Education Commons^™

Equipping Students For Life After School, Geoff Masters

Prof Geoff Masters AO

Identifying and developing the knowledge, skills and attributes required for life and work is an ongoing challenge in school education.

Teaching Reading In The Early Years, Prue Anderson

Prue Anderson

Teaching children to read in the early years involves a variety of comprehension strategies for the development of literate practices, as Prue Anderson explains.

A Developing Story: The Literacy Demands Of The Curriculum, Marion Meiers

Marion Meiers

The need for explicit teaching of the literacy demands of the curriculum has been and remains a significant area of interest for all teachers. An example of how this interest has evolved can be seen in Nea Stewart-Dore's careerlong interest in literacy learning. This was a key aspect of her major contribution to professional knowledge and understanding of literacy learning. Nea's story provides a useful retrospective insight into the shaping of the strong current focus of the literacy of the disciplines.

Pisa 2009 Plus Results : Performance Of 15-Year-Olds In Reading, Mathematics And Science For 10 Additional Participants, Maurice Walker

Maurice Walker

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an international comparative survey of 15-year-olds’ knowledge and skills in reading, mathematical and scientific literacy. PISA seeks to measure how well young adults have acquired the knowledge and skills that are required to function as successful members of society. As part of the PISA 2009 survey, students completed an assessment on reading literacy, mathematical literacy and scientific literacy, as well as an extensive background questionnaire. School principals also completed a survey describing the context of education at their school, including the level of resources in the school and qualifications of staff. …

The Cure For Early Grades Assessment Difficulties? Take A Tablet, Maurice Walker

Maurice Walker

Maurice Walker reports on an innovative approach to assessment using tablets to monitor educational development in the early years of schooling.

Meeting The Challenge Of Disciplinary Literacies, Marion Meiers

Marion Meiers

Assessing Maths Literacy: Learning From The Pisa Experience, Ross Turner

Ross Turner

A new book that draws on ACER’s work on one of the world’s largest international surveys is providing educators with important insights about how assessment can be used to improve learning outcomes.

The 'Literacy' Idea, Ross Turner

Ross Turner

A central reason why researchers and practitioners refer to domain literacy is to draw attention to the kinds of things students learn in the domain. In a traditional learning domain the focus might be on the acquisition of discrete facts, skills and procedures that have little obvious connection or utility. In a learning domain with a literacy orientation, the focus is on applying the domain’s facts, skills and procedures to support creativity and inventiveness, to solve novel problems and to deal with the kinds of challenges that life presents outside the classroom. In the case of mathematics, for example, a …

Dancing Literacy: Expanding Children’S And Teachers’ Literacy Repertoires Through Embodied Knowing, Allison Leonard, Anna Hall, Danielle Herro

Alison E Leonard

This paper explores dance as literacy. Specifically, it examines qualitative case study research findings and student examples from a dance artist-in-residence that explored curricular content using dance as its primary mode of inquiry and expression. Throughout the residency, students constructed meaning through their dance experiences in dynamic and autonomous ways, exhibiting complex literacy practices of inquiry and communication. Focusing on the kindergarten student participants’ experiences, the authors highlight three themes in their dance literacy practices: (a) artistic autonomy, (b) embodied knowledge, and (c) multimodality. As embodied knowledge, dance innately allowed for integrative literacy possibilities in the dance residency. The dance …

Bullying In Australian Schools, Kylie Hillman

Kylie Hillman

Recent international surveys of students’ mathematics, science and reading achievement also reveal much about their engagement with schooling, their experience of bullying and their sense of safety at school, as Kylie Hillman explains.

School Improvement On Australia’S Horizon, Geoff Masters

Prof Geoff Masters AO

While Australia has seen a steady decline in 15-year-olds’ reading literacy achievement over the past decade, Geoff Masters identifies promising signs at the primary level that this trend may soon be reversed.