Objectives: This study investigated pharmacists’ and pharmacy assistants’ current practices and perspectives with regard to oral healthcare provision across Australian community pharmacies. Design: Cross-sectional study. A questionnaire for each pharmacist and pharmacy assistant cohort was developed and administered by online or postal means. Pearson’s χ² test was used to examine relationships between categorical variables. Participants: Pharmacists and pharmacy assistants working within 2100 randomly selected Australian community pharmacies. Results: The overall response rate was 58.5% (644/1100) for the pharmacist cohort and 28% (280/1000) for the pharmacy assistant cohort. This represents pharmacy staff responses from 803 community pharmacies across Australia (approximately 14.6%, 803/5500 of community pharmacies nationally). Overall, the majority of pharmacists (80.2%; 516/644) and pharmacy assistants (83.6%; 234/280) reported providing oral health advice/consultations to health consumers up to five times each week. More than half of community pharmacists and pharmacy assistants were involved in identifying signs and symptoms for oral health problems; and the majority believed health consumers were receptive to receiving oral health advice. Additionally, more than 80% of pharmacists and 60% of pharmacy assistants viewed extended oral healthcare roles positively and supported integrating them within their workplace; extended roles include provision of prevention, early intervention and referral to oral healthcare services. The most commonly reported barriers to enhance pharmacy staff involvement in oral healthcare within Australian community pharmacies include lack of knowledge, ongoing training and resources to assist practice. Conclusion: This study highlights that Australian pharmacists have an important role in oral health and provides evidence supporting the need for growing partnerships/collaborations between pharmacy and dental healthcare professionals and organisations to develop, implement and evaluate evidence-based resources, interventions and services to deliver improved and responsive oral healthcare within Australian communities.

In producing a young generation with good environmental literacy and contribute towards the exploit of sustainable development, teachers become a vital agent to impart the knowledge of sustainability and value in the classroom. Hence, this study is steered to explore the pre-service science teachers’ knowledge of sustainable development concept and to find out how they incorporated knowledge of sustainability in their classroom during practicum training. By adopting mixed methods design, questionnaires were randomly distributed to 100 pre-service science teachers in the Faculty of Education, UiTM whilst 10 pre-service science teachers from the samples were purposely selected to involve in the interviews. The study found that in general, the pre-service science teacher possess moderate knowledge of the sustainable development concept and environmentalrelated issues as they were having difficulty to explain the term ‘sustainable development.’ This implied that, the possession of the knowledge is superficial and impart. The study also found that pre-service science teachers incorporated sustainability knowledge using two methods during their teaching practicum; first is by creating “green” classroom environment and second by integrating knowledge of sustainability into environmental-related topic in science. The study suggests that, science teacher training institution should enhance pre-service science teachers’ knowledge of sustainable development and expose them to more interesting and effective techniques to incorporate knowledge of sustainability in teaching and learning.

Malaysia’s declining performance in TIMSS and PISA somewhat contributed to the transformation of Malaysian Education System which emphasizes on the importance of higher-order thinking skills (HOTS). Changes in how students are assessed imply that teachers must teach differently; the focus has shifted to developing students’ analytical abilities instead on mere recall and understanding. This study was conducted to investigate science teachers’ training and skills in assessing students’ HOTS. Thirty Science teachers were involved where data were qualitatively gathered using interview, observations and document analysis. The findings revealed that all teacher participants were aware of the shortcomings in their continuous professional development practices. The trainings they attended were rather general instead of specific to science teaching and learning activities, merely focused on developing HOTS items instead of on the variations and procedure of assessment, and did not adequately help them to inculcate critical and innovative thinking as well as creativity in student learning. Suggestions on how to improve teachers’ skills in assessing Science learning with specific emphasis on HOTS were also put forward as a mechanism to enhance teacher professionalism.

Reflection in learning is crucial as it provides learners with the chance to think about what they do, clarify what they understand by their actions, and adapt ways of working towards achieving goals. The continuous doing and posing inquiries about personal experiences is key to learners' intellectual growth and understanding of professional identity. This chapter outlines how content and professional knowledge of student-teachers in a Malaysian university progress through engagement in research process, and how involvement in research shapes their teacher personality and qualities as they become more critical and open-minded during the learning process. The study shows that reflection can promote self-regulation of learning habits that enhance growth of intellect and professional identity. The findings have implications on the provision of teacher education in higher education. It is imperative that teaching and learning activities help learners to recognise, understand, appreciate and reflect on their personal, social and professional development.