This qualitative study explored children’s opportunities to actively solve problems as they talked, wrote and read during their first few months at school. Participants were two teachers from two schools in Tāmaki Makaurau, Auckland and eight children, newcomers to their classes. The children’s writing records and actions during guided writing ...

Data literacy enables teachers to use information collected about students and their learning to take data-informed instructional action.  This article outlines two approaches developed by teachers to provide teaching targeted to the immediate needs of specific students that moved beyond “gap-filling”. The pre-teaching and “fresh choice” approaches led to increased ...

Building cultural inclusivity is one of the major challenges many schools and teachers in Aotearoa New Zealand face today. This case study examines how a student-led video campaign in a multicultural high school strove to cultivate a culturally inclusive community, encouraging dialogue and empowering participants while students faced challenges in ...

Teachers can respond to the climate crisis through deliberate choices about what and how to teach. We suggest that, for history teachers, this requires stepping outside traditional topics that often focus on political change. Instead, they need to select contexts for learning that illustrate how global forces of colonisation impact ...

When teaching the multiplicative domain in New Zealand primary schools, teachers tend to spend a greater proportion of time on the meaning and processes of multiplication, to the detriment of a specific focus on understanding the concept of division. When division is taught, it tends to be by reversing the ...

Trauma-informed schools are deeply responsive to the trauma experiences of students and address their primary need for safety and connection as a foundation for emotional, social, and cognitive wellbeing. Trauma-informed schools have systems in place that provide trauma awareness, knowledge, and skills as part of their school culture, practices, and ...

Worldwide, academic procrastination is a prevalent concern in schools because it hinders students’ achievement, health, and wellbeing. Academic procrastination refers to students voluntarily postponing, initiating, or completing assigned learning tasks despite knowing they will be worse off for the delay. Research provides strong evidence that students procrastinate learning tasks when ...

Cat Lunjevich responds to Set’s questioning about how her understanding of social emotional learning deepened along the journey of making the Oho and Ata cards, which are now readily available to New Zealand teachers.

The last issue of Assessment News (Darr & Cosslett, 2024) outlined NZCER’s position on possible assessment policy directions that had been signalled by parties within the new coalition government. Since then, the Government has released a plan for consistent assessment, which requires all primary schools to use standardised assessment tools ...