Despite record investment in education, Australian students’ literacy and numeracy levels have been steadily declining. This podcast series speaks with some of Australia’s K-12 education leaders and asks the key question: What, if anything, are we doing wrong? In episode ...

The NAPLAN report card has been published and it confirms the findings of the snapshot released in August last year. While there were no statistically significant changes in any of the NAPLAN test domains when compared with 2017 results, ACARA ...

While certain experts think NAPLAN bizarre, parents and teachers, plausibly with more skin in the testing game, vociferously support it. Officeholders from the Australian Council of State School Organisations (ACSSO), the Australian Parents Council (APC), and the Isolated Children’s Parents’ Association of ...

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 ...

Twelve-hour days and big classes are realities that Singapore’s teachers face daily. Such conditions create stressful work environments which impede their capacity to live up to their global reputation for teaching excellence. They are usually too exhausted to be the classroom innovators they ...

It’s been five years since the last – and Australia’s inaugural – Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) results were released. Now, with the 2016 crop divulged, we’ve improved, but not by much. Just 16 per cent of the over ...

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. ...

Along with a relatively small number of countries such as New Zealand, Singapore and Finland and Scotland, Australia is unusual in that, as well as a focus on knowledge and skills, its national curriculum explicitly requires schools to teach certain ...

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 ...

Each time international PISA and TIMSS results are released, the word Singapore is breathlessly mentioned. Although the city state continuously tops these tests, cracks are beginning to show in its educational veneer. Several academics have pointed out flaws in the tests themselves, including ...