After a successful campaign to scrap the compulsory rollout of NAPLAN online testing in Queensland, experts are asking the inevitable question: is NAPLAN testing still worthwhile? University of the Sunshine Coast's associate Professor Michael Nagel specialises in research on childhood ...

When NAPLAN was launched in 2008, its aim was to boost student achievement through the annual administration of standardised tests. But the scheme's performance remains unimpressive, as the 2017 NAPLAN results have shown. Yet again, student scores in literacy and numeracy flatlined, as ...

In August we learned that there were NAPLAN triumphs and concerns: overall, reading and numeracy were up, yet writing had declined. Now, with ACARA's release of the 2017 NAPLAN National Report, long-term demographic trends have come to light. Since 2008, Indigenous ...

A wicked problem, in academia, means a thorny one - one without an obvious solution. In the lead up to the International Day of People with a Disability, Dr David Armstrong has identified four of these in Western special education. ...

What do our three most recent male Prime Ministers - Malcolm Turnbull, Tony Abbott and Kevin Rudd - have in common? Certainly not much of their politics.  They all did, however, at one point or another, attend single-sex schools: Sydney ...

Catholic Education Western Australia (CEWA) is no longer daydreaming. The body once imagined implementing a cloud-based learning platform across its 163 schools, and now they're actually doing it. Seventy-eight thousand students - from Broome to Beagle Bay - will be signed up to ...

It may be the HSC’s 50th birthday, but not everyone's celebrating. An English module called 'the craft of writing' will soon be mandatory for all year 12 students. In this back-to-basics approach, spelling, grammar and vocabulary are emphasised. On the flipside, context ...

Professor Catherine Beavis is all for digital learning, but not testing. Well, not quite yet. With trials of online NAPLAN tests commencing in around 500 NSW schools this week, equity, Beavis said, is the issue. Some students are disadvantaged by ...

“I always say in jest to people, if you type NAPLAN in a Word document or on the computer, it autocorrects to NAPALM, which I think says it all.” Associate professor Michael Nagel, an educational psychologist at the University of ...

Australia’s schools and their students are on trial once more: annual NAPLAN testing will be held next week. This year, however, an education lecturer wishes something would change. Dr Kathy Bates of Western Sydney University scrutinised how NAPLAN writing papers may ...