The NSW government will review the K-12 curriculum over the next 18 months. Simplistic approaches may suggest reducing the number of subjects, but this would be a backward step.
Trends in education suggest an increased focus on the assessment and teaching of thinking skills in the future.
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To assess problem-solving, creative and critical thinking skills on NAPLAN would fit with broader movements in education internationally, but there are some questions to address first.
Getting rid of NAPLAN would remove a distraction from the classroom and allow teachers more time to understand and address the needs of the students.
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The recently released Gonski 2.0 report focuses on overhauling core aspects of curriculum and reporting, and proposes a move away from the industrial model of education towards individualisation.
There are now several new gate-keeping measures to test teacher quality introduced by universities in the last two to three years.
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Kenyans believe that fixing education is not someone else’s task or someone else’s failure.
The average year nine Indigenous student in a very remote area scores about the same in NAPLAN reading as the average year three non-Indigenous city student, and significantly lower in writing.
Aap/Tracey Nearmy
Using equivalent year levels provides us with a clearer picture of the gap for Indigenous students, who can be up to an equivalent of 7.7 years behind their non-Indigenous counterparts in writing.
NAPLAN results should also be considered in relation to other standardised assessments, which do not always tell the same story.
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NAPLAN is great at tracking changes over time and between demographics, but not so great at measuring what factors effect change, engagement or creativity.
It appears that whatever factors are constraining genetic potential among less well-off students in the US do not exert a similar influence in Australia.
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The latest round of NAPLAN results show Australia’s school systems are not good at reducing the influence of a student’s background on their academic achievement.
‘Kindy bootcamps’ tend to be run by untrained teachers.
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Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research e Peter Goss, Grattan Institute
The Productivity Commission has said that education spending has substantially increased over the last decade but student achievement has shown little or no improvement. Is that true?
The evidence shows counting was beyond more than a handful of numbers for Australia’s Indigenous people.
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There is plenty of evidence to show Australia’s Indigenous people had ways of counting big numbers, yet the myth persists they couldn’t count more than a handful of things. Why?
Children taking part in a philosophical discussion at Buranda State School in Brisbane.
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