Helen Boon

James Cook University | JCU · College of Arts, Social Science and Education

This paper reports exploratory research conducted in a flood-impacted rural Australian town to identify the factors which residents perceived as supporting community resilience to disaster. There is a gap in this research area centred in the Australian disaster context. Since Australia is predicted to be highly impacted by the effects of climate ch...

Recent weather‐related disasters (i.e., floods, fires) impacting Australia may potentially increase in frequency and severity as a result of predicted climate variability. The dearth of literature pertaining to school emergency response planning for vulnerable students with disabilities (including those with intellectual disabilities) when such dis...

[Extract] Tropical Cyclone Yasi (TC Yasi) made landfall in the early hours of Thursday 3rd February 2011 with the eye passing over the Mission Beach region. The maximum wind gusts were estimated to be 140 to 225 km/h across the area stretching from Townsville to Innisfail. The localities away from the Mission Beach to Cardwell region experienced wi...

This paper advocates the use of Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory as a framework to analyse resilience at diverse scales. Bronfenbrenner’s bioecological theory can be employed to (a) benchmark social resilience, (b) target the priority interventions required and (c) measure progress arising from these interventions to enhance resilience to natu...

Through an ongoing project, we have been reviewing the literature addressing school planning for climate change related ecological disruptions and disasters, particularly for the special needs of children with disabilities. We have also examined related state education department policies from across Australia. Our preliminary results suggest scant...

Textbooks can act as filters and conduits between educational policies and classroom teaching. This research analyzes the cognitive demands of questions in nine senior science textbooks written for the recently reformed curriculum in Queensland, Australia. Marzano and Kendall’s (The new taxonomy of educational objectives (2nd ed.). Corwin Press, 20...

The 2019 Global Environmental Outlook Report released by the United Nations Environment Program (UNEP 2019) notes unprecedented environmental challenges: global population explosion, rampant urbanization, economic contractions fueling trade wars, diverse conflicts resulting in large-scale migration and refugee surges, and the wicked problem of clim...

In this chapter we outline our thoughts regarding the rationale for this collection of works, how that thinking changed over time, and how a reader might reflect on the content of the chapters. There is an historical element to our reasoning and we have recast how we might consider issues in science education that were previously cast as dilemmas....

Learning objectives outline the knowledge and skills to be taught in a subject, thus signaling what is worth learning and what type of thinking is valued. The aim of this syllabus analysis is to determine the cognitive demand of learning objectives in the recently reformed Queensland physics, chemistry and biology syllabus and to analyse whether th...

Within the rough ground that is the field of education there is a complex web of ethical obligations: to prepare our students for their future work; to be ethical as educators in our conduct and teaching; to the ethical principles embedded in the contexts in which we work; and given the Southern context of this work, the ethical obligations we have...

Schools in Western countries are places where work-related conditions lead to teacher disaffection and attrition. To mitigate this employers and scholars advocate fostering teacher resilience. This chapter presents a critical examination of teacher resilience. Originally conceived as a personal trait, later research showed human resilience is an at...

This systematic review synthesises research on curriculum alignment to suggest considerations for the implementation of the Senior secondary curriculum reform in Queensland, Australia. It focuses on the coherence of cognitive skills in the prescribed and enacted curriculum as these are typically the least aligned curriculum components. Search metho...

This article documents the adaptation, piloting and validation of a measure of teachers’ ethical sensitivity. To create the test, we modified a measure from dentistry drawing on literature in teacher professional ethics and drew on the expertise of professional ethics scholars and practitioners. Based on the results of Rasch analysis combined with...

Background Ongoing debate about Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder (ADHD) has not resolved ambivalent teacher beliefs about ADHD. This is an important matter since teachers’ beliefs influence their pedagogy, classroom management, and their referral procedures for formal diagnoses of ADHD. They therefore must be provided with up-to-date profes...

This systematic literature review sought to examine whether iPad or other mobile technology use by school students aged 9 to 14 years enhanced academic outcomes. Conducted in March 2019 using the PRISMA statement, the review identified 43 studies published between 2010 and 2019 which specifically addressed the research question. Findings revealed t...

