Improving disadvantaged students? Reading outcomes through overcoming reading avoidance and building reading engagement. It is costly for students to avoid reading. Low literacy levels impact negatively on academic success, earning levels and employment opportunities. This project aims to produce new conceptual and empirical knowledge to inform the development of effective teaching practices to promote reading engagement for disadvantaged students.
Enhancing numeracy learning and teaching across the curriculum. Leaving school without an adequate level of numeracy has devastating consequences for young people's life chances. This project will implement a rich approach to numeracy across the curriculum in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 with the aim of improving students' numeracy learning outcomes and teachers' confidence with and understanding of numeracy.
Serious play: using digital games in school to promote literacy and learning in the twenty first century. Young Australian’s social and cultural experiences are increasingly digital. This project will offer leadership to schools seeking to use and create games to improve student outcomes across subject areas, and will generate new knowledge about how students and teachers approach digital games and the kinds of literacy, learning and pedagogy they entail.
Emotional learning in socioscientific issues for enhancement of scientific literacy. This project will aim to address international concerns about waning student interest and participation in science by engaging middle school students imaginatively in socioscientific issues. Expected outcomes will enhance students' scientific literacy, and the production of positive emotional energy and the classroom emotional climate.
Responding to Indigenous students' and their communities' voiced experiences regarding effective teaching practices: a catholic education initiative. This project will identify the actions of effective teachers through the voiced comments of Indigenous students and community members and their teachers. Using this information and the literature on culturally located practices, the project will determine the impact of these actions on educational outcomes.
Discovery Early Career Researcher Award - Grant ID: DE150100269
Funder
Australian Research Council
Funding Amount
$361,876.00
Summary
Designing and implementing effective cross-curricular numeracy tasks. Numeracy has been a national education priority for more than a decade, yet there appears to be little progress in students' numeracy performance. A lack of numeracy skills leads to devastating social and economic outcomes for individuals. This project aims to improve students' numeracy capabilities through: attention to the design of tasks intended to enhance numeracy learning across the curriculum; and the refinement of teac ....Designing and implementing effective cross-curricular numeracy tasks. Numeracy has been a national education priority for more than a decade, yet there appears to be little progress in students' numeracy performance. A lack of numeracy skills leads to devastating social and economic outcomes for individuals. This project aims to improve students' numeracy capabilities through: attention to the design of tasks intended to enhance numeracy learning across the curriculum; and the refinement of teaching practices with a view to improving student performance on both standardised numeracy tests and more realistic, contextualised tasks. The project aims to generate new theoretical and practical insights into effective numeracy education across the school curriculum.Read moreRead less
Building executive function in imaginary play. This project aims to develop a sustainable, play-based program to increase the executive functions of children in the year prior to school. Executive functions (EF) are cognitive processes that control an individual’s behaviour and cognition and include processes such as working memory, inhibitory control and attention. There is evidence that EF skills are critical to a successful transition to formal learning environments and future academic achiev ....Building executive function in imaginary play. This project aims to develop a sustainable, play-based program to increase the executive functions of children in the year prior to school. Executive functions (EF) are cognitive processes that control an individual’s behaviour and cognition and include processes such as working memory, inhibitory control and attention. There is evidence that EF skills are critical to a successful transition to formal learning environments and future academic achievement, and that they are amenable to early intervention. Improving children’s EF skills in the year prior to school could produce lasting benefits across the school years, particularly for more vulnerable children. This project intends to inform professional development programs in early childhood education.Read moreRead less
Accelerating the mathematics learning of low socio-economic status junior secondary students. This project aims to develop theory that will enable mathematics programs to be constructed to accelerate Years 8-9 students’ learning to the point that Years 10-12 mathematics can be accessed and employment and life chances increased.
Investigating the relationship between teacher expectations, student persistence and the learning of mathematics. There is a culture in many classrooms in which teachers are encouraged by students to pose easy tasks. The project will explore what is needed to encourage students to embrace challenges and to persist even when tasks are difficult. The outcome will be enhanced mathematics learning and improved student confidence.
Multiliteracies for addressing disadvantage in senior school science. Multiliteracies for addressing disadvantage in senior school science. This project aims to develop discipline-specific pedagogies in senior physics, chemistry and biology to improve disadvantaged students’ engagement and achievement. Many students from disadvantaged backgrounds fail to develop the linguistic precision and symbolic representational dexterity needed to comprehend and communicate senior school science concepts. T ....Multiliteracies for addressing disadvantage in senior school science. Multiliteracies for addressing disadvantage in senior school science. This project aims to develop discipline-specific pedagogies in senior physics, chemistry and biology to improve disadvantaged students’ engagement and achievement. Many students from disadvantaged backgrounds fail to develop the linguistic precision and symbolic representational dexterity needed to comprehend and communicate senior school science concepts. These pedagogies will ‘infuse’ multiliteracies in senior school science to improve access to science-based pathways for these students, and enable them to understand progressively more complex scientific concepts and demonstrate this in examinations. This project is expected to improve student retention, arrest declining enrolments in senior school science, and increase young people working in science.Read moreRead less