Short articles

‘A parent who is now told that their child’s reading is "developing" in each of years 3, 5, 7 and 9 is never likely to know what that means.’ Professor Geoff Masters AO says recent changes to NAPLAN reporting won’t help teachers and parents, and are ‘bewildering’.

How we can improve the continuity of learning from birth to 12 years? That is the question that will be explored at Research Conference 2023, held in Sydney on 3 and 4 September. In this Q&A, we speak with Conference Convener and ACER Senior Research Fellow Dr Claire Scoular, about the conference theme.

‘There is a need for schools to have consistent and clear approaches to behaviour that set and maintain behaviour expectations ...’ Katherine Dix, Tom Cain, Karina Stocker and Susannah Schoeffel discuss 6 key recommendations from a new guidance report, and share some common challenges and implementation tips for how to overcome them.

In this reader submission, Dr Nicholas Jackson shares the findings and implications from his recent PhD thesis which involved students training teachers how to use specialist 3D design software and providing guidance and advice on effective ways of teaching of learning with this software.

‘The default assumption has been that being a generalist is what primary school teachers prefer, or else they would have become secondary teachers.’ In our latest reader submission, Dr James Russo shares the findings of a study asking generalist early years teachers at schools in 2 Australian states if they’d rather be subject specialists.

How can schools encourage students that are capable readers, but have no interest in reading for pleasure, to read more frequently? This is the underlying question that drove the research project of English teacher and 2021 Reading Australia Fellowship recipient Edwina West.

The Future-focused mentoring initiative has been working with schools in Queensland and New South Wales. In our latest reader submission, Dr Ellen Larsen, Associate Professor Hoa Nguyen and Dr Elizabeth Curtis share details of the pilot project and its early findings.

In this series, we take a look at some further readings available on a particular topic, including open access research papers from various online databases, and Teacher archive content you might not have come across yet.

The Australian space economy is set to triple in size and create another 20,000 jobs by 2030. In this article, we speak to Dr Scott Sleap, the latest recipient of the Park Family Churchill Fellowship, about the work he is doing to inspire young people to consider careers in space.

Late last year, Matt Orchard from Apollo Bay P-12 College in regional Victoria was named winner of the 2022 Telstra ARIA Music Teacher Award. In this article, he tells us about the music program he’s run for over 20 years.