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,…

Alternative education programs are one way of responding to the disengagement of young people from mainstream schools. While there are a great variety of programs, those where young people experience success have incorporated a number of elements of best practice (Mills & McGregor 2010). This article reviews the attributes of effective…

In recent years, the numbers of girls in secondary and tertiary education studying Physics have declined. This research sought to investigate Years 10 and 11 female students' views about Physics and their physics teachers and was conducted in an all-girls independent school. While the findings show that in general these students do not relate well…

Identifies 20 major ideas about writing instruction resulting from a study of 93 Australian teachers of Grade 10 English. (RL)

The author discusses the aims, outline, and evaluation of an existing self-paced ungraded mathematics program for grades eight, nine, and ten. (MN)

A study documenting and describing dialogue journal writing in a group of nine tenth graders in an Australian secondary school English class is reported. The overall purpose was to understand the nature of dialogue journal writing and to assess its value as a suitable mode of encouraging writing among secondary students. Specific aspects of…

Research focused on two factors that may be influencing females in choice of careers. Factors are role-specific self-concept in science and self-perception in terms of stereotypical masculine and feminine characteristics. Logical ability and mathematics and science courses were also examined as factors in career choice. Results of data for 177…

This paper addresses components of a 3-year longitudinal study in which 9th and 10th grade students in Australia, Canada, and Zambia participated in data-handling programs through networked learning communities. Of interest here are the students' responses to a selection of "ends-in-view" problems, which formed the major part of the…

High school students' subject preferences in 30 Australian schools, examined with Holland's typology of persons and environments, showed data consistent with Holland's model, suggesting a strong association between interest in school subjects and occupational interest as well as an empirical basis for classifying school subjects in terms of…

Surveys of 10th graders in public and private Australian schools found major sector differences in numbers of children who held positive attitudes toward teachers and toward school and personally valued schoolwork. Students from all groups were more likely to have positive perceptions of school if they attended private schools. (SM)

Compared were the attributional patterns for success and failure in mathematics of 491 tenth-grade students in Papua New Guinea and Australia. Relatively few differences were found in the patterns of boys and girls or of high- and low-achieving students, but substantial differences were found between students in the two countries. (MNS)

The hypothesis that higher levels of job knowledge and/or more extensive career exploration would be indicated in higher correlations between self-estimates and measured interests was investigated in two separate studies. Job knowledge was assessed using the Job Knowledge Survey (JKS), and career exploration was assessed using the questionnaire,…

The free writing responses of 120 gifted/average Australian high school students (grades 8, 10, and 12) to a short story and a poem were coded according to Alan Purves' categories--engagement, perception, interpretation, evaluation, or miscellaneous--to detect any patterns of differences. The students also provided data about their preferences for…

Grade level and sex differences in attitudes to English, mathematics, social studies and art were explored among a sample of students in grades 7 through 10. Student attitudes generally were most favorable toward English, then toward mathematics, social studies, and (least favorable) art. (Author/MLW)

Found grades in science achieved by tenth-grade general science students correlated with their scores on Propositional Logic Test. The students' ability level was consistently related to the pattern of errors they committed on that measure. Mean scores were lowest on a subtest of ability to use the bicondition and implication, higher on the…