Kylie Sturgess

At the time of writing, the global pandemic COVID-19 is an ongoing world health crisis. One of the many ramifications of the pandemic is the impact on universities and colleges worldwide (Leung et al. 2020; UNESCO 2020; WHO Regional Office for Europe 2020). The disruption to classes that would usually involve face-to-face learning, the discontinuation of exchange programmes, and the spread of the virus, in general, has led to alternative methods of education using distance or online learning…

With the advent of podcasting, broadcast reach has extended to wherever an audio file can be downloaded, saved, or streamed. In educational settings, podcasts have emerged to supplant and compliment lectures, lessons, and instructional texts. This is particularly evident in the shift to online learning during COVID-19 (Wake, Strong and Fox, 2020). However, despite the popularity of well-crafted sonic digital narratives, little investigation and theorising has been undertaken into approaches to podcasting, as part of blended learning and how they combine to contextualise the creation of educational podcasts. This thesis first proposes and then tests a production model for constructing creative narrative audio works for an educational purpose. Secondly, can the model be applied to guide the composition of entertaining and educational narrative podcasts?

There has been discussion of audio codes and their contribution to audio narrative works by numerous academics (McHugh, 2022; Huwiler, 2016; Mildorf and Kinzel, 2016; Shingler and Wieringa, 1998). However, no pre-existing model draws together these codes to guide the production of educational podcasts. This thesis contains a model created by consolidating techniques and conventions such as soundscape, speech, and silence to guide the creation of educational narrative podcasts.

This exegesis explores the creation and the application of the edutaining podcast learning model to create a four-part supplemental educational online podcast radio series for undergraduate university students studying radio production. The series was made for the students of a first-year introductory radio unit at Murdoch University, in 2020. The podcasts include the contributions of four actors and numerous audio samples, including sound and special effects. The exegesis concludes with an analysis of the data collected from surveys taken of the students attending the unit classes, and how that feedback discerns what assisted them with their learning. It concludes with an in-depth discussion about potential areas of interest for upcoming educators and podcast-makers.

Vision Australia Radio (VAR) is part of the Australian Radio for the Print Handicapped (RPH) community radio network providing a radio reading service to listeners with a vision impairment. Like mainstream media, it faces the challenge of ensuring the service is fit for purpose in the digital age. There is little preexisting research on the behaviour and interests of the vision-impaired as a discrete audience demographic. This paper reports on a survey of listeners to VAR in Perth, Western Australia, which gives an insight into their current listening habits and identifies some of the challenges in meeting their future needs.

Wiseman and Watt’s short scales of positive and negative superstitions have attracted attention in the literature. Using a representative survey of the Australian state of Queensland, the six scale items were applied to 1243 respondents. Initial investigation using Cronbach’s alpha showed that one of the scales did not function properly. A factor analysis suggested that a four-item and a two-item scale best fitted the data. A Rasch analysis of all the items confirmed this, and showed that the conventional five-category response format was not appropriate, and that three categories fit the data better. The main conclusion is that the results do not support the Wiseman–Watt theory of three positive and three negative superstitions. It does not seem advisable to use these scales without substantial reformulation and re-testing.

This paper reports on the development of theoretical frameworks to inform a quantitative investigation of secondary school student engagement in classroom learning. A process of inductive analysis was applied to theoretical and empirical literature on student engagement and participation. Material were condensed and summarised leading to the proposal of frameworks with content considered important by the researcher for epistemological and methodological reasons.

The paper commences by examining some of the conceptions of student engagement and participation found in the literature on these topics. Next, Bio-ecological models of intellectual development and engagement were examined and adapted to explain student engagement. A twelve element Bio-ecological view of student engagement is proposed. The key attributes of Flow Theory and how this can be applied in a two dimensional conceptualisation of student engagement are then explored. The two dimensions are student capability for learning and expectations of student learning for understanding. A series of propositions and expositions are advanced to provide starting point for operationally defining these constructs. Student capability for learning was defined in terms of student attributes associated with learning theory constructs - self-esteem, self-concept, resilience, self-regulation, and self-efficacy. The framework of expectations of learning for understanding was based on the six facets of understanding developed by Wiggins and Mctighe (2001) - this provided operational definitions for the sub-constructs comprising this construct.

The paper then presents some of the requirements for objective measurement and how these necessitate the presence of particular features in the theoretical frames that will inform instrument development. Finally, the theory underpinning the conceptualisation of student engagement in classroom learning is re-examined in terms of these requirements.