Teachers across Australia shared their 4 main challenges in teaching Foundation to Year 6 mathematics. These critical insights informed ORIGO's new digital teaching resource, ORIGO Mathematics.

In this edition of Researching education: 5 further readings, we’re sharing 5 pieces of content on the topic of assessment from researchers in Australia and from overseas. You can read research into the state of assessment literacy of teachers across the globe, and a paper on early years educators’ use of phonological awareness assessment practices.

Our guest for today’s School Improvement episode is Ruth Rogers, Principal of Karonga School in New South Wales. Ruth joins us today to talk about her school’s immersive classroom, and how it allows students – all of whom have an intellectual disability – to access a world beyond the classroom and practice skills that they can take with them when they are out in the community.

New research shows children and young people with disability in Australia are experiencing exclusion and bullying in school settings. In this episode, we’re joined by a lead investigator of the research, Dr Catherine Smith, to find out more about the experience of children with disability in schools, and their recommendations for educators.

‘Addressing the gender imbalance in digital technologies education and careers is an important goal. The research highlighted several areas where educators can contribute.’ Research from ACER for CSIRO has identified several factors that could support greater engagement of young women in digital technologies education. Find out more in this article.

So far in a 3-part series on teacher planning, educational leader Michael Rosenbrock has looked at how teachers can pro-actively plan to tackle student misconceptions in STEM and support them to build and use their vocabulary in science and mathematics. In this final article, he explores how teachers can best plan to make effective use of manipulatives and representations to help students build understanding.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Kristy Osborne, a physicist, former pre-service teacher and Research Fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) about the science concepts that primary students struggle with and why it’s important for teachers to identify and address student misconceptions early on.

‘Deliberately planning to support students to build and use their vocabulary is critical to ensuring that students can both access the curriculum content and effectively demonstrate their understanding.’ Educational leader Michael Rosenbrock shares what this might look like in practice for maths and science teachers.

In today’s article we share an update on the Pathways, Engagement and Transitions study, which explores the post-school pathways of young people experiencing disadvantage and how this information can be used to create better support systems, including in school settings.

Our guest for this episode of The Research Files is Professor Anne Castles. She’s a Keynote speaker at ACER’s Research Conference next month, which is exploring how to improve continuity of learning in the first 12 years of a child’s life. We’ll be discussing some of the research on learning to read, and getting a taster of what delegates can expect from her presentation.