OUR WORK | Q Educational Development

Project: Exploring Values to Inform Subject Design and Teaching

Values in Advocacy for Health Professional Students

This project focused on advocacy within the health profession. To be an advocate, health professional graduates need professional knowledge, skills and attributes underpinning patient centred care (PCC) and the advancement of quality healthcare systems. They also need be able to work collaboratively with stakeholders and in multidisciplinary and interprofessional teams. As collaborative practice is rarely embedded in the curriculum, we wanted to better conceptualise foundational values to design a new innovative collaborative practice advocacy program. Q methodology enabled us to identify the perspectives held by educators across three healthcare disciplines involved with the design. From an interdisciplinary perspective, the methodology offered a way to see the similarities, and where there may be differences, across these three disciplines, thus, allowing the educators an opportunity to reflect, evaluate on the normative claims and their own standpoints. The project successfully helped align the values that underpin the Graduate Attributes and the Collaborative Practice Ready Curriculum.

Project: Exposing the Hidden Curriculum to Inform Teaching and Learning

Exposing the Hidden Curriculum in Clinical Settings

Outside educational institutions, the clinical workplace environment is where future health professional receive much of their learning. Whilst formal curriculum documents guide teaching and learning, the informal curriculum - the hidden curriculum - influences health professionals’ workplace learning and experience but remains largely unexamined. The Q sorting activity provided a unique opportunity for a range of clinical teachers to consider how they, as individuals, decide the knowledge, professional values, and behaviours to include or exclude when planning to teach. Our findings highlighted that when clinical teachers are planning for learning, the hidden curriculum is often overlooked as part of their planning process. With this new awareness, clinical teachers were better able to make decisions about the institutional cultural norms they would continue or discontinue to reinforce or model. As unintended learning happens when the hidden curriculum is not overtly planned for or understood, the clinical teachers found the Q sorting activity was an extremely useful tool to highlight aspects of the hidden curriculum that could otherwise be overlooked.

Project: Investigating the affective domain to inform teaching and enhance learning

Explicitly Focusing on the Affective Domain to Enhance Learning and Teaching

In primary, secondary or tertiary education, subject learning outcomes encapsulate the knowledge, skills, and understandings that students are required to attain or achieve to successfully complete or pass a subject. Traditional assessment methods focus on the cognitive domain, predominantly on what students know and can do after achieving the learning outcomes outlined in the subject. Our project, in contrast, looked at the affective domain, exploring implicitly stated attitudes, values, and interpersonal skills embedded in the learning outcomes. By utilising Q methodology, we were able to interrogate students' subjective belief patterns and values hierarchies held toward the subject. We engaged with early years, primary, secondary and tertiary students to provide teachers (and to be shared with learners) an interpretation of the data gathered. Tapping into the affective domain gave more credence to students’ emotions, trust and more specifically their evolving beliefs, it revealed insights in how students respond emotionally and how they value and internalise information, providing insights in how students engage in deeper, emotional aspects of belief formation. By paying attention to the affective domain teachers were given access to students' underlying assumptions, values and feeling about the selected subject. From this teachers were able to prepare and plan for explicit instructional approaches and strategies to emphasise or address the affective domain and to foster student's personal growth.

Project: School principals' viewpoints for curriculum planning

Investigating school principals' viewpoints on languages education

Q methodology was applied to delve into the perspectives of 16 Victorian principals from schools where Italian is, or was, taught. This was part of a larger, broader study that included primary schools from other states, as well as teachers and parents. Since 1983, languages have been a key part of the curriculum, and while the legislative requirement for a languages program is clear, the implementation has been wonderfully varied. As the educational landscape has shifted, Q methodology was applied to identify the viewpoints of key stakeholders and their significance in how programs are or could be implemented to be able to provide students with quality languages education. The research found that one group of principals strongly believed that learning a language offers inherent linguistic, cognitive, and cultural benefits. They saw language education as an essential part of the primary curriculum and believed that a quality program, led by qualified, linguistically proficient teachers, is crucial for all students. The second group of principals also valued languages education, but they focused on different key elements for a successful program. They saw whole-school support, qualified teachers, the use of the target language, and consistent time on task as critical. For this group, the choice of language—whether Asian or European—was not a priority. As Victorian schools move from less rigorous language awareness to more integrated and subject-specific programs, these understandings were vital for curriculum planning to provide students with high-quality language education that truly prepares them for the future.

The tabs above provide information on some of our recent projects. Click through to learn more.

Exploring Values to Inform Subject Design and Teaching

Exposing the Hidden Curriculum to Inform Teaching and Learning

Investigating the affective domain to inform teaching and enhance learning

School principals' viewpoints for curriculum planning

Sophie's Testimonial

(Year 9 & 10 STEM teacher)

Renata and Jayne's initial meeting was incredibly informative and made me feel confident about the Q educational development project. The instructions were clear, and their modelling of the process made me aware of exactly what was required. I chose a STEM subject because it's an area where I'm actively looking to improve my teaching. The data provided by the Q sort activity has been invaluable. It has given me insight into how my students want to learn, what they value, and what motivates them.

The project has already changed my teaching approach. While I haven't altered my lesson plans yet, I've changed my language to better connect with my students. For example, if I know they're interested in future careers, I'll make those links clearer in my lessons. I've also identified students who are struggling and now understand the importance they place on collaboration. I now let students choose one trusted friend to be in their group before I place them with others, which has made a noticeable difference in their engagement and classroom management. They feel more comfortable, and it's led to a more cohesive and productive learning environment. The Q sort was an excellent pre-assessment tool to collect this kind of valuable data at the beginning of the term.

I felt confident in implementing the Q sort. I believe a good pre-assessment tool is the best way to collect valuable student data at the beginning of a term. Some students, particularly those with language barriers, struggled with the number of statements and the vocabulary used, but they were engaged and tried their best. I would suggest a dummy run and spreading the activity over two lessons to help students who get overwhelmed. I've also found that it's important to be flexible with students finishing at different times, as the process itself reveals a lot about their learning styles and abilities. Now that I have completed the Q sort once, I would definitely like to have more input into the creation of the statements next time. The Q sort is an excellent tool for understanding your students and an asset in teaching and classroom management.