Canadians seem not to want to talk about race and racism, deferring instead to ‘income’ and immigration status when it comes to measuring education success.
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News of Canada’s successful immigrant students glosses over important stories of racism, for example the ‘streaming’ of Black males. But without more data beyond Toronto, the story is hard to share.
A low sense of belonging is associated with negative behaviours including misbehaviour, drug and alcohol use at school, violence and dropping out of school.
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Sue Thomson, Australian Council for Educational Research
Australian students, on average, reported a poorer sense of belonging at school than the OECD average. But issues with sense of belonging aren’t distributed evenly across the population.
Both first- and second-generation immigrants in British Columbia and Ontario outperformed their non-immigrant counterparts in science literacy, in the 2015 Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development Programme for International Student Assessment.
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But could the influences of Shanghai and Singapore help?
B.C.’s ambitious new school curriculum includes mandatory financial literacy instruction within math courses at every grade level, starting from kindergarten.
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Financial literacy is non-intuitive to the human brain and fundamental to survival today. We should follow British Columbia’s example and make financial literacy mandatory in every grade - across the country.
For a student who is blind, the obvious test adjustment is providing a braille test if they are proficient in braille.
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Standardised tests restrict how well students with disability can do, which reinforces the idea that there are things they can’t do that children without disability can.
Results from the 2017 NAPLAN results showed very little improvement since the test was introduced 10 years ago.
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NAPLAN is good at measuring some aspects of education, including knowledge difference between demographics, but has not produced a positive effect on student learning outcomes.
Chemistry class at the Dong Tien Secondary School, Thai Nguyen Province, Vietnam.
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… and why our analysis is a much fairer comparison.
Indonesian girls are performing better than boys in the PISA test. But the overall performance of Indonesian students in science, mathematics and reading is among the lowest of participating countries.
Enny Nuraheni/Reuters
The latest PISA report shows Indonesian girls outperforming boys in all subjects. But, overall, Indonesian students are low performers among students of PISA-participating countries.
How can we use data from international tests to improve student learning?
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The role of private tuition plays a part in the overall success of students in Singapore, with around 80% of primary-school children having at least three hours of private tuition a week.
Australia is one of only three countries with significantly decreased maths and science scores in the latest round of PISA.
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Politicians need to stop meddling with education policy and invest in teachers if Australia’s science, mathematics and reading standards are to improve.