set 1983: no. 1

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 experience staff losses. The two schools featured in this article, Hagley High School and Riccarton High School, have taken imaginative approaches to the problem. Both schools have already faced rapid roll decline.
The first response… Read more

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, influence politicians and administrators in the prosecutions of economies?
With the passing of the Education Act of 1877 the state, working through the agency of a small… Read more

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 type:
1 some of the results from a close examination of samples of writing from 1250 primary school children;
2 an account of one of the ways we make new… Read more

Jean Piaget died, at the age of 84, just over 2 years ago. As with all great contemporaries, a balanced assessment of the long-term significance of his contributions will emerge only gradually over the next few decades as the already considerable amount of Piaget-inspired research builds up, and the implications of his ideas for educational practice are developed and tested more extensively.

How can education help to break down unnecessary sex-stereotyping of school subjects? The issue was much discussed in the 70s. The 'Catch 22' situation in the diagram was common and it was realised that you could try to break these circles either by providing the missing classes, or by supplying the classes with the missing c hildren. Our research followed up such ideas.
Throughout the 1970s in Western Australian state secondary schools boys and girls chose tertiary-oriented courses,… Read more

Starting the year on the 'right foot' is the key to effective classroom discipline. Obviously, of course, naturally - now tell us something new. Well, what's new is that a school can indeed design an in service beginning-of-the-year project that makes a difference in attitudes and actions for teachers, students, and administrators. I want to describe an unusually successful project in school discipline at a small elementary school in Greenwood, South Carolina.
The principal of… Read more

Are kids in secondary schools misbehaving more frequently? Do they have less respect for teachers? Do they have less respect for authority? Is what teachers do contributing to the problem? How would students like teachers to handle kids who
misbehave?

A man once owned a dog which was inclined to jump over the back fence and enjoy the delights of the neighbourhood. Deciding that he needed a new fence around his yard, the man was confronted with the problem of determining how high the fence should be. Because he wanted to approach the task systematically, he took his dog to a testing agency, where the animal was put through an extensive series of jumping tests. Eagerly, he awaited the results of the tests, which took some time to arrive.… Read more

One of the most striking characteristics of classrooms since the Industrial Revolution to the present has been ~he large number of pupils within them. At no other 'stage in their lives will young people occupy such socially intimate settings for such extended periods of time. Buses, football pavilions, and cinemas may be more crowded than classrooms, but people rarely stay in them for long, and, perhaps more important, they do not have to meet the demands of individual and social learning… Read more