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NZCER Blogs

A number of NZCER staff contribute to our blogs and we link to and draw on external expertise. We hope it is a useful source of information, ideas and support about NZCER's work and wider educational and assessment issues. We welcome your questions and comments.

Please refer to the NZCER community guidelines for participation on NZCER blog posts.

When I reflect on educational aims at the school level, I think of the key competencies in the curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007).

Date posted: 8 September 2016

By Rose Hipkins

Read rest of post: PISA and the progress question
Date posted: 31 August 2016

By Elliot Lawes

Meet Bob. Bob is a floating eyeball with a hard luck story he's dying to tell you. Are you willing to listen?

Read rest of post: Meet Bob
Date posted: 29 August 2016

Thank you for coming back to our science blog. You get a tag-team handover this week - I am Rose Hipkins and I’m picking up from my colleague Ally Bull. My plan is to build on her thoughts and questions while turning the focus to an issue that I know is worrying a lot of teachers right now.

Date posted: 24 August 2016

This is the focus of A Nation of Curious Minds: He Whenua Hihiri i te Mahara – the national strategic plan for science in society. So to what extent does science learning at school support this goal? Before we can answer that we need to be clear about what supports the development of innovators.

Date posted: 12 August 2016

By Rachel Bolstad

My last post discussed the diverse ways that teachers in the Games for learning project used games in their classrooms.

Read rest of post: Advice from game-using teachers
Date posted: 5 August 2016

My last blog post , “Games OR learning”, asked whether digital games might be viewed by some teachers as distractions or intrusions into students’ learning time.

Date posted: 4 August 2016

Many of my friends who are parents, and especially those of teenage boys seem mystified or despairing about the amount of time their children spend in darkened rooms playing digital games.

Date posted: 4 August 2016

School science fairs get a bad rap. They are often criticised for not promoting real learning, being overly-competitive, advantaging students from already privileged backgrounds, putting extra stress on children, teachers and families, not representing science as it really is, and so on. Despite this though, some people do leave school with very positive memories of science fairs.

Read rest of post: Science fairs
Date posted: 2 August 2016

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