Acceleration of digital communication has changed the nature of reading and young people today need to engage multimodal skills for reading success in the digital world. While historically there have been social justice issues for marginalised students in terms of reading, the digital age is creating new equity issues across the globe. This…

Data reporting in the Australian education system produces deficit-based comparisons of academic achievement between Indigenous and non-Indigenous students. Since 2009, data from the National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) have been used by the Australian government to allow it to report on 'Closing the Gap' policy. These…

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…

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…

In this paper we explore how participation in a constructivist-oriented, classroom aligned mathematics intervention program advanced the learning and positive dispositions of Grade 1 students who were failing to thrive when learning mathematics. Intervention programs are an approach to differentiated instruction that some schools adopt, but there…

A quality education is a basic societal right. Yet for many Aboriginal students that right is not yet a reality. This paper focuses on the situation of Aboriginal/palawa school students in Tasmania and employs a quantitative methodology to examine the comparative educational achievements of Aboriginal school students. State level Grade 3, 5, 7 and…

"Make It Count" was a large scale, government-funded, project aimed at improving the mathematics learning of Indigenous students. NAPLAN Numeracy test results were used as one measure of the effect of the program. In this paper we report on the performance on these tests of Indigenous students in schools involved in the project. Group…

There has been a major and growing international focus on improving the quality of teaching for decades. In Australia, there have been numerous key national initiatives introduced since 2007 with the aim of improving school, teacher and student performance. These include national testing and reporting of student achievement, national professional…

This paper examines changes in demographic and socioeconomic inequalities in student achievement over the school career, and the extent that these inequalities are accounted for by other influences such as, region and socioeconomic background (where appropriate), school differences and prior achievement. The data analysed are from a longitudinal…