How effective is school reporting, particularly for parents of international students? Schools spend considerable time and effort in reporting to parents, but little research has been conducted on reporting, or its ability to raise achievement. This article looks at how one high school reports on student achievement and how those ...

School improvement has been the dominant paradigm informing educational policy and practice for a generation. There is no doubt that it has had a significant impact on almost every aspect of educational life. School improvement represents a powerful hegemony that informs the development of policy at the national, local, and ...

Charles answers the following questions:

• If we pre- and post-test every unit, are we overtesting?
• How can we determine whether our students have progressed if we do not test every unit?
• Is it valid to test students soon after they have received instruction in something?
• Should parents know where their ...

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.

This issue of set comes at an exciting time in education as the draft national curriculum, incorporating the proposed key competencies, has just been released for public discussion.

How well do our students learn what we set out to teach them? There are many opinions, but not enough facts. This article summarises the results of 35 years of international surveys of achievement in reading, mathematics, and science. There is some support for our reading programmes in the cross-national ...

Given that children's achievement appears to be enhanced in schools (particularly low-decile schools) with ICT-rich environments, research into what might help staff at a low-decile school integrate ICT into their school curriculum is timely. The authors also looked for ways teacher education providers might encourage the effective integration of ICT ...

This article describes a pilot behaviour intervention programme for boys aged 7–9 with severe, challenging behaviours. The pilot was based on the Canadian SNAP™ (Stop Now and Plan) programme and developed jointly by the Ministry of Education/Special Education and primary and secondary RTLBs.

This article explores the perceptions of parents/caregivers, teachers, and students in an intermediate school about the success of this approach to reporting on learning.

Accessing children’s understandings through traditional methods of assessment can be problematic for teachers. This article explores how the use of drawings by a group of Year 5 children to answer questions about mathematics allowed them to describe their ideas more clearly, and contributed to a deeper knowledge of their beliefs ...