Intellectually gifted students have the right to appropriately challenging learning experiences and the right to reach their potential. In Australia, most intellectually gifted students are in mixed-ability classes and teachers are expected to differentiate to meet the specific learning needs of students across the full range of abilities; yet…

Reading lists have been described as a stalwart of the academic environment. This article explores the role of reading lists as a pedagogical tool and describes how reading lists contribute to an immersive block teaching model at an Australian university. Little has been written about the application of reading lists in block teaching models. This…

Foundation and Year 1/2 teachers at Saint Martin de Porres Primary School, a Catholic School in Laverton, Melbourne have been collaborating with a team of researchers from Monash University on a four-year project led by Professor Peter Sullivan and colleagues. The teachers have been trialling and implementing a series of lesson sequences as part…

Understanding is one of the four key ideas in the "Australian Curriculum: Mathematics." This case study investigated preservice teachers' understanding of modified words such as 'regular polygon', where the preceding word/s modifies the meaning of the final word. Data were gathered from 23 preservice teachers who voluntarily participated…

An Australia-wide consensus was reached on seven core concepts of physiology, one of which was cell-cell communication. Three physiology educators from a "core concepts" Delphi task force "unpacked" this core concept into seven different themes and 60 subthemes. Cell-cell communication, previously unpacked and validated, was…

A task force of physiology educators from 25 Australian universities generated an Australia-wide consensus on seven core concepts for physiology curricula. One adopted core concept was "cell membrane," defined as "Cell membranes determine what substances enter or leave the cell and its organelles. They are essential for cell…

Piaget's theory of stage structure is synonymous with discussions involving cognitive development. As with any theoretical model, researchers inevitably and rightly seek to affirm and/or contest the elements of the model presented. In this comparative study, students' performance across three hands-on engineering tasks for two distinct student…

Learning objectives outline the knowledge and skills to be taught in a subject, thus signaling what is worth learning and what type of thinking is valued. The aim of this syllabus analysis is to determine the cognitive demand of learning objectives in the recently reformed Queensland physics, chemistry and biology syllabus and to analyse whether…

Problem-based learning (PBL) has a history of producing strong educational results in engineering; however, global society is challenged by highly complex environmental, socio-political and technical problems summarised in the UN Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs). This obliges us to explore educational approaches that address complexity. Yet,…

In this article the authors overview how the recently revised (version 9) Australian Curriculum (Australian Curriculum Assessment and Reporting Authority, 2022) and student difficulties with fractions relate to five developmental Fraction Schemes developed from multiple research projects in the literature. The article shares research findings from…

In this paper, an example is offered of a problem-solving task for senior secondary school students which was given in the context of a story. As the story unfolds, the task requires progressively more complex forms of linear programming to be applied. Coding in MATLAB is used throughout the task in such a way that it supports the increasing…

With the emergence of a wealth of research-based information in the field of educational neuroscience, educators are now able to make more evidence-based decisions in the important area of curriculum design and construction. By viewing from the perspective of educational neuroscience, we can give a more meaningful and lasting purpose of leading to…

This paper outlines a seven-step process for developing problem-solving tasks informed by cognitive load theory. Through an example of a task developed for Year 2 students, we show how this approach can be used to produce challenging mathematical tasks that aim to optimise cognitive load for each student.

Language is frequently discussed as barrier to mathematics word problems. Hence this paper presents the initial findings of a linguistic analysis of numeracy skills test sample items. The theoretical perspective of multi-modal text analysis underpinned this study, in which data was extracted from the ten sample numeracy test items released by the…

The Australian Geography Competition (AGC) was established in 1995 by the Royal Geographical Society of Queensland (RGSQ) and the Australian Geography Teachers' Association to promote the study of geography in Australian secondary schools and to reward student excellence in geographical studies. Initially focusing on students at the lower…