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.

‘For those Australian teachers affected by remote delivery of teaching, many found the value and utility of engaging their students through Instructional Video.’ English and History teacher Steven Kolber shares the six common approaches to apply Instructional Video within a classroom or educational setting.

With the growing use of STEM across various industries in Australia, how can we ensure equitable opportunities and pathways for all students? How can schools build successful partnerships with industry specialists to rethink STEM education? In this article, we outline five further readings which explore STEM education in Australia.

How can we make assessment work for learners and learning in a rapidly changing world? How can we establish where students are at in their learning, including in the hard-to-measure skills and attributes they need to flourish in life? These questions will be explored at ACER’s Research Conference 2022, where the theme is ‘Reimagining assessment’.