Developing students' reading and numeracy skills remain key goals of contemporary schooling. In Australia, the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests have assessed these skills since 2008. Previous research found a significant gender gap in favour of females for the NAPLAN writing test, yet no study has examined…

School funding policy in Australia not only promotes educational equity in some ways but also creates substantial between-school resource inequalities due to its embrace of market ideologies. School funding policies are designed to promote school choice and competition, based on the assumption that they are both a right and an effective lever for…

This article details how and why we have developed a flexible and responsive process-based rubric exemplar for teaching, learning, and assessing critical and creative thinking. We hope to contribute to global discussions of and efforts toward instrumentalising the challenge of assessing, but not standardising, creativity in compulsory education.…

Considerable interest lies in the growth in educational achievement that occurs over the course of a child's schooling. This paper demonstrates a simple but effective approach for the comparison of growth rates, drawing on a method first proposed some 80 years ago and applying it to data from the Australian National Assessment Program. The…

This study examines public opinion about the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) in Australia, based on an online survey conducted with a sample of New South Wales (NSW) residents (n = 2,017). Our study participants did recognize the benefits of NAPLAN despite their opinion generally trending toward negative viewpoints of…

National testing of students has become an increasingly prevalent policy tool, often implemented to drive improvement through increased accountability and heightened competition between schools. Such testing has been found to generate negative emotional responses among students, including increased stress and anxiety. However, there is little…

In Australia, it has been observed that there have been significant declines in the proportion of students studying senior sciences over the last two decades (Commonwealth of Australia 2017 & 2018; Steidtmann et.al, 2023). It has been suggested that one of the causes for this decline could be a link between students' literacy achievement and…

Background: The transition from primary to secondary school presents a challenging developmental milestone which often marks a decline in academic performance. Social-emotional skills are recognized as fundamental to academic success but longitudinal research is needed to determine the extent of their association over this transition period. Aim:…

This study examines the effect of school socioeconomic composition on student achievement growth in Australian schooling, and its relationship with academic composition utilising the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) dataset. Previous research has found that school composition predicts a range of schooling outcomes. A…

In recent years, numeracy has had an increasing focus in the Australian educational system, with policies and assessments in place for both students and teachers. In order to address the requirements of their careers, teachers need to have sufficient numeracy capabilities. In our study, we explored the numeracy capabilities of post-graduate…

Students' prior achievements in school have significant correlations with their later achievements. Specifically, students' prior numeracy achievement is the most important predictor of later numeracy success. However, the assessment of this predictor across gender and its trend across students' year levels is often overlooked or not adequately…

In this article, we contest globalised notions of data as 'universally' beneficial, necessary and 'evidence-based'. We do so by drawing upon narrative accounts of the problematic ways data impact educators researching and working in university and schooling settings over time and in varied national contexts. We reveal how data are transient and…

Explorations of the national NAPLAN numeracy data consistently reveal a strong relationship between achievement on these tests and students' socio-economic background. A small but persistent pattern of gender difference favouring males in mean NAPLAN numeracy scores is also reported. Whether these patterns are replicated for students attending…

The number of times children change schools, or student mobility, is associated with multiple adverse outcomes across the life span. This study used administrative data from the Western Australian Department of Education for public primary school students who completed Year 6 between 2016 and 2019 to examine potential associations between student…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to provide a brief review of foundational research that has informed how the field of literacy education understands the importance of child-adult interactions for learning language and early literacy, and the importance of this learning for learning literacy later in life. Design/methodology/approach: The…