Students who have parents deployed to a war zone are more vulnerable to an increased level of stress and anxiety, health problems, behavioural disorders and academic under-achievement. Yet, little is known about the processes employed by schools to support these students. This study investigated the deployment support work conducted by Defence Scho...

This paper reports findings from a systematic literature review conducted to identify effective behaviour management strategies which create a positive learning environment for Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander students. The search criteria employed resulted in 103 documents which were analysed in response to this focus. Results identified eigh...

This paper summarizes the findings from the first phase of a three-part project which, overall, investigates what Aboriginal¹ students perceive as the qualities and actions of effective teachers and subsequently seeks to determine the impact of the enactment of these identified qualities on educational outcomes. This first phase of the research was...

Experiencing high levels of subjective wellbeing is a central criterion of positive mental health in all groups of individuals. Wellbeing is not only the result of favourable life circumstances such as academic success and satisfying relationships, but also a predictor and part cause of these outcomes. More specifically, in relation to university s...

Many current economic and social challenges lead to waves of migrating people. The countries where migrants seek refuge can be ethnically homogeneous and monolingual such as Greece, or more frequently, ethnically diverse with local Indigenous populations which have been subjugated and marginalized, such as the US or Australia. In either context, a...

Vietnam is highly vulnerable to the impacts of climate change, particularly in poor coastal communities. While external climate change projects have been conducted in some coastal provinces, including Ha Tinh, there is a lack of local education programs to enhance communities’ awareness and adaptive capacity to cope with climate change. Therefore,...

Families of Australian Defence Force (ADF) members also contribute to the defence of our nation. Through maintaining family functioning at home, they enable the ADF member to focus on their operational duties confident that the family members at home are proceeding with day to day lives. Schools play an important role in supporting ADF families by...

This paper presents findings from the validation of a survey instrument constructed in response to what Indigenous parents/carers and students believe constitutes culturally responsive pedagogies that positively influence Indigenous student learning. Characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogies established through interviews with Australian...

Regional and remote communities in Tropical North Queensland (TNQ) are among Australia's most vulnerable in the face of climate change. They face sea-level rise, more intense dry spells, increasing temperatures, more extensive coral bleaching and the risk of more intense cyclones and floods. Consequently, sociologically and economically diverse sub...

This paper provides a snapshot of the current approach to ethics education in accredited Australian pre-service teacher programs. Methods included a manual calendar search of ethics related subjects required in teacher programs using a sample of 24 Australian universities and a survey of 26 university representatives. Findings show a paucity of req...

Despite a broad consensus on the ethical dimensions of the teaching profession, and long-standing efforts to align teacher education with wider trends in professional education, little is known about how teacher candidates are being prepared to face the ethical challenges of contemporary teaching. This article presents the results of an internation...

This paper presents findings of Phase 2 of a larger three phase study examining culturally responsive pedagogies and their influence on Indigenous student outcomes. Characteristics of culturally responsive pedagogies obtained through interviews with Australian Indigenous1 parents and students generated characteristics and themes which were distille...

Australia regularly suffers floods, droughts, bushfires and cyclones, which are predicted to increase and/or intensify in the future due to climate change. While school-aged children are among the most vulnerable to natural disasters, they can be empowered through education to prepare for and respond to disasters. School disaster education is essen...

Given the urban dominance of inclusion literature, it is germane to explore issues pertaining to including students with disability in the rural school. As such, this paper uses a qualitative research methodology to examine how 20 teachers experience including students with disabilities in their rural secondary classrooms. As a mother of an adult w...

Purpose – This paper aims to explore the influence of wildfire events on community perceptions of climate change and the risk of future wildfire disasters in southern Australia. Design/methodology/approach – The study was located around Beechworth in northeast Victoria, where wildfires occurred in 2003 and 2009. Semi-structured qualitative intervie...

This study presents the outcomes of the first phase of a three phase research initiative which begins by identifying through the voices of Aboriginal1 students and community members the teaching practices that influence Aboriginal student engagement and learning. The study occurs within the Diocese of Townsville Catholic Education schools in North...

