set 2005: no. 3

Teachers and teacher-librarians collaborate to establish an ongoing, school-wide literacy programme to teach students the process of research and the procedural skills of information literacy.

This article, the third in a series about carrying out research as a student learning activity, discusses how research relates to context—in this case, history.

The challenge is to help students experience and understand research as the basis for new knowledge construction in any discipline area.

Helping students to use metacognition involves assisting students to think about their own learning. This article shows how a teacher in a final-year high school biology class scaffolded learning by promoting metacognition.

Validity and reliability are two key ideas in assessment. In the last issue of set I looked at the concept of validity and how it might inform the assessment decisions we make as classroom practitioners and school leaders. In this article I address the issue of reliability, and how it too can help inform our assessment strategies and practices.