Background: Research on academic development has mainly focused on early time periods with less attention on individual differences in development in the later school years. Methods: To improve our knowledge of how students develop academically during later school years, this study used a multivariate growth model to investigate the developmental…

A higher proportion of students are privately educated in Australia, compared with many other nations. In this paper, we tested the assumption that private schools offer better quality education than public schools. We examined differences in student achievement on the National Assessment Programme: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) between public,…

The increasing influx into Australia of (im)migrants whose first language is not English has made Australia linguistically more diverse than ever. Despite this, Australia remains a strongly Anglocentric nation, and migrants, in response, tend to abandon their heritage languages (HL) and shift to English relatively quickly. Korean migrants in…

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…

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…

This study investigates consistent and inconsistent respondents to mixed-worded questionnaire scales in large-scale assessments. Mixed-worded scales contain both positively and negatively worded items and are universally applied in different survey and content areas. Due to the changing wording, these scales require a more careful reading and…

Sports participation and elite sporting success are fundamental to Australian culture and a prominent source of national pride. As sport is a major part of day-to-day living in Australia, it is not surprising that many young people aspire to careers as sportspersons. While such aspirations are often dismissed as fanciful and unattainable, the…

National standardized assessment programs have increasingly included extended written performances, amplifying the need for reliable, valid, and efficient methods of assessment. This article examines a two-stage method using comparative judgments and calibrated exemplars as a complement and alternative to existing methods of assessing writing.…

This study examined indicators of mental health, as well as strengths and difficulties, as reported by same-age boarding and non-boarding students spanning four time points over a 2-year period as they transitioned from primary to boarding school in Western Australia (i.e., at the end of Grade 7, beginning of Grade 8, end of Grade 8, and end of…

Many current economic and social challenges lead to waves of migrating people. The countries where migrants seek refuge can be ethnically homogeneous and monolingual such as Greece, or more frequently, ethnically diverse with local Indigenous populations which have been subjugated and marginalized, such as the US or Australia. In either context, a…

The benefit of recreational book reading is well recognized, however the role of teachers in encouraging recreational reading beyond the primary school years of skill acquisition is not clearly defined. In 2012, the West Australian Study in Adolescent Book Reading was undertaken in 20 schools in Western Australia. As part of the study, students…

Chronic victimisation in adolescence is a traumatic experience with potential negative long-term health consequences. Given that victimisation has been shown to increase over the transition from primary to secondary school, longitudinal data from 1810 students transitioning from primary to secondary school were used to identify victimisation…

Positive education is defined as education for both traditional skills and for happiness. The high prevalence worldwide of depression among young people, the small rise in life satisfaction, and the synergy between learning and positive emotion all argue that the skills for happiness should be taught in school. There is substantial evidence from…

The importance of teachers' content knowledge for effective teaching of mathematics has long been recognised. Recent national testing regimes in Australia (National Assessment Program-Literacy and Numeracy [NAPLAN]) have raised questions of the adequacy of teachers' content knowledge. This, in turn has focused attention upon the quality of teacher…

The research was conducted in Sydney and Hong Kong using students, from grades 5 to 9, whose first language or teaching medium was English, learning to read Chinese as second language. According to cognitive load theory, the processing of single Chinese characters accompanied by pictures should impose extraneous cognitive load and thus hinders…