set 2008: no. 2

Practical Research for Education, 38, October 2007, pp. 44–49 (reprinted with permission)

Evaluation of a pilot programme in UK primary schools to support children (often British born) who are beyond the initial stages of acquiring English as an additional language to develop the cognitive and academic language required for academic success.

Collaborating in the secondary department of an area school, teachers and researchers developed their understanding of content area literacy and their skills in developing instruction to address literacy challenges across curriculum and assessment tasks. The teaching approaches they developed succeeded in raising students’ literacy skills and knowledge.

At the beginning of July I attended Scicon, a conference for teachers of science. One of the keynote speakers was Amanda Berry, a teacher-educator from Monash University in Victoria, Australia. Her presentation was about teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), specifically in science, but I think her ideas are relevant to other curriculum areas as well. Amanda talked about teachers’ PCK often being tacit. She believes that when teachers explicitly understand what they are doing and… Read more

• Are the tests normed?
• Why aren’t reading ages given in the new tests?
• How can we report to parents?
• Is there a specific test for each year group?
• How can we use the test results to group students for reading?
• Can we put the results into our data management system?
• How often and when should these tests be done?