Journal article

Over the past 6 years, the National Education Monitoring Project has monitored the educational achievement and attitudes of Year 4 and 8 students in New Zealand schools, covering 15 curriculum areas. This article presents accumulated evidence from these assessments on the relationship between school size and student achievement at these Year levels.

A substantial number of teachers working in Auckland’s poor urban primary schools are highly successful in their practice. They have an expertise that takes children to their academic and personal potential, and they achieve success in a way that does not alienate children from their diverse home contexts. Case study research focusing on nine such teachers has found that a combination of 11 attitudes and beliefs is integral to all their pedagogies.

In-class modelling of teaching practices in mathematics enables the facilitator to take an active role when working with teachers. By situating aspects of this professional development in classrooms, teachers are able to see how they can incorporate the new practices into their existing teaching approaches. 

Cognitively Guided Instruction provides a basis for understanding why a child is able to solve certain problems and not able to solve others. Within a problem-solving environment, interactive processes, involving students’ explanations and justifications of their thinking, support mathematical sense-making and meaning construction. Decisions about what to teach and when to teach it are based on teachers’ knowledge of their students’ understandings.

The evaluation of the Numeracy Exploratory Study at Year 9 in secondary schools in 2001 showed that a programme for assessing, teaching, and reassessing numeracy was both necessary and effective for this older age group. Students had unexpected difficulties with multiplicative concepts in particular. After a carefully graded assessment, related to specific teaching suggestions for meeting students’ needs, teachers took different steps to address these needs.

Research into children’s understanding of number over the last decade suggests that there are identifiable progressions in how children develop number concepts. The Early Numeracy Project included a diagnostic tool designed to give teachers quality information about the mathematical knowledge and strategies of their students. This article discusses the results.

This article focuses on the diagnostic interview used as part of the Numeracy Development Project to assess students’ mathematical knowledge and strategies. It looks at changes in the instructions to teachers about the basis on which judgments about each student’s global strategy stage are made, and looks at the process of categorising children’s solution strategies, using different criteria to make the judgments. 

This year marks the centenary of the birth of Dr C.E. Beeby in 1902. Dr McDonald explores some themes from his life and career and relates his reform of education in New Zealand to aspects of her own life.
 

The review of Special Education 2000 policy highlighted the fragmentation of responsibilities and provision, which undermined the policy’s intentions to improve educational experiences and outcomes for students with special needs. While New Zealand has now started to develop a more systematic approach, the recent Daniells decision could head New Zealand provision for students with special needs in the opposite direction.

Some of the findings from a research project that aimed to document the role that a visit to one New Zealand science and technology centre played in the educational activities of six visiting primary school groups are reported.