Penny Van Bergen

Macquarie University · School of Education

The widespread move to online schooling during the COVID-19 crisis meant that parents played a significant role in educating their children. However, there is a paucity of research relating to parents’ perceptions of online and remote learning designs. This study used multiple regression analyses and thematic analysis of parent survey responses dur...

Introduction Internationally, research has shown Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual, Transgender/gender diverse, and Queer (LGBTQ+) people experience multifaceted challenges within school contexts. However, there is only a small emergent body of research on how LGBTQ+ community members might also experience positive, joyful, or euphoric experiences in these sa...

In this exploratory descriptive study, changes in one cohort’s responses to an authentic statistical investigation at the commencement of years 3 and 4 were analysed. Forty-four students made predictions by interpreting a data table of historical monthly temperatures, represented these data and explained their reasoning. An Awareness of Mathematica...

IntroductionAdolescents frequently use informal support seeking to cope with stress and worries. Past research in face-to-face contexts has shown that the relationship between informal support seeking and mental health is influenced by the specific strategy used and the mode through which support is sought. To date, little research has considered t...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) parents’ rights were openly debated around marriage legislation movements. Religious schools can deny their families services. This chapter investigates 208 LGBTQ+ parents’ euphorias in their children’s schools. Under a third of them were euphoric and mostly always or often; gay or lesbian par...

Affirming affective framings of lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender and queer (LGBTQ+) experiences are needed in education research. Drawing on the 2021 LGBTQ+ You surveys, this chapter explores experiences of euphoria in Australian education institutions among 2407 LGBTQ+ staff, parents, and students participants and how these changed over time. S...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) students were a point of policy contention in recent elections and often portrayed as victims. This chapter investigates 1968 LGBTQ+ students experiences of euphoria. Of over a third who had euphoric experiences, most students experienced euphorias sometimes or often. Young, out, and non-binar...

Lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, and queer (LGBTQ+) education professionals have been portrayed negatively in education research literature and can be fired in religious institutions. This chapter investigates 229 LGBTQ+ professionals’ euphorias in their employing education institutions. Almost half of LGBTQ+ staff were euphoric about their ide...

Teachers face a range of exhausting job demands which contribute to burnout. These demands may be particularly acute during the COVID-19 pandemic, with lockdowns forcing rapid shifts to remote teaching. Yet during times of stress and upheaval, personal resources such as teaching self-efficacy and emotion regulation may protect teachers against burn...

Objective This study explored how seeking support from friends and parents and informal digital sources are related to anxiety and depression in adolescent girls. Method Early and middle adolescent girls (N = 186) were presented with four vignettes of academic stressors; for each scenario, they rated their likelihood of seeking support from parent...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as “remembered” or “imagined”—as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the mnemicity of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribution sho...

Episodic representations can be entertained either as ‘remembered’ or as ‘imagined’ – as outcomes of experience or as simulations of such experience. Here, we argue that this feature is the product of a dedicated cognitive function: the metacognitive capacity to determine the ‘mnemicity’ of mental event simulations. We argue that mnemicity attribut...

Introduction: Researchers note a consistent decline in adolescents' motivation and participation in science. It is important to examine factors vital to students' motivation in science, such as teacher-student relationships (TSRs). Limited research in science has examined TSRs from a multidimensional or person-centered perspective. The present inv...

The COVID-19 pandemic has caused significant upheaval in schools in Australia and internationally. The aim of this study was to map Australian teachers’ positive and negative experiences during remote and online learning. Our study took place during the first COVID-19 wave, in the early stages of lockdown. Using an online instrument, we asked 210 p...

Objective To determine the effects of learning interventions aimed at optimizing the quality of physical education (PE) on psychomotor, cognitive, affective and social learning outcomes in children and adolescents. Design A systematic review and meta-analysis. Data Sources After searching PsycInfo, ERIC, and SportDiscus electronic databases, we i...

In everyday life, we remember together often. Surprisingly, research reliably shows costs of collaboration. People remember less in groups than the same number of individuals remember separately. However, there is evidence that some groups are more successful than others, depending on factors such as group relationship and verbal communication stra...

Memories of the past are critically important as we age. For older adults receiving formal care in a range of settings, reminiscing with care staff may provide frequent opportunities for recalling autobiographical memories with a supportive conversational partner. Importantly, prior research suggests that some reminiscing conversations are more sup...

School liking is an important factor in student engagement, well-being, and academic achievement, but it is also potentially influenced by factors external to the individual, such as school culture, teacher support, and approaches to discipline. The present study employed a survey methodology to investigate the associations between school liking an...

