Education Commons^™

Reforming Educational Assessment: Imperatives, Principles And Challenges, Geoff N. Masters

Australian Education Review

AER 57 reviews research into assessment, especially in schools; it analyses the pivotal role of assessment in learning and argues for its reconceptualisation by practitioners and policy makers to better support learning. The genesis of this AER was the ACER Research Conference Assessment and Student Learning: Collecting, interpreting and using data to inform teaching, held in Perth in August 2009.

Section 1 outlines some current pressures for assessment reform, introduces the concept of a learning assessment system designed to establish where learners are in their progress within an empirically mapped domain of learning, and sketches a set of design …

Building Innovation : Learning With Technologies, Kathryn Moyle

Australian Education Review

AER 56 explores national and international policy priorities for building students' innovation capabilities through information and communication technologies (ICT) in Australian schools. Section 1 sets out the Australian policy context for digital education and highlights some of the emerging challenges. It provides an overview of two Australian school education policy priorities: that of how to meaningfully include technologies into teaching and learning; and how to build innovation capabilities in students. Section 2 critically examines the education and economic policy contexts for digital education in Australia, their intersections with international economic priorities, and the role of commercial technologies markets in schools. …

Second Languages And Australian Schooling, Joseph Lo Bianco

Australian Education Review

It is an underlying principle of AER 54 that active efforts should be made to cultivate the latent bilingual potential within Australia’s wider population and that this should be linked to major improvements in the quality of language teaching in schools. A combined approach of this kind will require investment in specialised preparation for language teachers, more time allocated to second language teaching in schools, and coordination of effort across school and post-schooling sectors. Section 1 describes the critical distinction between niche learning and mass learning of languages, and the current distribution of language competence throughout Australian society. The role …

The Leadership Challenge : Improving Learning In Schools, Bill Mulford

Australian Education Review

AER 53 elaborates on issues raised by the ACER Research Conference 2007: The Leadership Challenge - Improving learning in schools. This conference was significant in that it identified leadership as an area of interest to school leaders requiring explicit policy development at both a school and system level.This review aims to demonstrate that a great deal of a school's success depends on which areas of school life the educational leader chooses to spend time and attention. Section 1 describes the three interrelated, or nested, elements of leadership. Beginning from the outside and moving inward to the core these are: school …

Literacy Education In School : Research Perspectives From The Past, For The Future, Peter Freebody

Australian Education Review

AER 52 aims to expand our understanding of the nature of literacy at a time when public and private lives have become increasingly literacy-dependent, and literacy demands more complex and sophisticated. This review of the research literature is guided by the view that what passes for effective literacy education will differ depending on language, culture, history and the technologies of communication and knowledge production. Section 1 describes the large body of research relating to the teaching and learning of literacy that emerges from a wide range of discipline bases. It details the complexities associated with defining literacy, and it outlines …