Curriculum and assessment

Once upon a time, it happened that all the Newspaper Editors, Employers and Professors of Engineering throughout the land came to believe that children were no longer able to jump as well as they had in the old days, when the Newspaper Editors, Employers and Professors of Engineering themselves had been young.

Education for the environment is invariably considered to be the fundamental element in education "in, about, and for" the environment. However, research from New Zealand and elsewhere suggests that too few primary and secondary school programmes actually achieve substantial outcomes for the environment.
 

Teachers are constantly urged to develop higher-level thinking skills in their students. This article describes one school's approach to developing these skills in Year 9 students in a way that is meaningful, transferable, and fun.

Road safety education for young children requires more than games, rhymes, and worksheets; it needs to be linked to everyday experiences of traffic and addressed "little and often". This article reports on the experiences of teachers and classes in the first years of school who participated in a national project to develop integrative cross-curricular, essential-skills-based road safety education.

This action-research project investigated the efficacy of negotiation and power sharing during a physical education unit in an alternative education programme for students at risk. The students preferred enjoyable learning experiences that took place outside the classroom and wished for greater responsibility and ownership for their own learning. Staff and students preferred this approach, despite tensions that arose in the negotiation process. A philosophical and pedagogical shift occurred as the programme moved away from an approach based on tangible rewards.

A comprehensive study in 2003 looked at the extent, nature, and effectiveness of identification strategies and educational programmes for gifted and talented students. Key findings are highlighted, further questions raised are discussed, and classroom-based strategies from the international literature are explored.

A reflection on the journey taken by members of a team of social studies educators to identify the learning and teaching environments that contribute to quality learning in social studies.

Gardner's theory of Multiple Intelligences (MI) has been well received by many educators. Most of the literature on MI, however, concentrates on the primary school sector. This article considers the implications of MI for both primary and secondary sectors and suggests why the latter has been less responsive.

Nineteen broad areas of essential learning about New Zealand society are identified in the social studies curriculum. The authors consider what aspects of these are assessed in the 2001 NEMP monitoring tasks for Year 8 students.