Positive psychosocial adjustment is considered critical to adaptive student development and academic growth. Theories of positive youth development argue that psychosocial adjustment is a form of thriving and can be understood via multiple academic indicators, including achievement. To better understand the factors that support students’ psychosoci...

This study adopted a sociocultural framework to investigate how educators interacted with young children in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants included 85 educator–child dyads from seven early childhood centers in Sydney, Australia. Younger children (n = 40) were 27–36 months and older children (n = 45) were 48–60 months. Each...

When children reminisce with adults about their own past experiences, they are offered a rich forum in which to develop cognitive and socioemotional skills, build their sense of self, and form emotional bonds. Little attention has been directed to reminiscing in educational contexts, however. Our aim was to explore when, how often, and why early ch...

We investigated how educators, mothers and children used temporal language in reminiscing and future talk conversations. Participants initially included 40 educator-younger child dyads (27–36 months) and 45 educator-older child dyads (48–60 months) from early childhood centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were asked to nominate and discuss four...

Research with children and adults suggests verbal references to negative emotion support narrative recall. To date, however, the effects of gesture on emotion recall have been ignored. Children (4‐6 years) and adults viewed videos containing negatively valenced, positively valenced, and emotionally neutral stories. The narrator provided gestures re...

This study investigated the characteristics of educators’ talk about decontextualised events with young children in seven early childhood long day care centres in Sydney, Australia. Educators were partnered with up to six children aged between 27 and 60 months. Across two time points, 85 educator–child dyads discussed past and future events. Educat...

The term neuromyths refers to misconceptions about learning and the brain. Educator neuromyths may result in inappropriate instruction, labelling of learners, and wasted resources. To date, little research has considered the sources of these beliefs. We surveyed 1359 Australian preservice educators (M = 22.7, SD = 5.7 years) about their sources of...

While numerous studies have highlighted the benefits of physical activity on cognitive health, learning, and executive function, maintaining physical activity throughout one’s life lies with the acquisition of physical literacy. This article examines how the process of cognitive learning attributed to physical literacy can be understood in light of...

While digital communication is almost universal amongst adolescents, we do not yet know why adolescent girls seek support electronically or how they perceive this support. The prevalence of adolescent girls' informal digital support seeking was determined by a self-report questionnaire with 186 early and middle adolescent girls (Mage = 13.64 years)...

A rich body of research using teacher report has shown that students with disruptive behavior are at heightened risk of experiencing negative student–teacher relationships over time. However, no research has compared how students with and without disruptive behavior remember their own past relationships. We conducted autobiographical memory intervi...

This paper describes elementary students’ awareness and representation of the aggregate properties and variability of data sets when engaged in predictive reasoning. In a design study, 46 third-graders interpreted a table of historical temperature data to predict and represent future monthly maximum temperatures. The task enabled students to interp...

Undergraduate research engagement is critically important across disciplines. In education, however, pre-service teachers often report disengaging from research activities. To address this problem, we drew on the affordances of online learning: building and implementing a self-paced online program of multimodal resources called ResearchEd. We evalu...

Research findings No research to date has compared mental state language (MSL) in conversations between children and different adult talk partners, such as mothers and educators. The aim of this study was to investigate the use of MSL (verbalization of mental states such as remembering, knowing and thinking) by children, educators, and mothers duri...

This study examines children's reminiscing with different members of their family. Sociocultural research shows how mothers and fathers each scaffold children's memory narratives, yet it is not clear how children reminisce with siblings. We therefore captured multiple dyadic conversations from twelve young families including mother, father, and two...

Sociocultural developmental psychology can drive new directions in gadgetry science. We use autobiographical memory, a compound capacity incorporating episodic memory, as a case study. Autobiographical memory emerges late in development, supported by interactions with parents. Intervention research highlights the causal influence of these interacti...

In this article, four researchers from Australia and South Africa consider why it is important for primary schools to include both male and female teachers. The authors refute previous calls directed by public and political discourse, for male teachers to enhance boy’s educational outcomes or to act as role models or father figures. Instead, the au...

Disruptive student behaviour is a major concern for teachers, causing classroom conflict and emotional fatigue. Whilst student-teacher closeness is known to reduce student aggression and improve behaviour, it is not yet known why some teachers experience close relationships with disruptive students and others do not. This qualitative study therefor...

