The aim of this article is to comment on the ways in which beliefs and theories of learning affect the teaching and learning of mathematics. When mathematics is viewed as a static body of knowledge, a transmission style of teaching is often employed. In contrast, a radical constructivist view of ...

Currently, the Māori word hauora is translated in New Zealand curricula as health and wellbeing or as health and physical education for Māori-medium education. “Hauora, wellbeing” is also an underlying concept within Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum, where it is claimed that it offers a “Māori ...

The official New Zealand curriculum as it pertains to social sciences embodies tensions between newer transformative and older transmissive agendas for education, and in its disciplinary divisions. This article explores the mixed messages in the curriculum for teaching and learning within social sciences. I argue that tensions in the curriculum ...

In November 2007, changes to the New Zealand curriculum were published, with an expectation that schools would fully implement these changes by February 2010 (Schagen, 2011, p. 1). Among the changes were aspects that encouraged greater recognition of an entrepreneurial orientation. We set out to gauge the understanding preservice teachers ...

International comparative studies offer unique opportunities to interrogate and challenge embedded practices within education systems. In this paper we explore the textbook presentation of fractions from a Chinese text. The fraction tasks reviewed in the Chinese text involve practice on learnt knowledge as well as exercises designed to extend the ...

The Ministry of Education is endeavouring to build an education system that is responsive to the challenges of the 21st century. This includes revising the school curriculum and a major investment in programmes of research and development. This paper examines the discourses relating to diversity and education that have become ...

Since the introduction of senior social studies for the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA ) in 2002, some progress has been made towards developing a unique identity for the subject. This progress has clarified a number of unresolved tensions relating to the nature and purpose of social studies, which ...

The purpose of this paper is to understand how teachers’ identities as assessors in a standards-referenced assessment system may be developed through their participation in online social moderation meetings. In these meetings, teachers negotiate and share their understandings of assessment standards and judgement decisions. In particular, the paper focuses on ...

Māori language education settings have resulted in teachers requiring efficient ways to identify the oral Māori language proficiency of students at the beginning of Māori-immersion schooling and throughout their participation as the basis for students’ ongoing learning. Accordingly, three assessment tools were developed using understandings from sociocultural perspectives on human ...

The conceptions teachers have about assessment are assumed to influence their practices and to be consistent with the jurisdictional and policy frameworks in which they work. This paper compares two groups of teachers (i.e., New Zealand primary and secondary) in response to the Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA–IIIA) self-administered survey ...