Adolescent aspirations have been extensively researched, particularly in the contexts of higher education and the workforce. This paper extends research by exploring how the educational and career aspirations of rural adolescent girls relate to their other future goals. It demonstrates how exploring aspirations, both within and outside of the…

Large-scale international comparative studies and cross-ethnic studies have revealed that Chinese students, living either in China or overseas, consistently outperform their counterparts in mathematics. Empirical research has discussed psychological, educational, and cultural reasons behind Chinese students' better mathematics performance.…

Early career teachers often feel overwhelmed by the complex, intense and unpredictable nature of their work. Recently, policy initiatives have been introduced to provide new teachers with extra release-time from face-to-face classroom teaching duties to assist them in their transition to the workforce. This paper reports on a critical policy study…

In contemporary education policy, simplified technical accounts of policy problems and solutions are being produced with the use of numeric calculations. These calculations are seen as clear and unbiased, capable of revealing "what works" and identifying "best practices." In this piece, the authors use resources from the…

This article examines conflicting mentor (school-based supervising teacher) and pre-service teacher narratives of professional experience in schools. It draws on a small narrative inquiry about the mentoring relationship in teacher education. Interview conversations were analysed using "writing as a method of inquiry", allowing for a recursive…

Severe enduring reading- and writing-accuracy difficulties seem a phenomenon largely restricted to nations using complex orthographies, notably Anglophone nations, given English's highly complex orthography (Geva and Siegel, "Read Writ" 12:1-30, 2000; Landerl et al., "Cognition" 63:315-334, 1997; Share, "Psychol Bul"l 134(4):584-615, 2008;…

Teacher assessment literacy is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. Yet understanding teacher assessment literacy is important in an international curriculum and assessment reform context that continues to challenge teachers' assessment practices. In this article situated examples of classroom assessment literacies are analysed using…

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…

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…

Recent changes in higher education have confronted education research with a conundrum: how our traditionally multidisciplinary field can refine itself as a unified discipline. In this address I sketch out what this conundrum may mean for education research, both substantively and methodologically, in the future. I propose that one starting point…

A remarkable feature of the sociology of education is its proliferation under a broad gamut of research themes and topics. Understanding the relationship of education to social reproduction and social change are pivotal to the sociology of education, and have fruitfully informed research in fields such as gender and education, vocational education…

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.…

Australians live at a time when the quality of discussion in the public sphere and within the institutions of the state is at a very low ebb; when policy making is dictated by short term political cycles, spin and focus groups; and when notions of the public good are set aside in favour of self-interest. This paper is based on the premise that if…

The promotion of educational equity and improvement of educational quality in China are contextualised in tenets of Confucianism and policy directives, inspiring educational research and practice. In this paper, we first explore the historical and cultural roots of educational equity and quality through Confucianism and elaborate on the current…

This paper provides some background information about the Strategic Capacity Building for Australian Educational Research initiative: a joint program of work sponsored by the Australian Association for Research in Education and the Australian Council of Deans of Education. In addition, it offers some broader analysis of the contexts within which…