The National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) is intended to assess all Australian students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 to ensure equity and inclusion. This paper explores the extent to which equity and inclusion are achieved for students with disability through NAPLAN reporting. Document analysis of publicly accessible NAPLAN…

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…

The science teacher in the modern high school acts as the designer and driver of the in-class practice. In this role, the teacher must broadly assess the effect of the practice on the student. This would rely on accurate self-knowledge of how they act in class and impact their students. In this study we explore these issues by comparing the…

This article considers the ways in which two senior secondary assessment policies that aim to be inclusive are enacted for students from refugee backgrounds. The final years of secondary school in Australia are shaped by high-stakes assessment requirements. Yet there have been policy moves in South Australia to be more inclusive of students by…

Sports participation and elite sporting success are fundamental to Australian culture and a prominent source of national pride. As sport is a major part of day-to-day living in Australia, it is not surprising that many young people aspire to careers as sportspersons. While such aspirations are often dismissed as fanciful and unattainable, the…

Young people may face conflicting and confusing messages about what it means to respond well in relation to homophobia and transphobia. Consequently, we ask--What might it mean to respond well to homophobia and transphobia? This strategy, inspired by Anika Thiem and Judith Butler, is recognition of the ambivalent conditions which structure…

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 "Australian Curriculum: History" has emerged out of a neoliberal federal education policy landscape. This is a policy landscape where pragmatic and performative, rather than pedagogic concerns are clearly foregrounded, and this has implications for curriculum development and implementation. A useful way to conceptualise the features,…

The aims of this study were to examine whether adolescent self-efficacy mediates the associations between parental control, perceptions of the importance of healthy nutrition for child health and barriers to buying fruits and vegetables and adolescent fruit consumption using a theoretically derived explanatory model. Data were drawn from a…

Set within the affective turn in cultural and social theory, in this paper, I explore the significance of materiality and matter, most specifically, bodily matter, in the pedagogic practices of contemporary school classrooms. The received view in education is that affect is tantamount to emotion or feeling and that materials, such as bodily…

In Australia, there is a crisis in science education with students becoming disengaged with canonical science in the middle years of schooling. One recent initiative that aims to improve student interest and motivation without diminishing conceptual understanding is the context-based approach. Contextual units that connect the canonical science…

In this study, the authors compared the results of a coping measure completed by 98 seventh through ninth grade students who were assessed as having learning disabilities with published means from the general Australian student population. The "Adolescent Coping Scale" was the measure used. The results suggested higher use by students…

This paper identifies the ways in which the Productive Pedagogies framework has been refined as a research tool for evaluating classroom practice within a current study into issues of school reform in Queensland. Initially emerging from the landmark Queensland School Reform Longitudinal Study (1998-2001), the Productive Pedagogies has been taken…

Positive education is defined as education for both traditional skills and for happiness. The high prevalence worldwide of depression among young people, the small rise in life satisfaction, and the synergy between learning and positive emotion all argue that the skills for happiness should be taught in school. There is substantial evidence from…

This article compares prevalence estimates of substance use and delinquent behavior in Washington State, United States and Victoria, Australia, two states chosen for their different policy environments around problem behavior. Few comparisons of international differences on rates of multiple problem behavior exist, and most are based on methods…