The analysis of exemplars of different quality is a potentially powerful tool in enabling students to understand assessment expectations and appreciate academic standards. Through a systematic review methodology, this paper synthesises exemplar-based research designs, exemplar implementation and the educational effects of exemplars. The review of…

Statistical investigations, a thread within the statistics strand of the mathematics and statistics learning area (Ministry of Education, 2007), are underpinned by the statistical enquiry cycle. As teachers introduce their students to the statistical enquiry cycle, they are supporting their students to become data detectives, posing and answering…

Many of the mediation analyses reported in the literature are based on concurrent or single-occasion data sets. The 2 overarching themes of the present article are: Results of concurrent mediations are inherently ambiguous, and researchers would be wise to conduct mediations on longitudinal data sets instead. An example included here demonstrates…

School efforts to engage parents are posited to influence whether and how they are involved in their children's schooling. The authors examined educators' engagement efforts in beginning reading, their subjective evaluations of engagement practices, and beliefs about parent involvement, in two stratified samples of New Zealand elementary school…

There is a growing recognition that parents play an important role in the academic achievement of their children. This role includes both the interactions they have with their children and the management of resources that can contribute to their children's achievement. To better understand parents' roles, it is important to understand their…

Model-based clustering methods, commonly referred to as finite mixture modeling, have been applied to a wide variety of cross-sectional and longitudinal data to account for heterogeneity in population characteristics. In this article, we elucidate 2 such approaches: growth mixture modeling and latent profile analysis. Both techniques are…

The paper draws on a series of Australian Research Council (ARC) projects aimed at understanding better the process of doctoral examination. The early phase focussed on the Australian doctorate, which functions without a Viva, while the later phase was concerned with comparing the earlier findings with analysis of the United Kingdom (UK) and New…

This article focuses on analysing the effect of educational differentiation policies of OECD educational systems on socioeconomically disadvantaged students, based on data from PISA 2009. The analysis is conducted on the basis of a definition of two subgroups of disadvantaged students: those that achieve high scores, and those obtaining scores…

This article shares and extends research-based developments at the University of Otago, New Zealand, that seek to explore how students' worldviews change as they experience higher education with us. We emphasise that sustainability attributes may be described in terms of knowledge, skills and competencies but that these are underpinned by…

Despite career satisfaction models being well established, little is understood about the career satisfaction of indigenous employees. Using a sample of 172 Maori employees, the indigenous people of New Zealand, we tested a career satisfaction model with a cultural wellbeing factor over and above established factors of human capital,…

Research, such as that collated as part of the New Zealand Ministry of Education's (MoE) Iterative Best Evidence Synthesis (BES), indicates that regular Professional Learning and Development (PLD) for educators can have a positive effect on the quality of teaching and, in turn, on outcomes for diverse students. PLD, though, needs to offer…

Outlines design issues involved with introducing an income-contingent, college student-loan program and describes the solutions adopted by Australian and New Zealand governments. Uses dynamic microsimulation to simulate the likely future repayment profiles for two Australian ICL schemes and assesses the proportion of total debt repaid. (19…

In this article I critique six quantitative studies of Reading Recovery and five reviews of Reading Recovery research published in Tier 1 research journals--journals accepted as having high levels of "expert scrutiny" through peer review. I also critique several quantitative research studies of Reading Recovery published in Tier 2…

This document contains 95 papers and summaries of 5 poster sessions from an Australian conference on putting vocational education and training (VET) research to work. The following are among the areas covered in the papers: factors affecting VET graduates' employability over time; technical and further education (TAFE) institutes as models of…