In this chapter, the notion of health literacy is explored in the context of adolescents learning about health. Up until fairly recently, the concept of health literacy has been driven mainly by health care models and has specifically targeted adult populations. This chapter uses the case studies (Chapters 2–7) provided to explore an alternative wa...

Research suggests that children with behavioural difficulties exhibit “positive illusory bias” (PIB), in which they overestimate their competencies leading to a perception of self that is more positive than the perceptions held by their peers, parents or teachers. However, research to date has focused on children of elementary school age and none h...

Prospective memory (PM) performance suffers when individuals collaborate, consistent with findings of “collaborative inhibition” in episodic recall. However, prior research indicates strong individual differences, such that some collaborative groups are more effective than others. To identify successful and unsuccessful collaborative processes, we...

While constructivism enjoys considerable popularity in higher education, both in Australia and internationally, it nonetheless takes a variety of forms. These different interpretations make it difficult to draw strong conclusions about constructivism as a whole. In this essay, we therefore take a psycho-philosophical approach: reviewing and assessi...

Spatial communication tasks, such as following route directions through unfamiliar environments, place considerable demands on multiple cognitive processes, including language comprehension and memory. Gestures accompanying spoken route directions may aide task performance by enhancing cognitive processes such as language and memory processing. It...

This study compared the effects of mother-child reminiscing coaching on mothers of typically developing children (community sample) and mothers of children with conduct problems (clinical sample). It also tested whether intervention effects generalize to mothers' preferences for elaborative and mental-state oriented talk with their children in othe...

This position paper proposes that a relationship between young children's embodied mathematical concepts and their awareness of mathematical pattern and structure (AMPS) (Mulligan & Mitchelmore, 2009) develops through play. Theoretical perspectives on the development of schematic patterns, the embodiment of mathematical understandings, and the deve...

To perform prospective memory (PM) tasks in day-to-day life, we often enlist the help of others. Yet the effects of collaboration on PM are largely unknown. Adopting the methodology of the “collaborative recall paradigm”, we tested whether stranger dyads (Experiment 1) and intimate couples (Experiment 2) would perform better on a “Virtual Week” tas...

We remember in social contexts. We reminisce about the past together, collaborate to remember shared experiences, and, even when we are alone, we remember in the context of our communities and cultures. Taking an interdisciplinary approach throughout, this text comprehensively covers collaborative remembering across the fields of developmental psyc...

This chapter follows the progress of nine high-ability Year 1 Australian students as they develop reasoning skills through data exploration and analysis. The students used self-portraits drawn by child artists in Kindergarten and Year 3 to develop a rule-based classification model. Students tested their model on larger sets of self-portraits and de...

Much information in our lives is remembered in a social context, as we often reminisce about shared experiences with others, and more generally remember in the social context of our communities and our cultures. Memory researchers across disciplines and subdisciplines are actively exploring collaborative remembering. However, despite this common in...

Elementary teachers' emotional expressions when speaking about disruptive students provide a previously unexamined source of classroom influence. The present study therefore examined how 47 elementary teachers spoke about their relationships with disruptive (n = 23) and well behaved (n = 28) students. Speech samples from classroom and support teach...

Whilst an international shortage of male teachers has received much research attention, to date, no study has tracked the trajectory of male teachers in any country. Drawing on annual workplace data, we calculated the proportion of male teachers in Australia from 1965 to 2016. We separate the data for Government and non-Government (Independent and...

Male teachers may face extinction in Australian primary schools by the year 2067 unless urgent policy action is taken. In government schools, the year is 2054. This finding comes from our analysis of more than 50 years of national annual workplace data – the first of its kind in any country.

Building on work examining teachers’ perceptions of the student-teacher relationship, this study investigated how young students draw themselves with their teachers. Fourteen kindergarten and first-grade teachers each nominated 2 disruptive and 2 well-behaved students. Students then completed 1 drawing of themselves with their classroom teacher and...

Peer collaboration has become a popular instructional strategy in schools. The assumption is that “two heads are better than one”: that students will learn more together than apart. Surprisingly, however, psychological research with adults suggests that collaboration may disadvantage memory. The goal of this study was to compare children’s memory p...

Students with disruptive behaviour in the Australian state of New South Wales (NSW) are increasingly being educated in separate ‘behaviour’ schools. There is however surprisingly little research on how students view these settings, or indeed the mainstream schools from which they were excluded. To better understand excluded students’ current and pa...

This study reports on findings from a research project that investigated the extent to which pre-service teachers at a major metropolitan Australian university engage with research, and the factors that influence their level of engagement or disengagement. Results from survey responses (n = 235) and focus group interviews suggest that attitudes tow...

