The gender gap in physics in Australian secondary schools remains a significant issue. This study aims to address this problem by examining how physics teachers perceive girls' participation in physics, and how these perceptions influence their approach to gender issues and their potential impact on girls' physics identity. The study uses a…

Completion of higher-level mathematics courses in secondary school is advantageous for success in many university-level science, technology, engineering and mathematics courses. Based on survey data from 942 Year 10 students from Western Australia, the Year 11 mathematics course choices made by girls and boys were compared. Findings indicated that…

Social identity is an important social determinant of student outcomes such as mental health and well-being. Currently, no validated social identity measures exist for adolescents in secondary school settings. A new 'Adolescent Social Identity' measure was developed by adapting two social identity dimensions from a validated reputation enhancement…

Background: Research illustrates that girls indicate more positive attitudes towards reading than boys. Gender differences are often presented in simplistic terms with 'all boys' represented as one homogenous group. Methods: This study developed a survey to identify similarities and differences in boys' and girls' attitudes towards a range of…

Effective collaborative problem solving comprises cognitive dimensions, in which men tend to outperform women, and social dimensions in which women tend to outperform men. We extend research on between-country differences in gender gaps by considering collaborative problem solving and its association with two indicators of societal-level gender…

There is a significant amount of research into gender differences in academic performance in the science, technology, engineering and maths (STEM) fields. This has identified important differences between the academic achievement of men and women as measured through grade point averages and time to completion. However, the specific STEM fields of…

Understanding the gender dynamics in educational transitions can help target policies to support equitable access to education as well as its quality and labour-market outcomes. In almost all OECD countries, the gender gap in favour of women is wider in tertiary education than at upper secondary level. Differences in programme orientation and…

Objective: A measure was recently developed which assesses self-efficacy to resist NSSI across differing contexts. The aim of this study was to examine how self-efficacy to resist NSSI across contexts interacts with NSSI-related outcome expectancies when differentiating NSSI history. Participant: 501 Australian college students aged 17-40 years (M…

Prior research suggests that human children lack an aptitude for tool innovation. However, children's tool making must be explored across a broader range of tasks and across diverse cultural contexts before we can conclude that they are genuinely poor tool innovators. To this end, we investigated children's ability to independently construct 3 new…

The purpose of this research was to explore gender differences and cultural differences in school motivation among students from eight culturally diverse groups from Western and non-Western societies. The selected groups come from Hong Kong, the Philippines, Singapore, Australia, the Netherlands, and Qatar. More than 10,000 secondary school…

While technical and vocational education and training (TVET) has the potential to bolster the participation of women in the labour market, this potential is not always well understood and capitalized on. In general, female students are lowly represented in TVET compared to general programmes, and in particular girls and women tend to be…

Microfinance has been recognized globally as a poverty alleviating strategy and particularly as a gender equality enhancing approach. There have been immense, intense and nuanced debates in the field of international development, feminist studies and comparative social policy regarding the role of microfinance in addressing gendered poverty. This…

Due to its close links to the labour market, technical and vocational education and training (TVET) can play an important role to improve job opportunities and livelihoods for young people, and in particular for disadvantaged youth. However, this potential is not always fully realized, and relatively little research and evidence has been collected…

This retrospective narrative investigation challenges aspects of structural determinism. The biographical data generated in the study revealed that the baby-boomer, male participants were not academically constrained by their working class identities. Interpersonal relationships experienced within an individual's unique communities of practice…

Aliteracy, the state in which the skill to read has been acquired, but not the will, is a growing concern in research on adolescence internationally. The West Australian Study in Adolescent Book Reading (WASABR) aimed to discover current attitudes toward and levels of engagement in recreational book reading among 520 adolescent students from 20…