Our research
The Pedagogical Laboratory for Education is an Australian first research group that is a central hub for the collection, analysis and dissemination of best practices research in the area of teaching and learning.
In physical education the main goal is to teach people so they become a lifelong mover, that's a hard thing to assess, but in 20 years hopefully we will see the number of people engaging in a variety of physical activities increase.
My name is Dana Pearlman, I'm a senior lecturer, co-director of the Pedagogical Laboratory for Education.
Pedagogical Laboratory for Education, it's a place where we wanted to have people be able to collect and analyse data based on a variety of teaching and learning settings. Those settings can involve school-based settings, they can involve nursing settings, anywhere where education takes place.
It's both a physical lab but it's also a virtual lab, which has the ability to go to remote settings and that's kind of one of the unique aspects of it and most of what we do is actually away from the laboratory so what it has really is a mobile setting
Since the Pedagogical Laboratory for Education is interdisciplinary, we really looked at education holistically and as it applies to across a variety of contexts and settings, so we have individuals from nursing, we have individuals who work in university in higher education, we have individuals who are looking at research in the area of K-12 schools
Some of the big issues in terms of education are the experiences that students are going into. These experiences are conceptually aligned with standards or accreditation, and sometimes the variability in learning and achievements don't always match what the standards say, if we have an understanding of how we can facilitate that learning in those experiences as they align with those standards, that would provide a better learning experience for the student no matter who he or she is.
So some ways we're trying to address those issues, or really looking at clinical placement so for example we're doing a project called recovery camp which is a clinical experience that seemed to elicit significantly higher learning outcomes than other clinical placements, and we started to ask the question what within that setting provided that, supported that? and we're starting to delve down deeper into those settings
We are really noticing that the people with a limited experience of mental illness are actually becoming the teacher, they're a better resource than a textbook, they are living what these students are supposed to be learning and providing them that opportunity is something that I think can apply in other settings.