This paper presents a review of the literature pertaining to the teacher actions that influence Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander student learning outcomes. This review investigates two foci: the identification of teacher actions influencing learning outcomes for Aboriginal and/or Torres Strait Islander students and the methodological approa...

Australia, a country which has regularly experienced various natural disasters, is now set to face more intense and frequent disasters in the twenty-first century as a result of climate change. Prior research indicates that in Australia, the perceived risks of climate change are mixed and becoming less prevalent across rural and urban locations, po...

Disasters and climate change impacts have cross-scale effects, disrupting functioning across multiple levels of socio-ecosystems. In a global context of increasing incidence of natural disasters there is widespread interest in understanding patterns of resilience exhibited by communities and individuals that have experienced natural disaster in ord...

Communicating risk is vital so that communities can prepare to meet approaching natural hazards. This study examined access to emergency communications and subsequent levels of preparedness in two rural Australian communities, Ingham in Queensland and Beechworth in Victoria. In 2009 these towns experienced a flood and fire disaster respectively. Fo...

Migration out of hazard-prone areas presents significant opportunities for disaster risk reduction and climate change adaptation. Alongside and intermingled with opportunistic migration there has always been relocation to escape, particularly from calamity, disaster and warfare. As climate change is considered a likely driver of migration, the lite...

Climate change science is part of the Australian National Curriculum. Understanding current perceptions of climate change among pre-service teachers and the Australian public is important for designing effective teacher training on climate change communication. This study employed a survey to examine self-reported knowledge, beliefs and attitudes t...

James Cook University) outline recent research into the inclusiveness of school emergency management plans for children with disability. • ABSTRACT Children with disabilities and special needs are among the most vulnerable when disaster strikes. Schools can play an effective role in mitigating the effects of natural disasters on students and their...

To date, there is an empirical gap in the evidence of the relations between teachers' classroom goals and values, two key variables linked to students' achievement motivation. The purpose of this study was to investigate this relationship in an Australian teacher sample. We surveyed 102 high school teachers from seven schools in Cairns, Queensland...

Climate change effects will be most acutely felt by future generations. Recent prior research has shown that school students’ knowledge of climate change science is very limited in rural Australia. The purpose of this study was to assess the capacity of preservice teachers and parents to transmit climate change information and understanding to scho...

Values can influence students' learning goals and achievement motivation. The purpose of this study was to investigate which values Australian teachers aim to communicate to their students and whether value priorities differ between teachers with different demographic background. Data was collected with a modified version of Schwartz's (1994) Portr...

indicates that preparedness is linked to an individual's financial capacity to meet the costs of an event, which raises critical issues of equity when examining preparedness for disaster. ABSTRACT The character and severity of impacts from natural disasters depends not only on the particular disaster but also on exposure and vulnerability. This stu...

Introduction: Tropical cyclone (TC) Yasi, thought to be the largest and most severe cyclone to cross the Queensland coast since 1918, made landfall on the southern tropical coast near Mission Beach and continued to track westward across Northern Queensland on February 3, 2011. The warning and response model (WRM) suggests that situational factors,...

In recent years there has been an increasing trend in education to seek answers for best pedagogical practice in cognitive neuroscience research. This paper reviews current cognitive neuroscience research findings and critically discusses what they can potentially add to educators' pedagogy. It argues that there is a need for the development of pre...

Introduction The need to manage psychological symptoms after disasters can result in an increase in the prescription of psychotropic drugs, including antidepressants and anxiolytics. Therefore, an increase in the prescription of antidepressants and anxiolytics could be an indicator of general psychological distress in the community.Purpose The purp...

The impetus for the study reported in this paper was Queensland's poor performance on 2008's NAPLAN testing, the Queensland Education Performance Review(Department of Education and Training, [DET]2009b) that followed and the subsequent adoption of pre-registration tests for aspiring Primary and Early Childhood teachers(Queensland College of Teacher...

