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…

Collaborative testing has been shown to enhance student performance compared to individual testing. It is suggested that collaborative testing promotes higher order thinking, but research has yet to explore this assumption directly. The aim of this study was to explore the benefits of collaborative testing on overall performance, as well as…

The enduring monolingual mindset in English-speaking countries results in widespread belief that additional language learning takes time away from literacy in the societal language. Yet, extensive research has shown that time spent learning additional languages enhances learners' literacy skills, providing first language literacy is sufficiently…

Curriculum design, teaching methods, assessments and range of academic support need to be inclusive in Open Access Enabling courses. The findings of this study confirm a correlation between student access to online learning materials and a positive impact on grades in science courses. More specifically, students who frequently use the online…

Grouping students by academic achievement level has been practised in a wide variety of forms and contexts for over a century. Despite a general consensus in the research that between-class achievement grouping provides no overall benefit for students, the practice has persisted in various guises. Between-class achievement grouping is common in…

Developments in school education in Australia over the past decade have witnessed the rise of national efforts to reform curriculum, assessment and reporting. Constitutionally the power to decide on curriculum matters still resides with the States. Higher stakes in assessment, brought about by national testing and international comparative…

This article reports the findings of a study showing that one-third of all foreign students who studied at Australian universities speak English so poorly that they should never have been granted visas to study in the country in the first place. The study, by Robert Birrell, director of the Centre for Population and Urban Research at Australia's…

Three groups of students were tested on the same material in three different forms of examination. They performed better in multiple-choice and in cued essay questions than in uncued essay questions. (Author/LBH)

This interim report summarizes ongoing research reported from the Australian Capital Territory, Queensland, Tasmania and Western Australia on the relationship between matriculation through the Tertiary Education Entrance Project Series A Test Battery and university performance. In view of the preliminary nature of the findings, the tables are…

Examines whether students who are intrinsically motivated about learning procrastinate less than those students who are externally motivated and also explores the consequences of procrastination. Indicates that students whose motivation is external are more likely to procrastinate while procrastination is associated with poor academic performance…

A study was conducted to examine and compare, in 10 selected countries, the interaction between current conceptions and theories of assessment and assessment practices. Of particular interest was the nature of changing practice and theory in assessing the learning achievements of students in elementary and secondary education, as well as the…

This study analyzed the Tertiary Admission Examination and Australian Scholastic Aptitude Test results for 264 pairs of 17-year-old monozygotic and dizygotic twins in Western Australia to determine if examination performance is influenced by environmental or genetic factors. Purely environmental models are rejected as inadequate explanations of…

In July 2001, the Ministerial Council on Education, Employment, Training and Youth Affairs (MCEETYA) agreed to the development of assessment instruments and key performance measures for reporting on student skills, knowledge and understandings in primary science. It directed the newly established Performance Measurement and Reporting Taskforce…

This publication on the New South Wales' Basic Skills Testing Program (BSTP) describes the development of the program's tests, the analysis of students' results, and the communication of results to parents, teachers, and schools. In BSTP tests, basic skills are defined not as low-level, rudimentary survival skills, but as major areas of learning…

The question of bias in the way Higher School Certificate (HSC) scores relate to university results is examined. Analyses showed that HSC scores were biased against state school students. State school students were found to perform better at university than do independent school students having the same HSC scores. (Author/MLW)