By Rose Hipkins
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NZCER Blogs
A number of NZCER staff contribute to our blogs and we link to and draw on external expertise. We hope it is a useful source of information, ideas and support about NZCER's work and wider educational and assessment issues. We welcome your questions and comments.
Please refer to the NZCER community guidelines for participation on NZCER blog posts.
By Elliot Lawes
Meet Bob. Bob is a floating eyeball with a hard luck story he's dying to tell you. Are you willing to listen?
Read rest of post: Meet Bob
Date posted: 29 August 2016
Thank you for coming back to our science blog. You get a tag-team handover this week - I am Rose Hipkins and I’m picking up from my colleague Ally Bull. My plan is to build on her thoughts and questions while turning the focus to an issue that I know is worrying a lot of teachers right now.
Read rest of post: What do we mean when we ask if students are "making progress" in science?
Date posted: 24 August 2016
This is the focus of A Nation of Curious Minds: He Whenua Hihiri i te Mahara – the national strategic plan for science in society. So to what extent does science learning at school support this goal? Before we can answer that we need to be clear about what supports the development of innovators.
Read rest of post: Building creativity, innovation and increased critical science literacy
Date posted: 12 August 2016
By Rachel Bolstad
My last post discussed the diverse ways that teachers in the Games for learning project used games in their classrooms.
Read rest of post: Advice from game-using teachers
Date posted: 5 August 2016
My last blog post , “Games OR learning”, asked whether digital games might be viewed by some teachers as distractions or intrusions into students’ learning time.
Read rest of post: Playing, making, discussing, gamifying: Many ways to use games for learning - written by Rachel Bolstad
Date posted: 4 August 2016
Many of my friends who are parents, and especially those of teenage boys seem mystified or despairing about the amount of time their children spend in darkened rooms playing digital games.
Read rest of post: Under the blood is learning: What students wish parents and teachers understood about gaming - written by Sue McDowall
Date posted: 4 August 2016
School science fairs get a bad rap. They are often criticised for not promoting real learning, being overly-competitive, advantaging students from already privileged backgrounds, putting extra stress on children, teachers and families, not representing science as it really is, and so on. Despite this though, some people do leave school with very positive memories of science fairs.
Read rest of post: Science fairs
Date posted: 2 August 2016
In the third of her series on the place of science in a future-focused curriculum, Ally Bull explores the idea of making school science personally relevant.
Read rest of post: Making school science personally relevant
Date posted: 19 July 2016
In the second in her series on the place of science in a future-focused curriculum, Ally Bull explores the idea of science and certainty.
Science is science regardless of how you approach it. That’s kind of the nice thing about science – it’s true regardless of how you feel about it.
Read rest of post: Science and certainty
Date posted: 15 July 2016