Attainment of grade-level reading proficiency by fourth grade is pivotal to student academic success. In fourth grade, students shift from learning to read to reading to learn where they gain the ability to use their reading skills to access knowledge. Despite the connection between fourth grade reading proficiency and future academic success,…

Two case studies of Australian primary school students tracked changes in their data interpretation and representation over three years. Students were engaged in predictive reasoning tasks based on their interpretation of a data table showing temperature change over time. Students' explanations and graphical representations were collected at the…

It is a much-lamented fact that research with the potential to inform or influence education policy instead remains policy inert. There are many reasons for this frustrating state of affairs, including a lack of strategic thinking on the part of researchers on how to successfully accomplish outreach--as opposed to communication with peers…

Social scientists have found income inequality is associated with an array of health and social problems, however the implications of income inequality for educational outcomes have not been investigated as thoroughly as other domains. In this study, I investigated how income inequality was associated with 4th grade academic achievement using…

This report, which is based on an invited presentation given at the 2015 meeting of the Association of Test Publishers, is a response to the continuing proliferation of scale linking studies that have occurred since the publication of "Uncommon Measures" in 1999.The report has four parts. First, I restate the conclusions made in…

The National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP), also known as the Nation's Report Card, is the most comprehensive measure of student learning, and is widely considered the gold standard for empirically measuring trends in student achievement outcomes in the United States. The NAEP data for 2018, which were released on April 23, 2020, offer…

Since its introduction in 2017, National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has been contracted by Ofqual to develop, deliver and analyse the results of the National Reference Test (NRT) in English and maths. The NRT is administered annually and shows if student performance in English and maths at GCSE level has changed from year-to-year.…

Attention skills are strong cross-sectional predictors of reading comprehension from childhood through to adolescence. However, less is known about the developmental relations between these two domains across this period. This study examined the codevelopment of reading and attention in a community sample of 614 Australian school students (50%…

Our purpose is to proffer QuantCrit methodological approaches to interrogate notions of statistical practice by convention. We present two approaches to meta-analysis and mean effect size calculations for student achievement. The first approach is the conventional approach which applies between-group differences to calculate effect sizes…

This study explores the influence of external examination on teaching and learning Mathematics at the secondary schools affiliated with provincial and private examination boards in Pakistan. This study was conducted in two phases by employing the explanatory sequential mixed-method. First, the Mathematics examination papers of the last five years…

The main National Reference Test (NRT) outcomes, reported in the 2021 National Reference Test Results Digest (ED627839), show overall performance on the NRT in English and mathematics over time indicating how the subjects may have been impacted as a whole. This study provides additional analysis of the NRT 2020 and 2021 data to explore whether…

Results of the National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP; National Center for Education Statistics, 2020) have shown that despite efforts to raise the literacy skill levels of students in elementary school, the average reading scores for fourth-grade students in 2019 were still cause for concern. The NAEP data showed the reading scores in…

The fourth-grade 2019 National Assessment of Educational Progress (NAEP) Reading assessment shows that 34% of the nation's students perform below the "NAEP Basic" level. However, because there is no achievement-level description for below Basic, educators and policymakers lack information on the nature of the reading difficulties that…

The study examines how students in Grade 9 handle conceptual knowledge through the concept of continuity and change in the context of large-scale assessment. The research questions address: (1) what strategies the students use when they use the two parts of the concept concomitantly; and (2) any gender-related differences regarding these…

Relative age effects (RAEs), where older children within an age-based group have better academic, sporting, self-concept and mental health outcomes than their younger peers, have been demonstrated in multiple countries. Australian research has found self-concept and Attention Deficit Hyperactivity Disorder RAEs, but academic RAEs have not been…