The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is intended to assess all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to ensure equity and inclusion. This paper explores the extent to which equity and inclusion are achieved for students with disability through NAPLAN reporting. Document analysis of publicly accessible NAPLAN…

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…

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…

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…

Attention skills are strong cross-sectional predictors of reading comprehension from childhood through to adolescence. However, less is known about the developmental relations between these two domains across this period. This study examined the codevelopment of reading and attention in a community sample of 614 Australian school students (50%…

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 National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) was introduced into Australian schools in 2008. Since NAPLAN's standardised tests are now regarded as high-stakes assessment, how well students perform has now become much more important. The findings presented in this paper pertain to students' experiences of how NAPLAN has affected…

According to creative writing pedagogies academic Susanne Gannon ("English in Australia, 54"(2), 43-56, 2019), and the Federal government-commissioned NAPLAN review (McGaw et al., 2020), NAPLAN has restricted how writing is taught in secondary schools. A NAPLAN-influenced structural approach to teaching writing has subsumed the…

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…

It is well accepted and understood amongst the mathematics education community that numeracy is the responsibility of all teachers, across all levels of schooling. However, the way numeracy is understood and actioned across the Early Childhood, Primary and Secondary contexts is different. This paper reports on a case study of secondary school…

Australian children from regional, rural and remote (RRR) areas exhibit lower educational outcomes than their peers in metropolitan areas. The mechanisms driving the comparatively poorer educational outcomes of children in RRR areas, however, are not well understood. This paper proposes and tests two sets of factors that may be responsible for…

National Assessment Program for Numeracy and Literacy (NAPLAN) is the national assessment programme for literacy and numeracy in Australia administered to children in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 each year. The testing process was introduced in 2008 and is described by the developers as low stakes, however, research has highlighted that this is not the…

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…