Emphasis on continuous infant sleep overnight may be driven by parental concern of risk to child mental health outcomes. The Mercy Pregnancy and Emotional Wellbeing Study (MPEWS) examined whether infant sleep at 6 and 12 months postpartum predicts anxiety disorders at 2-4 years, and whether this is moderated by maternal depression, active physical…

People participate in vocational education and training (VET) for a variety of reasons and at different stages of their life. Some undertake VET to gain the vocational skills necessary to enter the labour market for the first time, while others enter in order to upgrade existing skills, learn new ones, or simply for personal interest. Successful…

Some children's speech impairment resolves spontaneously. Others have persistent problems affecting academic and social development. Identifying early markers that reliably predict long-term outcome would allow better prioritization for preschool intervention. This article evaluates the significance of different types of speech errors, made by 93…

Dispositions and motivations toward future adult life are crystalized during adolescence, and one of the key agents in this process is student-teacher relationships in the school. Adolescent students can be very sensitive to the differential treatments of teachers toward them and their fellow students, particularly with respect to fairness and…

Building active and informed citizens is a major part of civics and citizenship education in order to enhance and sustain democracies. Civic learning and civic action opportunities within school contexts are commonly claimed to promote an active and informed citizenry. In the present research, we examine the meaning of formal civics education and…

Child development for a cohort of urban Aboriginal children was assessed at three time points: 12 months, 3 years and 4.5 years. This paper reports developmental findings and explores the impact of child, family, home and community variables over time. Overall, child development at 4.5 years was significantly below the standardised mean. Female…

Policies of inclusion challenge the construct of readiness and require schools to prepare for the diversity of children as they transition to school. However, there is limited empirical evidence concerning how this challenge is met. This paper presents two Australian studies that investigate inclusive practices in the transition to school. Study 1…

The objective of this paper is to better understand the factors that affect the chances of re-engaging early school leavers in education, with a particular focus on the importance of time out from school (duration dependence) and school-related factors. Using data from three cohorts of the Longitudinal Survey of Australian Youth and duration…

Background: Older adults experience a high rate of falls when they transition to community-living following discharge from hospital. Objectives: To describe the proportion of older adults who could recall having discussed falls and falls prevention strategies with a health professional within 6 months following discharge from hospital. To describe…

Underperforming trainees requiring remediation may threaten patient safety and are challenging for vocational training programs. Decisions to institute remediation are high-stakes--remediation being resource-intensive and emotionally demanding on trainees. Detection of underperformance requiring remediation is particularly problematic in general…

The rise of global university rankings has garnered much attention in recent years. Various ranking systems exist, but all are conceptually similar in that universities are evaluated and ranked on the basis of comparable indicators, with a focus on research performance. Although these rankings are widely criticised as over-simplistic and…

Background: Little is known about the nature, range and prevalence of different subgroups in language trajectories extant in a population from 4 to 11 years. This hinders strategic targeting and design of interventions, particularly targeting those whose difficulties will likely persist. Methods: Children's language abilities from 4 to 11 years…

Recent Australian government targets for higher education participation have produced a flurry of activity focused on raising the aspirations of students from low socioeconomic status (SES) backgrounds. In this paper we test two key assumptions underpinning much of this activity: that students from low-SES backgrounds hold lower career…

The research investigated the association between school engagement and adult education and occupation outcomes, within the context of a 1985 Australian longitudinal national cohort study of the factors affecting children's long-term health and well-being. School engagement may be more modifiable than other factors related to academic success,…

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…