Globalisation and policy transfer in education make it incumbent upon decision makers to prioritise among competing policy options, select policy initiatives that are appropriate for their national contexts, and understand how system-specific factors moderate the relationship between those policies and student outcomes. This study used qualitative…

The purpose of this study was to compare students' results in mathematics from a large-scale standardized assessment, the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), with a set of teacher-developed, school-based assessments. A case study of an all-boys secondary school in Sydney, New South Wales, Australia, was conducted over…

This article explores the neo-institutional theory of global policy convergence, or "isomorphism", by comparatively examining one of its most recent manifestations--the global diffusion of national standardised testing--in Australia and Japan. By understanding the particular configurations of national testing as being conditioned by both…

The "cloze" test is one possible investigative instrument for predicting text comprehensibility. Conceptual coding of student replacement of deleted words has been considered to be more valid than exact coding, partly because conceptual coding seemed fairer to poorer readers. This paper reports a quantitative study of 447 Australian…

Cloze testing is a widely-used procedure to test learners' reading comprehension in learning a language, but little is known if it can really improve learners' reading comprehension skills. This paper attempts to seek answers to this question by comparing the cloze test scores of two groups of students (Experimental versus Control) undertaking…

In 1981, the reading achievement of a representative sample of Queensland (Australia) Year 5 students was assessed by using a test that measured skills in the areas of vocabulary, comprehension, and speed of reading. The aim of this testing was to compare reading achievement in 1981 with reading achievement in 1971 and 1976. Comparisons of…

Results of a previous meta-analysis of gender differences in reading achievement at the secondary school level (Lietz, in press) showed significant differences between major assessment programs. Thus, the gender gap in favour of girls was more pronounced for the assessment programs conducted by the National Assessment of Educational Programs in…

The Multilevel Assessment Program tests for urban schools are conducted annually across Australia's Northern Territory in reading and mathematics. The program allows performance to be monitored at the system level for Years 5 and 7. Results show that, in terms of system performance on the link questions, there was no difference between 1992 and…

This report presents the results and sample items of a reading test and a mathematics test administered to Year 5 and Year 7 primary level students in 1989 in the Northern Territory of Australia. The Primary Assessment Program (PAP) monitors achievement in English and Mathematics in urban schools. All students in Years 5 and 7 are tested in…

This report describes the aggregated reading and mathematics performances of students in years 5 and 7 in urban Northern Territory (Australia) schools on the Primary Assessment Program (PAP) tests. The aggregated results are encouraging, with apparent gains in some reading tests over the preceding year, and no evidence of decline in the others.…

This report contains details of the results of the Primary Assessment Program conducted in 1991 in urban and non-urban schools in the Northern Territory of Australia. The assessment program, conducted annually at years 5 and 7 in urban schools and at ages 10 years and above in non-urban schools, monitors achievement in English and mathematics. In…