This paper contributes to conversations about school, post-compulsory and further education policy by reporting findings from a three-year study with disaffected students who have been referred to special ‘behaviour’ schools. Contrary to popular opinion, our research finds that these ‘ignorant yobs’ do value education and know what it is for. They...

The number of students in special schools has increased at a rapid rate in some Australian states, due in part to increased enrolment under the categories of emotional disturbance (ED) and behaviour disorder (BD). Nonetheless, diagnostic distinctions between ED and BD are unclear. Moreover, despite international findings that students with particul...

Despite the important theoretical and applied implications, there is limited experimental research investigating the influence of emotional valence on young children's verbal recall of everyday emotional experiences. This issue was addressed in the current study. Specifically, we investigated young children's (5- to 6 years) recall of emotional exp...

This study explored why and how Indigenous and non-Indigenous Australians remember the past. Indigenous Australians traditionally share a strong oral tradition in which customs, personal and cultural histories, and other narratives are passed across groups and between generations by word of mouth. Drawing on this tradition, in which inherent value...

The aim of the current study was to investigate the characteristics of effective podcasting in an educational psychology class. Given the practical context in which the investigation was embedded, an action research approach was used. In Cycle One, a How To procedural lecture was recast as a series of 37-min podcasts. Students surveys demonstrated...

800x600 The editorial board announced that this article has been retracted on February 21, 2014. If you have any further question, please contact us at: wje@sciedu.ca Normal 0 false false false EN-AU X-NONE X-NONE MicrosoftInternetExplorer4

The use of "highly elaborative" reminiscing by mothers, involving open-ended questions and more detail about past events has been shown to produce children with greater accuracy and detail in their autobiographical memory recall of past events. This paradigm has not been extended to semantic learning, or to an adult population before. Thus, the pre...

Geography Information System (GIS) have not yet been introduced to secondary school geography in Malaysia with reason of ability, lack of ground facilities and ICT. The purpose of this study is to determine the potential for GIS to be implemented into the teaching of geography in secondary Smart schools in Sabah, an area which is well known for hav...

The overrepresentation of students from minority ethnic groups in separate special education settings has been extensively documented in North America, yet little research exists for Australian school systems. The authors of this study systematically analyzed 13 years of enrollment data from the state of New South Wales and found stark, increasing...

The overrepresentation of students from minority ethnic groups in separate special education settings has been extensively documented in North America, yet little research exists for Australian school systems. The authors of this study systematically analyzed 13 years of enrollment data from the state of New South Wales and found stark, increasing...

An experimental paradigm examined the impact of elaborative, emotion- and non-emotion-focused reminiscing on 83 younger (3–4 years) and older (5–6 years) children's memory for a staged “visit to the zoo” event. Two days after participating in the narrated event, children were engaged in one of four types of reminiscing: emotion-cause (causes of the...

This article examines the increase in segregated placements in the New South Wales government school sector. Using disaggregated enrolment data, it points to the growing overrepresentation of boys in special schools and classes, particularly those of a certain age in certain support categories. In the discussion that follows, the authors question t...

The way that parents discuss the past with their preschool children plays a signifcant role in the development of children's store of personal memories, that is, their autobiographical memory. In this study we investigated two questions: frst, whether parents who engage their children in high-relative to low-elaborative conversations about the past...

The preschool years are a critical period for children's cognitive and socio-emotional development. Not only do many skills developed during the preschool years positively predict current and future academic, social, and emotional competence (Denham et al., 2003; Eisenberg, Smith, Sadovsky & Spinrad., 2004; Whitehurst & Lonigan, 1998); any disrupti...

The present study examined the impact of training mothers in high-elaborative, emotional reminiscing on children's autobiographical memory and emotion knowledge. Eighty mothers were randomly allocated to one of two training conditions: in the reminiscing condition, mothers were encouraged to reminisce by asking their children (aged 3.5 to 5 years)...

The paper reports on a funded project focussed on disciplinarity and technology in the New Life Sciences (NLS) where the understanding of the discipline is mediated through a number of technologies. These disciplinary and technological innovations have implications for learning particularly in the meta-discipline; the New Life Sciences, where much...

The preschool years are a critical period for all aspects of child development, and any disruption to cognitive or socio-emotional functioning at this stage has potential repercussions for current and future functioning. There is, therefore, a need for clinical interventions that optimize the functioning of children at risk of psychological disorde...