Journal article

Accessing children’s understandings through traditional methods of assessment can be problematic for teachers. This article explores how the use of drawings by a group of Year 5 children to answer questions about mathematics allowed them to describe their ideas more clearly, and contributed to a deeper knowledge of their beliefs and understandings.

This article explores the perceptions of parents/caregivers, teachers, and students in an intermediate school about the success of this approach to reporting on learning.

This article describes a pilot behaviour intervention programme for boys aged 7–9 with severe, challenging behaviours. The pilot was based on the Canadian SNAP™ (Stop Now and Plan) programme and developed jointly by the Ministry of Education/Special Education and primary and secondary RTLBs.

Given that children's achievement appears to be enhanced in schools (particularly low-decile schools) with ICT-rich environments, research into what might help staff at a low-decile school integrate ICT into their school curriculum is timely. The authors also looked for ways teacher education providers might encourage the effective integration of ICT in pedagogical practices.

How well do our students learn what we set out to teach them? There are many opinions, but not enough facts. This article summarises the results of 35 years of international surveys of achievement in reading, mathematics, and science. There is some support for our reading programmes in the cross-national data, but serious questions remain about our weaknesses in mathematics and science.

How effective are secondary school students’ information-literacy skills in the tertiary environment? When the authors looked at the expectation Years 12–13 teachers have of their students’ information-literacy competence in their first tertiary year, and compared this with polytechnic lecturers’ experience of first-year students’ competence and the students’ own expectations of their confidence and competence, some thought-provoking patterns emerged.

Investigating suspected underachievement in literacy in an intermediate school revealed that the levels of achievement in reading and writing were indeed a concern, especially the writing of Years 5–9 students. Teachers from the intermediate, seven primary schools, and one secondary school worked together to strengthen their curriculum understandings of students’ writing and the coherence of their classroom and instructional practice.

This article looks at ways of bridging the discontinuities young children experience between three settings: the home environment, the early childhood setting, and the new entrant classroom. It highlights the empowerment that occurs for children, families, and teachers in early childhood and school settings when children’s experiences at home are known and valued.

The introduction this year of the draft key competencies (paralleling the five strands of Te Whāriki) brings an exciting new development to the early childhood as well as the primary and secondary sectors. This article discusses learning dispositions and their relation to the key competencies, and suggests three ways in which a new continuity might be forged between early childhood and primary school curricula when the proposed key competencies are put into place.

School improvement has been the dominant paradigm informing educational policy and practice for a generation. There is no doubt that it has had a significant impact on almost every aspect of educational life. School improvement represents a powerful hegemony that informs the development of policy at the national, local, and institutional level in many education systems. Much of the prevailing academic orthodoxy informing teaching and research is centred on school improvement.