Editorial.

At a time when Commonwealth government funding of-the university sector has left academic departments understaffed and under-resourced, one of the first casualties is likely to be good research.

Concern back in 2004 about the Commonwealth government's apparent interest in 'teaching--only' universities led the then Minister for Education, Science and Training, Brendan Nelson, to refine the message behind the government's 'Our Universities: Backing Australia's Future' policy. The assurance then was that there was no intention to require any Australian university to become 'teaching-only,' yet the government's view in 2004 remained that universities tend to value research performance over teaching performance--and that something had to be done to promote the value of good teaching.

The assumption hidden in this proposition is that, in higher education, research performance and teaching performance are somehow unrelated things. They're not. Good research performance feeds good teaching performance. Whichever faculty you look at, those who are not researchers find it hard to be adequate teachers. That's not to say that if you're a good researcher you automatically make a good teacher, but that in higher education research is a necessary starting point if you're going to educate and inspire students.

Research is what the Australian Journal of Education is all about. It's what all academic publishing is about, and--hopefully--what distinguishes it from everexpanding sources of information available through open-source sites like Wikipedia.

According to Jimmy Wales, Wikipedia's co-founder, speaking at Wikimania, the annual meeting for Wikipedia contributors, held last year at Harvard University in August, the growing number of articles on Wikipedia is now cause for concern. 'We should continue to turn our attention away from growth and towards quality,' he said. The issue for sites like Wikipedia when it comes to quality, however, is really only about how and how well they are able to fact-check contributions that, deliberately or inadvertently, may be false. 'Quality' on open-source sites refers to the accuracy of information, not the quality of research. From time to time, researchers worry that the growth of open-source sites may mean the death of peer-reviewed academic journals, yet the Fact is that it's precisely through the mechanics of peer-review, which drive journals like the AJE, that research can be guaranteed. Look for studies that contribute new knowledge based on robust and empirically-supported research and chances are you're looking at an article in a peer-reviewed journal.

Stood separately, research articles published in journals like the AJE are no match for Wikipedia, despite the distinction between 'information' and 'research.' That's why this journal is available bundled in online form through various online publishers. It's also why it's listed on the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), maintained by Thomson Scientific through the ISI Web of Knowledge.

The power of SSCI is that it provides researchers with access to current and retrospective bibliographic information and, more importantly, cited references for more than 1,700 of the world's leading scholarly social sciences journals in more than fifty disciplines. It means researchers can search cited references in the AJE to track the literature forward, backward, and through the SSCI database, and cross disciplinary boundaries, enabling a multidisciplinary approach to literature searches.

As part of the SSCI, essentially, the AJE both stands alone and together with 1,700 other leading scholarly social sciences journals. We believe that's good reason to expect journals like this one to continue to publish research that contributes new knowledge, and thereby support research, including research undertaken in Australian universities, as published in this issue.

Jennifer Stephenson, Mark Carter and Kevin Wheldall report on their study, drawing on information from the websites of Australian schools, of the rationales and the uncritical acceptance and use of Perceptual Motor Programs (PMPs). As they put it, many interventions in education inhabit the 'murky borderlands' between unproven and disproved, and PMPs should be placed firmly at the unproven end of this continuum.

Can a standards-referenced model of assessment be applied nationally for Year Twelve Vocational Education and Training subjects to yield both a differentiating score and recognition of competence? Patrick Griffin, Shelley Gillis and Leanne Calvitto say it can. They report on their field-testing of such a model of assessment in more than fifty colleges in all states and territories of Australia over one school year. Their findings are that a standards-referenced model is compatible with the different senior secondary assessment systems that operate in Australian states and territories, and that there are considerable cost benefits in using such a model.

Lyndon Megarrity traces the evolution of Commonwealth government policies on private overseas students from the 1970s to the present to show that while 'market forces' rhetoric has appeared in Commonwealth government international education policies since the 1980s, in practice the Connnonwealth government has taken an interventionist approach to the provision of international education services.

Loretta de Plevitz digs beneath explanations for the poor educational experiences and results of Australian Indigenous school students by analysing legislation prohibiting indirect racial discrimination as well as case law to show how apparently benign and race-neutral policies and practices may have an adverse impact on Indigenous students' education.

Andrew Hassam, meanwhile, turns the research focus from students to educators, examining the conflicting identities inhabited by teachers of international students, as well as the conflicting loyalties they experience when they find themselves 'speaking on behalf of the nation.'

Does the knowledge culture of a discipline influence the ways in which generic skills are conceived? Anna Jones answers that question by examining the ways in which one generic skill, critical thinking, is understood by academic staff in two related but distinct disciplines, history and economics. Her finding--that while there are some similarities, critical thinking in economics is defined primarily as the use of economic tools whereas in history it is described from a range of perspectives--has implications for the ways in which generic skills are framed within the broader university community. That finding has some interesting implications for policy both at a university and political level at a time when some universities are committing to a general-degree model offering a three-year undergraduate degree, followed by a two-year professional degree.

We wish AJE readers good reading.

John Ainley

Steve Holden

Australian Council for Educational Research