Handwriting is a skill very similar to playing tennis or Space Invaders. It is complex and strategies need to be learnt if you want to do it well. But for fun, learning handwriting the conventional way, with sitting-up-straight and copying-tasks, comes nowhere near a game of tennis or a dollar's ...

A flowchart can describe what happens when we set out to copy a sentence; the factors and skills which operate during this task. The model is not about 'meaning' or 'word choice' or 'self-expression'. These things are part of the larger and more complex, less mechanical task of 'expressing one's ...

During the 1960s there was a dramatic increase in the amount of both experimental and theoretical work devoted to the topic of short-term memory. The field had become enormously complicated, so in an attempt to clarify this increasingly complex picture, Graham Hitch and I decided to ask the simple question ...

Children know a great deal of mathematics before they come to school. They have a variety of ways of interpreting and solving problems about quantities, but of course there are wide differences in how effective they are. Counting appears to play a central role in the child's mathematics learning during ...

Discipline is only one aspect of classroom management. It tends to loom large in the eyes of young teachers because the potential for trouble is large, many problems can arise and some are difficult to deal with. However,
there are many ways to prevent discipline problems from even beginning and ...

I wanted to know what beginning readers thought about the full stop , and so, with Gay Way Red Book 5 open at the ready, and at the risk of sounding like a less than popular quiz show, I asked 15 five year-olds to 'tell me about these little dots ...

It is a fact that there will be fewer and fewer children at school as the 1980s go on. The prospect is felt by teachers as a threat both to their job security, and also to the quality of education they can offer. Except in favoured areas, all schools will ...

How long should a young person continue at school? Should they remain and risk educational failure or should they leave and risk unemployment? Every year in New Zealand thousands of young people face such decisions. What do we know about the common trends in these decisions?

The development of the educational system has been checked or deflected from time to time as the result of crises in the country's economy. What parts of the system were especially affected and to what extent did considerations other than economy, for example, the desire for structural or administrative reform ...

Spelling research is making good progress. Two of the areas it is finding very fruitful are:
1 an examination of the words children write - and subsequently misspell;
2 investigation of how we recognise misspellings and remember correct spellings.
This set item contains examples of recent works, one of each ...