Last week’s hand-wringing over the comparability of online NAPLAN tests with paper versions is moot. That is, according to one of the architects of PISA, Professor Doctor Eckhard Klieme. Klieme, a professor of education research (with a background in maths and psychology) ...

What do a doctor and a teacher have in common? Potentially nothing, yet Professor Geoff Masters would like them to share something significant. Delivering a keynote presentation at the ACER Research Conference 2018, Masters, ACER’s CEO, explained his viewpoint. “The origins of ...

Research consistently shows that many students become disengaged in their schoolwork as they move further into the middle years of high school. As students become disengaged, they participate in class less often, enjoy school less, become less interested in schoolwork, ...

You’ve surely heard of dogs or cats of Instagram, but have you seen the teacher variety? Granted, they’re not as adorable, but in lieu of hilarious ‘caught on camera’ moments and puppy eyes, they offer and seek advice, personal stories and, of ...

How often have we heard kids (our own, others’ and even our past selves), whining that the maths they’re learning isn’t ‘useful’ and they’ll ‘never use it’? Too many to count. According to the IET, 203,000 people with engineering skills ...

The rapid and exponential growth of the internet over the past 40 years has changed the nature of society. Indeed, at the end of the first two decades of the twenty-first century, the internet is our defining medium. This has ...

They may constitute only approximately 1.2 per cent of the population, but until recently, transgender individuals have been excluded from society. In a 2015 speech, former Human Rights Commissioner Tim Wilson said that of LGBTQI people, “the lingering and most extensive discrimination ...

American developmental psychologist Emmy Werner was one of the first people to ever use the term ‘resilience’.  It came out of her landmark study of children from Kauai, Hawaii, from their birth in 1955 to their late teens, in the 1970s. At the ...

Choosing final-year school subjects is a challenging time for students – students may be tempted simply to avoid Maths or Science and therefore miss out on the foundation for many future opportunities. According to a recent SEEK Employment Report, the ...

For years, there have been intermittent reports of animals in captivity lashing out, and even killing themselves and their trainers and keepers. The 2013 documentary Blackfish brought this issue into sharp relief. It told the story of Tilikum, an orca whale implicated ...