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…

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…

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…

Objective: Sport may promote academic performance through physiological and psychosocial mechanisms. We aimed to examine the association between sports participation and academic performance in Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander children. Methods: Participants were from four successive waves of Australia's Longitudinal Study of Indigenous…

Relative age effects (RAEs), where older children within an age-based group have better academic, sporting, self-concept and mental health outcomes than their younger peers, have been demonstrated in multiple countries. Australian research has found self-concept and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder RAEs, but academic RAEs have not been…

The technological capacity that now exists to gather and store large amounts of data has improved access to information related to the academic performance, demographic profile and welfare needs of young people in a school. Improvements in data management techniques, statistical data analysis and software packages have made retrieving and…

In this study, we examine children's National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) achievement predictors, which may enable or limit their numeracy performance and assess the relative importance of the predictor variables. Our data source was the NAPLAN numeracy results of Queensland schools from 2014 to 2017. Years 3 and 5…

A higher proportion of students are privately educated in Australia, compared with many other nations. In this paper, we tested the assumption that private schools offer better quality education than public schools. We examined differences in student achievement on the National Assessment Programme: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) between public,…

In Australia, under the National Assessment Plan, educational accountability testing in literacy and numeracy (NAPLAN) is undertaken with all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to monitor student achievement and inform policy. However, the extent to which these data have been analysed to report student progress is limited. This article reports a…

Most studies on the relationship between students' socioeconomic status (SES) and student achievement assume that its effects are sizable and causal. A large variety of theoretical explanations have been proposed. However, the SES-achievement association may reflect, to some extent, the inter-relationships of parents' abilities, SES, children's…

Purpose: Through description and consideration of 12 models developed as part of the International Successful School Principalship Project (ISSPP), a new model of successful school leadership is developed. Design/methodology/approach: The paper is necessarily descriptive in nature. For the first time, 12 ISSPP models are described together, and…

Since 2007, 'Closing the Gap' between Indigenous and non-Indigenous people has been an ambition of Australian state and federal governments in areas including education, employment, and health. This paper examines media responses to government policies aimed at closing the achievement gap in schools. The paper analyses print and online newspaper…

What is the relationship between academic buoyancy and academic adversity? For example, does the experience of academic adversity help build students' academic buoyancy in school--or, does academic buoyancy lead to decreases in subsequent academic adversity? This longitudinal study of 481 high school students (Years 7-12) investigated the…

Drawing upon recent theorising of numbers and data, and applications to schooling, this paper reveals how tensions between more accountability-oriented logics, and more contextually-situated conceptions of engagement with data, played out in one school in a regional community in northern Queensland, Australia. The research reveals that at the same…

Background: Previous research has examined associations between individual activity behaviors and academic achievement. Yet activity behaviors should be analyzed together because they are codependent parts of the 24-hour day. Aims: This study aims to explore the associations between all daily activity behaviors (sleep, sedentary time, light…