This paper aims to provide some insight into the links between attendance, retention and engagement of Indigenous senior students in an urban environment. A study of 58 students from two urban high schools during the period 2009-14 was undertaken. The study used data from a variety of school records, as well as informal interviews with students.…

Senior secondary mathematics in Australia is generally characterised by a challenging prescribed curriculum, textbook usage, high homework expectations and externally imposed assessment tasks. An increasing number of senior secondary mathematics teachers are incorporating a flipped classroom approach into their teaching as a means of addressing…

Using Stochastic Frontier Analysis, this article examines the efficiency and effectiveness of financial inputs and demographic data for educational outputs as measured by the Year 12 results for New South Wales secondary schools using a panel dataset from 2005 to 2010. Effective schools, in these analyses, are those that have higher Year 12…

Using information gathered from a specifically created database, ALIAS, this paper sets out to examine the variations and changes to the works that appeared on the English reading lists of the different Australian states in their literature course(s) between 1945 and 2005. All those states which offered a set of public examinations at the 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…

Sport is a context that provides positive developmental benefits to adolescents. However, these benefits are not distributed equally to all participants. This study examined whether the motivational constructs of attainment value and ability self-concept were related to positive developmental experiences in sport, and tested intensity of…

The ability to represent the world like a scientist is difficult to teach; it is more than simply knowing the representations (e.g., graphs, words, equations and diagrams). For meaningful science learning to take place, consideration needs to be given to explicitly integrating representations into instructional methods, linked to the content, and…

Traditionally, the domain of higher education, the 'flipped classroom' is gaining in popularity in secondary school settings. In the flipped classroom, digital technologies are used to shift direct instruction from the classroom to the home, providing students with increased autonomy over their learning. While advocates of the approach believe it…

In Australia there is no centrally administered nationwide assessment system for students who complete their final year (Year 12) of high school. Each state and territory uses its own Year 12 assessment system. Apart from Queensland and the Australian Capital Territory, all states and territories use externally set competitive examinations. The…

As the Australian labour market restructured during the 1980s and 1990s, Year 12 retention rates more than doubled between 1983 and 1993 secondary schools diversified to include vocational education and training programs as alternative pathways through school. From a human capital perspective, the completion of vocational qualifications in school…

This paper discusses a research project undertaken to examine teachers' perceptions of creative writing in the senior English curriculum. It was a case study undertaken in a state high school in Melbourne under the Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE). The project investigated the challenges facing English teachers as they prepare students to…

Using a mixed-methods approach the authors compared the associated practices of senior physics teachers (n = 7) and students (n = 53) in a 1:1 laptop environment with those of senior biology teachers (n = 10) and students (n = 125) also in a 1:1 laptop environment, in seven high schools in Sydney, NSW, Australia. They found that the physics…

The most recent Program for International Student Assessment (PISA) (2009) mathematical literacy results provide evidence that in Western English-speaking countries, including Australia, the gender gap in achievement appears to be widening in favour of males. In the study reported in this article, the aim was to explore the effects of gender,…

This paper reports on the nature of the conceptual understandings developed by Year 12 Victorian Certificate of Education (VCE) physics students as they made the transition from the essentially deterministic notions of classical physics, to interpretations characteristic of quantum theory. The research findings revealed the fact that the…

A variety of factors are associated with students' achievement in secondary school physics, including cohort size--the total number of students studying Physics in the school--and socioeconomic status. Earlier studies also showed boys achieving better in Physics, while more recent research has shown better results for girls. Statistical analysis…