The first year of teaching is a critical stage in a teacher's professional life. Many beginning teachers are employed in short-term positions, but we know very little about how employment status affects first-year teachers' feelings of self-confidence, or their attitudes towards their second year of teaching. This article explores these ...

What supports students to develop their conceptual understanding? Taking part in focus groups helped the Years 9 and 10 Māori and Pasifika students in this study to focus on understanding the concepts underpinning social studies units, rather than the content. Discussions between students in the focus groups resulted in the ...

What does the term "student voice" mean to you? Does it mean listening to students' opinions? Involving students in decisions about their learning? Giving students equal say in decisions about school management and governance? This commentary analyses and critiques the ways we tend to think about young peoples' responsibilities, roles ...

Fractions are important mathematically and in everyday life but are complicated and difficult to learn. Teachers therefore need to be able to work out what students understand about fractions and what is causing them problems. This article reports on a study where students were asked to answer a number of ...

One of the most important goals for teaching statistics is to prepare students to deal with the statistical information that increasingly impacts on their everyday lives. Students need to be able to critically evaluate statistical information and data-based arguments. The findings of this collaborative research study of Year 9 students ...

From time to time the New Zealand Council for Educational Research is asked how test results can contribute to making an Overall Teacher Judgement (OTJ). This is an important and complex question and one that we continue to grapple with. In this Assessment News article I begin to explore what ...

How can teachers support students' additive thinking? This article focuses on the study of a lesson designed to teach the equal additions strategy for subtraction, in which many teachers, despite having a strong commitment to promoting conceptual understanding, struggled with various aspects of the material and resorted to teaching procedurally ...

Recent attention to the idea of “student voice” provides an interesting framework for considering the articles in this edition of set: Research Information for Teachers as an overall collection. They cover a range of different issues, with a special focus on mathematics education. The potential to read a “voice” dimension ...

This study explored whether using process drama to teach social studies would engage Year 10 Pasifika boys at a secondary school in Auckland. The author describes how, while in role, students used their existing knowledge and experiences to explore and develop new knowledge, and how process drama addressed the goals ...

The of use mobile technologies such as cellphones offers unique capabilities to help facilitate social interaction between students and support collaboration between home and school. This article reports on research into the use of cellphones to support student learning in a low-decile urban primary school. The school used the phones ...