) drawn…

This article explores the unique mentoring model that the Australian Indigenous Mentoring Experience (AIME) has established to assist Australian Indigenous young people succeed educationally. AIME can be described as a structured educational mentoring programme, which recruits university students to mentor Indigenous high school students. The…