The Commonwealth of Australia (2016) inquiry into access to learning for students with disability received several submissions on gatekeeping practices in Australian schools, resulting in minimised school enrolment and reduced participation in classrooms. The inquiry also received reports of the use of restrictive practices such as restraint and…

Opportunities for social mobility are generated by education systems designed to alleviate the effects of social origin by providing equality of opportunities and resources. The persistence of the strong association between socioeconomic status (SES) and child's educational achievement and attainment suggests that social origin continues to play…

We evaluated STEM (science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) coursework selection by women and men (representative longitudinal sample, 10,370 Australians) in senior high school and university, controlling achievement and expectancy-value variables. A near-zero total effect of gender on high school STEM enrollment reflected pathways…

Research on the achievement of rural and remote students in science and mathematics is located within a context of falling levels of participation in physical science and mathematics courses in Australian schools, and underrepresentation of rural students in higher education. International studies such as the Programme of International Student…

This paper reports preliminary findings on students enrolled in a massive open online course, who were also assigned to work in groups. Part of a larger study on the effect of groups on retention and completion in MOOCs, the paper provides students' demographics (i.e., location, gender, education level, and employment status), and motivation for…

The aims of this study were to describe the characteristics of older Australian university students (aged 60+ years); to identify the factors that motivate late-life, tertiary-level learning; and to capture older students' views about the role of tertiary-level learning in promoting healthy aging. In 2012, an invitation to participate in the study…

The impact of the first round of Victorian demand-driven reforms, referred to as the Victorian Training Guarantee (VTG), on enrolments and training outcomes is the focus of this report. The VTG reforms were introduced to create a more responsive training market and were implemented between July 2009 and January 2011. Subsequent reforms introduced…

This publication is a preliminary release of data on the number of students, full-year training equivalents, hours of delivery and subject enrolments relating to Australia's public vocational education and training (VET) system for 2010. As these figures are preliminary, they may be subject to change as further processing of data is undertaken.…

This paper contributes to the literature by separately analysing the course enrolment and completion effects of vocational education and training (VET) as well as higher education. Moreover, we investigate the persistence of these wage effects over time while controlling for two potential selection biases. We take advantage of the Longitudinal…

This technical report details the derived variables developed for users of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data. The derived variables fall into the categories education, employment and social, and help to simplify the complexity of the LSAY data by providing useful indicators for analysis. To help LSAY data users understand…

This technical paper details the derived variables developed for users of the Longitudinal Surveys of Australian Youth (LSAY) data. These variables fall into the categories of education, employment and social, and help to simplify the use of the data by providing useful indicators for analysis. This paper provides descriptions, formats and…

The renewal of quality assurance in Australian higher education comes at a time when the higher education sectors in Australia and around the world are experiencing a number of key challenges. These include: ongoing decline in public funding of universities; the massification of higher education and demand for it during global recession;…

This paper produces two sets of estimates of future student demand for higher education in Australia. The two sets of estimates allow Go8 to consider the capacity of the university sector to accommodate future growth in student numbers (including staff and facilities), and to identify the costs involved, including for the Government which has…

The thesis of this paper is that the open and distance education sector is based on a framework of terminology that is typologically inconsistent and which lacks clarity, and open and distance education teaching and learning models are examined to explore these concerns. The findings of this analysis are then used to assist in the articulation of…

This research used a survey and interviews to find out which science subjects 174 Year 10 students wanted to study in Year 11 and why. The results showed that the major reasons students wanted to study a particular science subject were because they were interested in the subject matter and because they felt they would achieve well in that subject.…