Australian students' performance on national and international literacy assessments has declined since 2000, while teachers in contemporary classrooms contend with conditions of increased complexity and uncertainty. In July 2017, the Australian Government commissioned a panel of experts to provide advice on how to improve Australian students'…

In this paper we examine how agency is characterised by teachers and students when personalised learning is enacted in the contemporary open classroom. A case study is outlined that identifies teacher reasoning for practice, the use of physical and virtual learning spaces, and student reaction to teacher facilitation of personalised learning.…

There is continuing interest in identifying factors that influence learning in the middle years. This paper reports a case study that aimed to identify key factors that influenced Year 8 students' self-regulation of learning in English in an Australian regional secondary school with a low socio-economic profile. This study focuses on both…

This study draws on recent research on the central role of representation in learning. While there has been considerable research on students' understanding of evaporation, the representational issues entailed in this understanding have not been investigated in depth. The study explored students' engagement with evaporation phenomena through…

This paper identifies three underlying discourses on the nature of sexuality evident in two Department of Education curriculum documents on sexuality education in Victoria, Australia, over the past 15 years. These discourses are a cultural "preservation" perspective, a risk minimisation perspective, and a view that sexual expression…

Various explanations and solutions have been proposed over the last ten years in relation to the ongoing problem of student lack of engagement with the middle years' curriculum in Australia. Identified contributors to this problem include an irrelevant or trivial curricular focus and ineffectual teaching and learning strategies. In this paper we…

As part of a long-term research study to enhance science learning, this paper reports on an exploratory study aimed at identifying initial beliefs and practices of a group of teachers and students (Years 4-6) in Australia when the students engaged with multiple representations of the same science concepts. There is growing recognition in science…