Drawing on the largest Australian collection and analysis of empirical data on multiple facets of Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander education in state schools to date, this article critically analyses the systemic push for standardized testing and improved scores, and argues for a greater balance of assessment types by providing alternative,…

The present study examined the mediating roles of prospective teachers' emotional styles in the relationships between their emotions about teaching and professional plans about teaching. A total of 684 prospective teachers, majoring in computer education and instructional technology teaching, mathematics teaching, preschool teaching, special…

From 2001 to 2004 Education Queensland undertook significant literacy reform in schools through the Literate Futures Project. Research into the impact of this reform has revealed that significant demands were placed on women at all levels, from those producing resources to those leading change within schools. Although the reform was a government…

Retaining quality teachers is a global challenge for schools, particularly those in rural districts. A nation-wide study conducted by the Human Sciences Research Council (HSRC) found that 55 % of teachers in South Africa would leave teaching if they could. Resignation was found to be one of the three largest causes of attrition (Hall et al.…

These are changing times in Australia for teachers and their students, with the introduction of a national curriculum and standards driven reform. While countries in Europe such as England, and in Asia such as Singapore, are changing policy to use assessment in the support of and improvement of learning it appears that we in Australia are moving…

An external change agent (ECA) was recently employed in three Queensland schools to align the school curriculum with the requirements of the state's high stakes test known as the Queensland Core Skills test (QCS). This paper reports on the teachers' perceptions of a change process led by an ECA. With the ever-increasing implementation of high…

This article reports on a major action research program that experimented with the use of cross-age peer teaching in schools to assist teachers to manage conflict issues in their classrooms, and to re-engage disaffected students in learning. The research, which was conducted in a range of elementary and secondary schools in Australia, was part of…

For marginalised secondary school students, mainstream education may no longer appear to be an inviting place. While proposed solutions to problems of disengagement and marginalisation appear to concentrate on finding ways to coerce students back to mainstream education through, for example, "learning or earning" legislation, this article suggests…

In this research a number of strategies including physical experiences, physical stories and lab school with guided reflection were used with pre-service physical education teachers in an attempt to foster more critical and inclusive approaches to teaching physical education in the middle years. The strategies were used to illustrate the complex…

Effective engagement of young children in the classroom is a critical step toward achieving positive learning outcomes. The Learning and Engagement Questionnaire (LEQ) was developed by the first two authors to identify ways in which teachers strive to engage learners in the classroom. In this study, the factor structure of the LEQ is examined.…

The PISA studies of reading achievement of 15 year old students in OECD and partner nations show Anglophone nations to have continuing high proportions of weak readers (less than or equal to Level 2), with no improvement in this area from 2000 to 2006 (OECD, "Science competencies for tomorrow's world: Executive summary," 2007). The nations which…

This article defines comprehension as a pragmatic social and intellectual practice. It reviews literature on current approaches to reading instruction for linguistically and culturally diverse and low socioeconomic students, noting the current policy emphasis on the teaching of comprehension as autonomous skills and strategies. The Four Resources…

This paper argues for the need for critical reading comprehension in an era of accountability that often promotes reading comprehension as readily assessable through students answering multiple choice questions of unseen texts. Based upon a 1 year study investigating literacy in Years 4-9 the ways strong-performing primary schools develop serious…

This paper presents the qualitative results of a study of students' reading of multimodal texts in an interactive, online environment. The study forms part of a larger project which addressed image-language interaction as an important dimension of language pedagogy and assessment for students growing up in a multimedia digital age. Thirty-two Year…

This paper examines the report of the "Inquiry into the Teaching of Literacy" (Department of Education, Science & Training (DEST) 2005) and explores the claims it makes about reading pedagogy and the centrality of particular "methods" or "approaches" to teaching backed by "scientific" evidence. Discourse analysis of the report shows that its…