In Australia, it has been observed that there have been significant declines in the proportion of students studying senior sciences over the last two decades (Commonwealth of Australia 2017 & 2018; Steidtmann et.al, 2023). It has been suggested that one of the causes for this decline could be a link between students' literacy achievement and…

Literacy interventions are a common educational response for supporting students with literacy difficulties. Australian schools historically offered such programs,, though recent studies were not found in the research literature. This paper reports on school-level and literacy intervention data for a randomly selected sample of 366 schools, from…

Asbury and Wai ("Journal of School Choice," 2019) perform a valuable service by summarizing much available behavior--genetic research on academic achievement. However they consider that no specific policies stem from the research body at this time. Here we do propose a policy based on some of our research using twins, namely that…

Building on the rich tradition of 'teacher as researcher' in mathematics education, I describe a study undertaken whilst working as a mathematics specialist in an Australian primary school. The focus of the study was on examining whether explicitly teaching students test-taking strategies ('test-wiseness') improved their performance on a…

Poor mathematics achievement in middle school students is evident in many countries. While some of the difficulties can be attributed to student related factors, there is considerable evidence that computational automaticity is essential for mathematics achievement. A QuickSmart (QS) mathematics intervention program was trialled with a group of…