Since the 1970s an ‘ethics boom’ has occurred to counter the disappearance of ethics education from tertiary institutions. This ‘boom’ appears to be absent from teacher education programs in Australia and the United States. Given persistent calls to enhance teacher quality this is problematic because quality teaching is inexorably linked to teach...

Low post-compulsory science enrolments for secondary students have been a growing concern across the Western world. Research has examined factors relating to science curricula and students’ attitudes about science, but parental views of science education remain largely unexplored in Australia. Because parents have a strong role in shaping their chi...

A sample of 1,050 regional Australian secondary students participated in a study investigating the relationship between mobility and academic achievement. Measures of mobility, academic achievement, suspensions, coping strategies, parental education, and family structure were used to test the hypothesis that academic coping strategies interact with...

Human systems have to adapt to climate change and the natural disasters predicted to increase in frequency as a result. These disasters have both direct and indirect health effects. Certain groups, the poor, the elderly, children and those with disabilities are set to be more seriously impacted by disasters because of their greater inherent vulnera...

Regional and remote communities in tropical Queensland are among Australia’s most vulnerable in the face of climate change. At the same time, these socially and economically vulnerable regions house some of Australia’s most significant biodiversity values. Past approaches to terrestrial biodiversity management have focused on tackling biophysical i...

Settlements and communities in tropical Queensland are highly vulnerable to climate change and face an uncertain social, economic and environmental future. At the same time, these socially and economically vulnerable communities contain some of Australia’s most significant biodiversity values, including existing and proposed World Heritage sites (W...

Human systems have to adapt to climate change and the natural disasters predicted to increase in frequency as a result. These disasters have both direct and indirect health effects. Certain groups, the poor, the elderly, children and those with disabilities are set to be more seriously impacted by disasters because of their greater inherent vulnera...

In the context of recently published academic discrepancies between Queensland students and students from other Australian states, final year pre-service teachers were surveyed to explore their understanding and knowledge of climate change. Their responses were compared to those of secondary students to discern any significant gains in knowledge as...

Low post-compulsory science enrolments for secondary students have been a growing concern across the Western world; curriculum reforms to increase scientific literacy levels for civic scientific literacy or informed citizenship and to enhance science participation at secondary level are making little difference. Much research has examined factors r...

Regional Australian students were surveyed to explore their understanding and knowledge of the greenhouse effect, ozone depletion and climate change. Results were compared with a parallel study undertaken in 1991 in a regional UK city. The comparison was conducted to investigate whether more awareness and understanding of these issues is demonstrat...

Since the 1970s the utility and efficacy of medical ethics curricula in undergraduate programs have received heightened world-wide attention. During this time, an "ethics boom" occurred designed to counter the disappearance of ethics education and the marginalization of moral education from higher education. This "boom", witnessed in most professio...

Dropping out of school has been associated with a student’s ethnicity, socioeconomic status, challenging behaviours and low academic achievement. This paper describes research conducted with 1050 students aged 12–15, in three North Queensland urban high schools to investigate issues related to Indigenous and non-Indigenous students at risk of dropp...

The role of parenting variables, including strictness/supervision and warmth and involvement, were examined in relation to school achievement and cognitive and behavioural characteristics among an urban sample of 112 Indigenous Australian adolescents. Structural equation modelling procedures tested the predictive role of parenting variables for mas...

The achievement goals and parenting of a sample of 879 grade 8 – 10 Australian students were examined to distinguish differences between low- and high-achieving students. Structural equation modelling was used to test a theoretical model linking parental warmth and strictness/supervision via mastery goals, self-efficacy, and self-handicapping to ac...

This short report describes the care of an extensive wound in a terminally ill patient and specifically draws attention to the role of the Oasis Fluidized Bead Bed (Figure 1) (Huntleigh Healthcare) in promoting the healing process and patient comfort.

School mobility is widely held to be disruptive to students' education either directly, by disrupting curriculum continuity or indirectly through social stress and engagement issues affecting the student. Paradoxically, mobility has not been consistently linked to poorer academic outcomes; where mobility was linked with lower academic achievement,...