Global and digital connectivity transform Australian classrooms by creating rich environments for inquiry learning. Developing inquiry learning in this Information Communication Technology (ICT) context is an Australian educational goal. Recently the Australian Curriculum reform and the Digital Education Revolution has become a catalyst for…

The New Social Studies movement was an effort by social scientists to reform US social studies/history curriculum at all levels during the 1960s and early 1970s. In the end, more than 50 different projects attempting to revitalise social studies were developed. Many of the projects focused on inquiry-based teaching practices and curriculum.…

Relatively little research has explored whether schools differ in their effectiveness for different group of pupils (e.g. by ethnicity, poverty or gender), for different curriculum subjects (e.g. English, mathematics or science) or over time (different cohorts). This paper uses multilevel modelling to analyse the national test results at age 7 and…

This document is a revised version of the National Consumer and Financial Literacy Framework (the Framework) originally developed in 2005. It articulates a rationale for consumer and financial education in Australian schools; describes essential consumer and financial capabilities that will support lifelong learning; and provides guidance on how…

Recent literature on the role of the interactive whiteboard (IWB) has indicated numerous ways in which teachers make use of the IWB to support children's learning. In these studies there is a growing awareness of changing roles in the classroom as teachers gain confidence in the use of new technologies. This study describes how a researcher worked…

It is well-established that language skills are amongst the best predictors of educational success. Consistent with this, findings from a population-based longitudinal study of parents and children in the UK indicate that language development at the age of two years predicts children's performance on entering primary school. Moreover, children who…

North American curriculum theorists Gonzales and Moll and their colleagues have argued that working with children's "funds of knowledge" allows teachers to build on what children already know in order to meet the mandated outcomes. The approach also has the potential to change the knowledges that are valued and which advantage some…

This is the second publication in the Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) Project Plus series. Project Plus aims to inform questions of policy and practice by synthesising findings of educational interest from projects funded by the TLRI. This Project Plus focuses on literacy in the early childhood education (ECE) and school…

Official reports on primary education are a bit like London buses. You wait ages and then three come along at once. There has been no major report on primary education since the 1967 Plowden Report "Children and their Primary Schools". Now, final reports are awaited from the Cambridge Primary Review and the government-appointed…

In England, there have been concerns that some primary teachers lack the necessary skills to teach the National Curriculum. The aim of this research was to ascertain the level of confidence of students completing a one-year primary teacher-training programme in relation to teaching in general and teaching music in particular. 341 students from…

The purpose of this paper is analyzing the new Science and Technology curriculum, which was declared as the new primary school curriculum in August 2004 by Turkish Minister of Education (MoE), based on Posner's (2004) curriculum analysis framework. The written curriculum was examined and the findings were supported with a variety of resources…

Computational estimation has not yet established a place in the Kuwaiti national curriculum. An attempt was made to include it during the early 1990s, but it was dropped by the Kuwaiti Ministry of Education because of the difficulties teachers had teaching it. In an effort to provide guidance for reintroducing the concept into the curriculum, this…

One of the key tasks of schooling is to ensure that children become confident readers and writers, able to access the curriculum and to be prepared for the myriad of demands on their literacy skills in adult life. The aim of Every Child a Reader (ECAR) is to target those with reading difficulties (mostly living in poverty) and make sure that they…

Learning to teach is a difficult and challenging process for beginning teachers in the national curriculum contexts due to several pressures that the centralised system presents for school and classroom contexts. This study investigated the difficulties beginning middle school mathematics teachers faced in the Turkish national curriculum context…

Math skills are essential to daily life, impacting a person's ability to function at home, work, and in the community. Although reading has been the focus in recent years, many students struggle in math. The inability to master math calculation and problem solving has contributed to the rising incidence of student failure, referrals for special…