The soon to be implemented Australian Curriculum aims to integrate a futures orientation across subject areas. Guidelines and support for this specific initiative are being finalized. Only a little is known about the current teaching of a futures orientation or of secondary teacher interest, understanding and support for this important but…

A major impediment to problem solving in mathematics in the great majority of South African schools is that disadvantaged students from seriously impoverished learning environments are lacking in the necessary informal mathematical knowledge to develop their own strategies for solving non-routine problems. A randomized pretest-posttest control…

The National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLaN) is an annual literacy and numeracy test for all Australian students, and results from the test are disaggregated into a number of categories including language background other than English (LBOTE). For this and other categories, results on each section of the test are aggregated into…

Within literature relating to the broad field of boys' education attention is regularly drawn to the significant difference between essentialist and anti-essentialist accounts of "the boy problem" and the limitations of gender-based educational reforms which rely upon deterministic notions of what boys are "really" like…

The issue of limited engagement with science for young people from Indigenous, minority and lower socio-economic groups in Australia appears to have been sidelined from the mainstream debate around falling rates of engagement with science at the secondary schooling level. The "closing the gap" mantra of education policy in Australia has seen an…

Low post-compulsory science enrolments for secondary students have been a growing concern across the Western world. Research has examined factors relating to science curricula and students' attitudes about science, but parental views of science education remain largely unexplored in Australia. Because parents have a strong role in shaping their…

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…

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…

The quality and types of relationships formed between students and teachers has been shown to play an essential part in the personal and academic success of students (Davis, 2003; Pianta, 1999). Little, however, has been done to determine the role that assessment plays in teacher-student relationships. Drawing upon the work of cultural…

In this study, four years of formal observations of classroom teaching practice were employed to ascertain the practice fidelity of a site-based school reform in a secondary school setting. Those observations were then used as a criterion variable in an examination of differences in the perspectives of administrators, teachers and teaching peers…

A sample of Australian secondary school students was used to explore the relationships among a set of standardised Year 7 numeracy and literacy tests, measures taken at Year 10 of mathematics attitude and schoolwork effort, and Mathematics and English scores in a state-wide Year 10 examination. Additionally, the predictive capacity of the numeracy…

Globally, teaching has become more complex and more challenging over recent years, with new and increased demands being placed on teachers by students, their families, governments and wider society. Teachers work with more diverse communities in times characterised by volatility, uncertainty and moral ambiguity. Societal, political, economic and…

The Learning to Learn in Schools Phase 3 Evaluation was a four year project across England exploring the concept of Learning to Learn in 33 primary and secondary schools. The project was funded through the UK based Campaign for Learning. One of the key aims of the project was to ensure that the locus of control in terms of development remains with…

Non-completion of senior secondary schooling continues to be a matter of concern for policy makers and practitioners in Australia today. Despite the efforts of governments to improve participation and retention rates, 30% of students drop out of school before completing Year 12. Further, some students remain at school, just biding their time until…