set 2004: no. 2

In this issue we continue to celebrate thirty years of set. While set has always been a refereed journal it is now officially recognised as such by the Commonwealth Department of Education Science and Training (DEST). This is a fitting milestone for a year of celebration.

set started in 1974 as a kit—looseleaf pages and little booklets with articles, reviews, and even
stories. set generally came out twice yearly—free for the first few issues, funded by the Department
of Education, then on a subscription basis. It covered education from preschool to tertiary level.

Road safety education for young children requires more than games, rhymes, and worksheets; it needs to be linked to everyday experiences of traffic and addressed "little and often". This article reports on the experiences of teachers and classes in the first years of school who participated in a national project to develop integrative cross-curricular, essential-skills-based road safety education.

Teachers are constantly urged to develop higher-level thinking skills in their students. This article describes one school's approach to developing these skills in Year 9 students in a way that is meaningful, transferable, and fun.

Education for the environment is invariably considered to be the fundamental element in education "in, about, and for" the environment. However, research from New Zealand and elsewhere suggests that too few primary and secondary school programmes actually achieve substantial outcomes for the environment.
 

A national research project investigated environmental education practice in New Zealand schools. This article describes and discusses key characteristics of current practice and the achievements of that practice in environmental education for teachers, students, schools, and the wider school community.

This article discusses the merits of using cancer as a context for teaching about social and ethical issues. It is based on part of a larger research project that investigated the teaching and learning of social and ethical issues in a Year 13 biology class.

Once upon a time, it happened that all the Newspaper Editors, Employers and Professors of Engineering throughout the land came to believe that children were no longer able to jump as well as they had in the old days, when the Newspaper Editors, Employers and Professors of Engineering themselves had been young. Overcome by a deep sense of concern at such a decline from the high standards they themselves had set, and anxious to convince the few remaining doubters of the superiority of their… Read more

Once upon a time the animals decided they must do something decisive if they were ever to solve the problems created by the growing complexity of their society. They set up a working party and, in due course, the working party reported back that in their view, taking all circumstances into consideration, a school should be set up. A second working party was then appointed to consider this recommendation and in due course their report appeared as well. This agreed with the first report, and… Read more

This article examines significant social-emotional influences on gifted students' motivation. While students' motivation to engage in learning is very much determined by factors specific to each individual, understanding and knowledgeable teachers—and appropriate classroom and school environments generally—are key contributing factors.