This May sees the release of the results from the third PISA assessment of financial literacy. These results are largely consistent with previous findings, but also go beyond earlier assessments in probing students' behaviours and attitudes towards money matters (including digital money matters) and their exposure to financial education at school.…

Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative…

Research across five countries has identified inability to pay attention to mathematical detail -- the discipline of noticing -- is an issue in senior secondary school mathematics teachers. The test and questionnaire completed by an Australian cohort further identifies a reluctance to employ non-routine questions in assessments, with teachers…

The purpose of this study was to compare students' results in mathematics from a large-scale standardized assessment, the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), with a set of teacher-developed, school-based assessments. A case study of an all-boys secondary school in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was conducted over…

Considered by many as a source of valuable data and a potential to improve mathematics education, a significant amount of studies have been conducted on The National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) test results. This study is a systematic literature review of 86 peer-reviewed journal articles published between 2008 and 2017 to…

The OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) examines what students know in reading, mathematics and science, and what they can do with what they know. It provides the most comprehensive and rigorous international assessment of student learning outcomes to date. Results from PISA indicate the quality and equity of learning…

As a result of the growing use of state and national testing of literacy and numeracy among school students, there are increasing demands for teachers to interpret assessment data. In light of this, there is a need to provide benchmarks or a framework that identifies critical aspects of teachers' understanding that are needed to interpret data…

The National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLaN) is an annual literacy and numeracy test for all Australian students, and results from the test are disaggregated into a number of categories including language background other than English (LBOTE). For this and other categories, results on each section of the test are aggregated into…

One of the many challenges facing music educators is diminishing class time in lower secondary school in the face of the increasingly crowded curriculum and the advent of arts "taster" courses. However, music educators are still expected to be able to produce musically literate students capable of completing high level music courses in…

"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…

The "cloze" test is one possible investigative instrument for predicting text comprehensibility. Conceptual coding of student replacement of deleted words has been considered to be more valid than exact coding, partly because conceptual coding seemed fairer to poorer readers. This paper reports a quantitative study of 447 Australian…

Cloze testing is a widely-used procedure to test learners' reading comprehension in learning a language, but little is known if it can really improve learners' reading comprehension skills. This paper attempts to seek answers to this question by comparing the cloze test scores of two groups of students (Experimental versus Control) undertaking…

This study sought to explore what sort of relationships exist between students' number sense and their problem solving ability, and the contribution of the teacher's teaching style and the students' learning style towards students' performance in these two respective areas. The problem solving ability and number sense proficiency of three classes…

Results of a previous meta-analysis of gender differences in reading achievement at the secondary school level (Lietz, in press) showed significant differences between major assessment programs. Thus, the gender gap in favour of girls was more pronounced for the assessment programs conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Programs in…

In 2004, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) conducted an assessment of a sample of Year 6 and Year 10 students across Australia to assess their proficiency in civics and citizenship. The assessment of civics and citizenship is part of a national plan that is being put progressively in place to…