This paper discusses the ways in which school leaders and teachers became connected to each other via professional learning networks as they worked to implement The New Zealand Curriculum. It explores how those networks were shaped and reshaped over at least a three year period.

This paper was the basis of a talk given at the NZCER conference Connected and Contagious: Exploring learning organisation ideas in schools, held in Wellington on 12 May 2011

Moderation of student work can support teachers to reach a shared understanding of the meaning of a standard, and to more reliably judge a range of evidence in relation to that standard. In theory insights teachers gain via moderation activities could support changes in teaching, leading to improvements in outcomes for students.

Rosemary Hipkins presented this session at the CORE Breakfast seminar in Dunedin, 29 March 2011.

The session:

NZCER Conference Proceedings August 2010

This book is the proceedings from the NZCER conference, Assessing Adult Learning: Literacy and Numeracy Competencies, held in Wellington in August 2010. The day was focused on assessment in literacy and numeracy, at individual, organisational, national and international levels. It also explored the role of the new national assessment tool for adult learners, which was made available earlier in 2010.

This paper was commissioned by the Royal Society of New Zealand and the Prime Minister’s Chief Science Advisor in conjunction with the Ministry of Research, Science and Technology to encourage debate on how better to engage students with science, with a particular focus on the role of schools. The focus of this paper is the current provision of science education. It discusses a range of purposes for science education and reviews New Zealand and international evidence on what students think about science and how well they achieve in it.

Drawing on secondary teachers’ experience of standards-based assessment for NCEA, this short article discusses moderation challenges that will face primary teachers as they make overall professional judgments of each student's progress against the new National Standards. Moderation potentially offers rich professional learning possibilities—but only if teachers feel safe to learn, have the time needed, and are given access to robust examples to inform their debates.

In a recent “Assessment News” we wrote about an impending new series of standardised science tests for Years 7–10. The tests, Science: Thinking with Evidence, have now been published and were launched earlier this year with a series of information afternoons around the country.

One of the hot topics at a small science education conference I recently attended was the Nature of Science strand of the new curriculum. There was considerable discussion about the kind of support that would assist teachers both to understand what Nature of Science is about and to change their teaching of science to incorporate the intentions of this strand. Teachers may (legitimately) ask: Why would we want to change the way science is taught?

This research report provides examples of how some schools have approached the revised curriculum and the Key Competencies, and discusses the processes, tensions, and opportunities of leading and managing curriculum change.

Throughout the history of schooling in New Zealand the national curriculum has been revised at fairly regular intervals. Consequently, schools are periodically faced with having to accommodate to new curriculum. In between major changes other specifically-focused changes may arise; for example, the increased recent emphasis upon numeracy and literacy.

This final overview report summarises the main findings from Healthy Futures. Healthy Futures is the evaluation of the Ministry of Health’s Fruit in Schools (FiS) initiative. This evaluation was conducted by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and Health Outcomes International.

In addition to this overview report, a separate document (Boyd & Moss, 2009), summarises the findings from the 2008 case studies, and presents the stories of six FiS schools. A technical report (Dingle et al., 2009), provides more details about the survey analysis and data.

Results of the 2007 NZCER national survey of ECE services

This is one of three reports from NZCER’s second national survey of the early childhood education sector, carried out in late 2007. The others are:

These days we are keen to make the most of our test data, particularly when it comes to informing next steps for teaching and learning. Sometimes we may examine how students have responded to particular questions on a test. This is good practice. It can be very enlightening to see what students found difficult (or easy) within a particular assessment and to think about the responses they made. It is also always important to know what was actually tested and how this matches our learning intentions. However, we must take care when dealing with responses to single questions.

Contemporary understandings about health education underpin one school's response to student and community need by ensuring consistency across the school system and using external providers to enhance this synergy. Supporting student action to improve health and wellbeing can assist schools to meet the intent of the new curriculum.

This article was included in an information pack  for school principals and curriculum leaders, designed and distributed by the Ministry of Education and intended to support the implementation of the New Zealand Curriculum.

It discusses assessment and the key competencies, framed within wider questions about the purposes and outcomes of schooling and education.

Rose Hipkins is an NZCER Researcher who has been involved in the development of the New Zealand Curriculum

This article uses a specific curriculum innovation—a focus on the nature of science—to illustrate the complex dynamics of curriculum change.

Snapshots from the professional learning of two teachers, one primary and one secondary, are used to discuss why teachers’ personal learning may not translate into changes in their taught curriculum unless additional support helps them to rethink traditional teaching and learning practices.

Measuring the main trends of an individual's progress is always difficult. However, the presence of measurement error makes it harder. Good tests indicate the measurement error associated with test scores. This article describes how this can be done.

This article offers a new look at students' comprehension of poetry.  Its findings will be of particular interest to English teachers and teachers working with students to extend their understanding of texts that have complex language features and use figurative language.

Measurement scales allow raw test scores to be converted to locations on an equal-interval scale.   This article outlines how these work, how they are numbered and how they relate to national norms.

Who should decide what students learn at school? I’ve grown increasingly interested in this question since becoming an educational researcher, but writing this article also reminded me of something that happened when I was still at secondary school.