ILSTE is a Finalist in the AFR 2020 Higher Education Awards (Education Technology), for using innovative technology in research on improving the quality and impact of teacher education.
The Australian Catholic University is leading a major National Research and Development (R&D) initiative to enable digital innovation at scale in teacher education. The initiative sees the design and building of systems and processes necessary to show the profession readiness of teaching graduates for the nation's classrooms (Foundation to Year 12). The built system is named, 'Evidence for Quality in Initial Teacher Education' (EQuITE), which is implemented in the Graduate Teacher Performance Assessment (GTPA) to compile, store, and analyse data on cohorts of individual pre-service teachers from multiple participating higher education institutes in the GTPA. EQuITE uses data from over 15,000 pre-service teachers and is supported by the collaborative engagement within the GTPA Collective of 15 higher education institutes across Australia.
In bringing together a large-scale national network of partners including sector authorities and levels of government from across Australia, the GTPA and EQuITE initiatives mark a ground-breaking achievement in collaboration to produce real-world outcomes without precedent. The societal benefit of this achievement is paramount, already impacting on the learning of classroom students through the preparation of emerging teachers shown to have the skills to apply their knowledge to impact student learning.
The GTPA research team comprises Professor Claire Wyatt-Smith, Professor Michele Haynes, Associate Professor Lenore Adie, Dr Andrew Smith, Dr Melanie Spallek, Dr Chantelle Day and Mr Alex Chen, all based in ILSTE at Brisbane.
Developed with an education-futures mindset, EQuITE and the GTPA enables the annual online intake and analyses of data essential to build public confidence in the quality of graduates entering the profession.
