In recent years many policy and curriculum reforms aimed at improving Australian students' literacy and numeracy levels have been introduced into schools and in initial teacher education. Despite this, the Australian National Assessment Plan, Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) data indicates that there has been little or no improvement in Australian…

Purpose: The purpose of this paper is to compare measures of socio-economic status (Index of Community Socio-educational Advantage values (ICSEA)), school performance, school funding and school readiness in terms of their impact on student performance. In this respect, the paper tests the proposition -- given research that suggests the teacher is…

School leaders in Queensland, Australia, are working in a rapidly shifting policy landscape, expected to work towards system-defined improvement measures involving increasingly higher external accountabilities. This article analyses a group of long-term case studies of the effects of school improvement expectations on principals since 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.…

Australian students' performance on national and international literacy assessments has declined since 2000, while teachers in contemporary classrooms contend with conditions of increased complexity and uncertainty. In July 2017, the Australian Government commissioned a panel of experts to provide advice on how to improve Australian students'…

The annual National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) measures the literacy and numeracy skills of primary and secondary students in Australia. Under the three Smarter Schools National Partnership, additional funding is provided to the independent schools with the expectation of improving student performance. Using multilevel…

Governments and their policy decisions inevitably influence the pedagogical practices of teachers. There have been considerable curriculum changes and national reforms in Australia with the implementation of two very different national curricula documents in the early childhood sector in the last decade. The political landscape in Western…

With schools coming under pressure to perform and produce outcomes, the caring practices of the institution have been increasingly framed around issues of achievement, excellence and outcomes. In this article, we examine how the performativity-driven practices of care impact on the possibilities of social inclusion for marginalised students.…

This study explored students' feelings during the Australian National Assessment Program -- Literacy and Numeracy. It features student voice depicted as self-drawn images accompanied by words as they journeyed through four phases of the NAPLAN process: preparation, participation, completion and results. The 34 students in Years 3, 5 and 7 attended…

Since 2008, secondary school English teachers have been at the receiving end of contradictory advice on how to best prepare their students for the literacy component of the National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN). On the one hand, Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority (ACARA) asserts that the 'best…

With the rise of large-scale academic assessment programs around the world, there is a need to better understand the factors predicting students' achievement in these assessment exercises. This investigation into national numeracy assessment drew on ecological and transactional conceptualizing involving student, student/home, and school factors.…

Recent research has shown how the statistical bias in Rasch model difficulty estimates induced by guessing in multiple-choice items can be eliminated. Using vertical scaling of a high-profile national reading test, it is shown that the dominant effect of removing such bias is a nonlinear change in the unit of scale across the continuum. The…

International and national testing of numerical and language skills has become a regular part of educational systems in many countries. In Australia, the "National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN) has been used since 2008 to carry out regular tests of literacy and numeracy amongst school students nationally. Since the…

This article reports on the effectiveness of an intervention using conceptual change approaches within challenging tasks, on the mathematics gains for low-performing year 3-6 students in in six primary schools. Quantitative data from PAT-Maths testing for each year showed a consistently large effect size of 0.7 compared to expected gain data from…

Scores from the "Australian National Assessment Program--Literacy and Numeracy" (NAPLAN) identify students "at risk" of not meeting minimum standards deemed necessary for future success in school and employment. The NAPLAN tests include items related to numeracy but also mathematics content and skills. Research in the area of…