To promote scientific literacy in school science, students need to learn key concepts in science, along with the nature of scientific knowledge and how it is generated. Ideally, this learning mirrors authentic scientific inquiry through student engagement in three key epistemic practices: flexibility and creativity, knowledge construction, and…

This Snapshot investigates the career guidance and support available for 15-year-old students in their schools, who has the responsibility for providing this support and whether the type of support available varies according to students' socioeconomic background and the location of their school. It also examines the types of activities students…

This study investigated school connectedness, student engagement, academic grades, and student affect. Factor analyses of 331 adolescent students (Years 7, 9, and 11 in Australia), validated a four-factor model of school engagement. The factors revealed in the analyses were described as (1) future and task focus, (2) planning and motivation, (3)…

This study evaluated the psychometric properties of the Student Engagement Instrument--College version (SEI--C) with college students in the southeastern United States. Participants self-selected paper-and-pencil or online administration. Confirmatory factor analysis revealed a modified 5-factor structure. Measurement invariance of the modified…

This study examined the extent to which boys fell into clusters comprised of different levels of motivations and costs. In turn, the antecedents of these clusters and associations with engagement and wellbeing outcomes were considered. Based on survey responses from 168 students across Years 5, 7 and 9 from an all-boys' school in Sydney,…

The dual-factor model of mental health proposes that high wellbeing and low distress are necessary to define mental health. This study used latent profile analysis to identify mental health profiles in a sample of 3,587 Australian grade 6 students and explored the association between mental health profiles and school outcomes measured in grades 7…

This study analysed students' attitudes towards school and the relationship between these attitudes and reading performance. Using a sample of 57,572 Year 7 and 9 students from 306 Victorian government schools, the analysis combined two de-identified data sets -- students' responses to the Student Attitudes to School Survey and their performance…

Among a sample of 472 Indigenous high school students, juxtaposed with 15,884 non-Indigenous students from the same 54 schools, we investigated variation in motivation and engagement from school to school, and the role of motivation and engagement in predicting various academic outcomes (aspirations, buoyancy, homework completion, and…

There is growing interest in how to engage middle school students in science to improve their enthusiasm for science and to arrest the decline in uptake in the senior years. Also, there is interest in improving students' application of science to real-life situations, a requirement for international tests. One approach that offers hope for…

The barriers to school attendance that affect young Aboriginal people in Australia are diverse, immense and well documented; however, except for a handful of studies, Aboriginal students' voices receive no platform for policy makers to hear them. In this paper, we present results from yarning circles about barriers to school attendance conducted…

The philosophy of middle level education is to intentionally create a learning environment that supports every young adolescent. The literature around engagement points to the need for students to experience (among other requirements) a sense of belonging at school (SOBAS). When the need for belonging is not achieved there may be significant…

Students' post-school options are limited if they have not completed mathematics subjects involving the study of calculus. This paper employs a sociocultural approach to identify institutional practices that might promote sustained engagement with these subjects among students from disadvantaged backgrounds. Drawing on interviews with mathematics…

A significant body of research documents the negative consequences of dropping out of school for both the individual and society. In attempting to respond to the problem of early school leaving, schools and systems internationally have put in place a range of system-level and local responses such as mentoring, targeted additional career guidance…

Engaging middle school students in science continues to be a challenge in Australian schools. One initiative that has been tried in the senior years but is a more recent development in the middle years is the context-based approach. In this ethnographic study, we researched the teaching and learning transactions that occurred in one ninth grade…

This case study explored how students disaffected with their school experience were scaffolded during their participation in a middle-school mathematics classroom. Of particular interest were the level of student engagement in discussion about the mathematics being presented by the teacher and the approach to doing mathematics being displayed by…