Measurement

Research shows that when children thrive in their early years, they have a strong foundation for lifelong learning, health, development and wellbeing. New data from the 2024 Australian Early Development Census (AEDC) show there has been an overall increase in the percentage of children developmentally on track on 5 AEDC domains since the baseline was established in 2009. 

In his first Teacher column for 2025, Professor Geoff Masters AO poses these questions: will schooling be different for children born this year, and if so, how? He then offers 3 suggestions for how learning at school might evolve by 2040.

Educators refer to multiple forms of student data to help them plan out the next steps in teaching and learning, including informal feedback, classroom conversations and written assessments. As Dr Anne Knowles explains in this reader submission, student drawings could also be a useful addition to your toolkit.

A new national report explores latest achievement data for students’ science literacy, and offers insights into what’s happening in Australian classrooms to help develop their knowledge, understanding and inquiry skills

In his first Teacher column of 2024, Professor Geoff Masters AO discusses assessment reforms proposed in New Zealand to reverse that country’s declining student performance.

Our latest Teacher’s Bookshelf features Building a World-Class Learning System: Insights from some top-performing school systems, by Professor Geoff Masters. It explores what British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea have in common, the strategies they employ, and the decisions they are making to support students now and in the future.

Research shows parents want more frequent communication about their child’s learning, and that communicating both a student’s individual achievement, and learning growth is important. In this article, we speak to one school about their new approach to student reporting.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Greta Rollo, who leads the Primary Early Childhood and Inclusive Research team at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), and ACER Research Fellow Dr Kellie Picker, about the place of phonics in early reading instruction.

A new research paper, Creative self-beliefs among children and adolescents, published in the Australian Journal of Education, seeks to understand more about young people’s confidence in their creative abilities, as well as their beliefs about whether these abilities are fixed or malleable.

‘At Dromana College we had an issue with only a few teachers having the confidence to write a decent rubric…As a school, we therefore came up with our own guidelines on how to construct rubrics for years 7-10.’ In this reader submission, Assessment and Reporting Coordinator Jodi Wilson shares how the Victorian secondary school has been helping teachers to improve their own rubric design skills.