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Full-Text Articles in Education

A Slow Burn: The Impact Of Ials In Australia, Juliette Mendelovits Sep 2011

A Slow Burn: The Impact Of Ials In Australia, Juliette Mendelovits

Juliette Mendelovits

Australia Australia has put its hand up to participate in all the international literacy surveys on offer: IALS in the second wave (1996), the ALL Survey in the second wave (2006), and PIAAC in 2011-12 – in the field right now. Nevertheless, until very recently Australia’s general response to the surveys can best be described as inert: more in the vein of our habitual “she’ll be right” than the “clever country” that our prime minister of the 1980s urged us to become. For most of the period since the IALS results were published in 1997, Australia paid little attention to …


Differential Performance Of Poor Readers In International Mathematics Tests By Item Formats, Luc Le Aug 2011

Differential Performance Of Poor Readers In International Mathematics Tests By Item Formats, Luc Le

Dr Luc Tu Le

The important role of language, including reading, on student performance on assessments in school academic areas such as mathematics has been addressed in number of studies. Although positive relations between different aspects of reading and mathematics performance have been investigated, there have been few studies focusing on the interaction between the context of the mathematics item and student reading proficiency, and most of those there were related only to the verbal loading. Recently, a low correlation between verbal loading and item difficulty was found for PISA mathematics items. This study used PISA 2003 mathematics data with 41 countries with about …


Pisa And The ‘Latest Model’: Can An International Survey Have Anything Useful To Say To Canberra’S Mathematics Teachers?, Ross Turner Jul 2011

Pisa And The ‘Latest Model’: Can An International Survey Have Anything Useful To Say To Canberra’S Mathematics Teachers?, Ross Turner

Ross Turner

The OECD’s Programme for International Student Assessment is the world’s biggest comparative survey of educational outcomes, targeted at 15-year-olds and currently operating in almost 70 countries around the world. In this presentation the author introduces the PISA project, and some of the things we can learn from such a survey. He outlines the elements of the mathematics framework that will underpin the next round of the PISA survey in 2012, which will have mathematics as the major survey domain. The author's main goal, however, will be to give you a feel for some research findings acquired through his work in …


Identifying Cognitive Processes Important To Mathematics Learning But Often Overlooked, Ross Turner Dec 2010

Identifying Cognitive Processes Important To Mathematics Learning But Often Overlooked, Ross Turner

Ross Turner

This article is based on the author's presentation to ACER's Research Conference 2010 that introduced a set of mathematical competencies that deserve to be given more attention in our mathematics classrooms, on the grounds that the possession of these competencies relates strongly to increased levels of mathematical literacy. These competencies are: communication; mathematising; representation; reasoning and argument; strategic thinking; and using symbolic, formal and technical language and operations. The author argues that widespread under-representation of these competencies among the general populace contributes to unacceptably large measures on the mathematics terror index. The argument in support of these competencies comes out …