Purpose: Videogames are complex, meaningful and multimodal texts. This study aims to explore how students could learn about narratives from, and be engaged by, playing a videogame and how a teacher adapted their pedagogy to incorporate the young adult videogame (YA game) "What Remains of Edith Finch" into an English Language Arts…

The 'responding' strand of the Australian visual arts curriculum promotes twenty-first century learning skills through students' analytical engagement with artworks and artists. Assessing students' experiences and engagement is one strategy to improve teaching and learning in responding. However, there are no validated, subject-specific student…

Among a sample of 472 Indigenous high school students, juxtaposed with 15,884 non-Indigenous students from the same 54 schools, we investigated variation in motivation and engagement from school to school, and the role of motivation and engagement in predicting various academic outcomes (aspirations, buoyancy, homework completion, and…

The barriers to school attendance that affect young Aboriginal people in Australia are diverse, immense and well documented; however, except for a handful of studies, Aboriginal students' voices receive no platform for policy makers to hear them. In this paper, we present results from yarning circles about barriers to school attendance conducted…

This study draws on student engagement factors to examine the relationship between students' non-school-based arts experiences on their intrinsic motivation and self-efficacy to participate in visual arts responding tasks. Visual arts responding in the curriculum includes learning about artists and artworks, decoding art and making critical…

This paper focuses on using sociocultural theory to support a context-based approach to teaching mathematics. A goal of the research was to explore the opportunities-to-learn of using a context-based approach to enrich student engagement with mathematics. This paper focuses on the practice of one female secondary school teacher as expressed…

Students' post-school options are limited if they have not completed mathematics subjects involving the study of calculus. This paper employs a sociocultural approach to identify institutional practices that might promote sustained engagement with these subjects among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with mathematics…

The link between recreational book reading and improved literacy performance is consistently supported by educational research. Increasing engagement in recreational book reading remains imperative for English teachers, though how to best facilitate this in a secondary context is an object of contention, with limited research in this field. The…

Visual arts theory is fundamental to facilitating visual literacy, or students' ability to decode and construct imagery. Visual literacy skills support students' participation in contemporary society. This doctoral study uses a mixed methods approach to investigate students' engagement in visual arts theory, as increased engagement may facilitate…

Alternative education programs are one way of responding to the disengagement of young people from mainstream schools. While there are a great variety of programs, those where young people experience success have incorporated a number of elements of best practice (Mills & McGregor 2010). This article reviews the attributes of effective…

This paper reports on an evaluation of a distinctive university-school partnership program, Curriculum Bridges. Curriculum Bridges aims to develop the enthusiasm and capacity of students from disadvantaged schools in the fields of science, technology, engineering and mathematics (STEM). These objectives are sought by developing a theme in the…

Most traditional models of academic motivation focus on a small number of specific factors. However, the Student Motivation and Engagement Scale (MES) (Martin, 2007b) includes a fairly comprehensive range of perspectives on general student motivation. The current study set out (a) to provide an independent test of the proposed 11-factor structure…

A sample of Australian secondary school students was used to explore the relationships among a set of standardised Year 7 numeracy and literacy tests, measures taken at Year 10 of mathematics attitude and schoolwork effort, and Mathematics and English scores in a state-wide Year 10 examination. Additionally, the predictive capacity of the numeracy…

Introduction: The paper describes an interim model for understanding the influences on information use in relation to plagiarism, with a focus on secondary school students. Available literature mostly focuses on the tertiary level and on quantifying the extent of plagiarism, with limited availability of theory or empirical research focussing on…