School closures have undoubtedly affected all students. However, some impacts have been more pronounced for students experiencing disadvantage. A recent study looks at the unequal impacts of COVID-19 school closures on the attendance rates of high-SES and low-SES secondary students in a quasi-experimental analysis.

ACER’s Research Conference 2022 has kicked off today. This afternoon, ACER Research Fellow Dr Fabienne van der Kleij delivered her presentation ‘Reimagining classroom assessment and feedback to meet learner needs’. In this Q&A, she expands on what was covered in her presentation.

In this episode, we’re joined by two international guests ahead of their presentation at ACER’s Research Conference 2022, Louisa Rosenheck from Kahoot! and YJ Kim from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They share what playful assessment is, and how teachers can embed this practice in the classroom.

ACER’s annual Research Conference kicks off in 2 weeks’ time and this year, Dr Diane DeBacker from the University of Kansas will be delivering the Karmel Oration Keynote, titled ‘Making learning visible: Moving from nouns to verbs’. Here, Dr DeBacker gives Teacher readers a glimpse of what she will be speaking about, and outlines the current state of competency-based education internationally.

ACER’s Global Academic Challenge was held for the first time this year and offers higher-performing students in Years 4, 6 and 8 the opportunity to attempt the kinds of questions sat by students in international schools around the world. ACER Senior Research Fellow Frances Eveleigh, who led the development of the challenge, shares some of the insights in this article.

In her latest Teacher column, Dr Sue Thomson looks ahead to the release of the PIRLS results, including the aims of this international assessment of Year 4 students’ reading skills, and how data for the 2021 cycle were collected during the pandemic.

New research has shown that while the use of immersive virtual reality (IVR) increases student enjoyment and presence in a task, when used on its own it does not improve procedural or declarative knowledge when compared to the more traditional learning activity of watching a video.

When you think about the last time you travelled on an airplane, did you wonder whether there could be a more efficient way of getting passengers on and off the aircraft? It is this question that was considered by participants in the 2022 International Mathematical Modeling Challenge (IM²C).

How can schools better engage families in their students’ learning? Dr Rebecca Winthrop, Senior Fellow and Director of the Centre for Universal Education (CUE) at the Brookings Institution, shares the findings from a research initiative she has led at CUE on school engagement with families, along with some practical tips for building school-family engagement.

How can a student’s social-emotional motivation at school impact their behaviour and achievement? In what ways can we support students’ social-emotional development? These are some of the questions explored in Dr Rebecca Collie’s study into the role of prosocial motivation in the classroom.