Schools do not create jobs. They do create school leavers. However, there is no reason why they should create school-leavers who do not have the practical know how to participate competently in life beyond school. In Melbourne schools programmes which join academic study with practical experience have been underway for ...

'Who cares for the caregiver?'. American researcher and' grand old man' of family studies, Urie Bronfenbrenner, asked that question at the Second Early Childhood Convention in 1979. He suggested that the caregiver and the child are like two legs of a stool. For intact families, the 'third leg of the ...

Currently in secondary schools a special time allowance of 'up to five weekly teaching half days beyond regulation staffing' is available 'to permit schools to employ part time teachers when circumstances warrant approval'. Many schools claim this allowance to help children who are slow in Mathematics. Is the extra time,effective ...

In 1985, I had the opportunity to visit, across four states of Australia, twenty primary schools interested in using computers as part of the school curriculum. In eighteen of these schools the children had been using computers for a year or more; in two, although they were interested in utilising ...

This article is not intended to be a series of handy hints on choosing between specific brands of microcomputers or different word processing programs. That sort of information is best obtained from teachers already using word processors, orfrom advisory staff in education departments. Instead, I hope to show just how ...

The study of children's mathematical behaviour goes back many years. Piaget in the 1930s used clinical interviews to unearth children's ideas about number. Earlier than this, Brueckner had used tests that measured ability in computation and solving verbal problems, and tests that sampled various combinations of a particular skill (such ...

Just when can children take charge of their own health? New research shows that, even at age 5, children are quite clued up on ways to keep well. In our study we talked to 53 Wellington children about what it means to stay healthy and what they know about certain ...

It is generally the case that teachers, instructing young children to read single words, present these sight-words in the company of pictures representing the same objects. For example, when teaching a child to recognise and later read the word I dog', the teacher presents the word accompanied by a picture ...

Tertiary education should give students (1) the general ability to think critically and independently and, (2) competencies in at least one specialised discipline. Unfortunately, if tertiary education does have a beneficial impact on intellectual growth there is not much convincing evidence of it. A fundamental problem for teachers and researchers ...

Is classroom interaction research worth the effort involved? Up till recently the main result of decades of work seemed to be that 'time on task' was the only thing you could be sure about: the more time a subject got the more learning took place. But time is a precious ...