As NZCER trials its Assessment Resource Banks for science, the patterns of student answers can help teachers to understand and address student errors and areas of difficulty. This article focuses on the ARBs for science achievement objective 3, Planet Earth and Beyond.

An effective behaviour management programme must focus on the behaviour of the whole school, not just the behaviour of students. This requires refocusing on the school’s core values, using a quality schools model developed over a number of years, ideas from the literature on quality, effective schools, school improvement and ...

Establishing credibility with a group of students for the first time is transactional and often complex. This article uses a case study of an initial classroom encounter to show how things can go wrong. Suggestions for improved classroom practice are first made from a common sense perspective, calling on classroom ...

What are the essential elements to motivate students and bring about positive outcomes for all? This article briefly explores some of the conceptual models developed to help teachers work with young people who present challenging behaviours. It advocates an approach based on a modification of Bronfenbrenner’s (1979) ecological model, now ...

Researchers and practitioners around the world have been working on understanding the nature of bullying and finding practical and useful solutions for dealing with it. This overview of their work aims to provide food for thought for New Zealand teachers and schools intending to initiate or refine a programme to ...

Welcome to the second issue of set for the year 2000. The response to the first issue has been exceptional. Clearly, the new format and the New Zealand content have met with approval from all sectors of the education community. The response is a clear mandate to continue in the ...

Fewer than 4% of primary and intermediate schools have half the 7.8% Pacific nations children. Only 2% of primary teachers are of similar background. A study of Pacific students at Wellington College of Education highlights some of the difficulties they face, and what colleges of education and tutors can do ...

In Britain, new national testing and assessment procedures have shown girls outperforming boys across most areas of the curriculum, though girls continue to underachieve in some key areas. Boys also present the majority of behavioural and learning problems, as they do in New Zealand. A wide range of forces is ...

New NZCER Information Skills tests explore students’ understanding of the information skills involved in using libraries, parts of a book, and reference sources. They provide strong evidence that students are experiencing difficulty with sorting through the various dimensions of a search task in order to select the volume, page, or ...

The requirement to report school entry assessment data to the Ministry of Education makes SEA a high stakes activity. But how well is it working? In this study, all teachers raised concerns such as timing, how to manage SEA tasks in the classroom, and how dependable the scoring is. Critical ...