International student survey 2014

Introduction This report documents research into the experiences of international students studying in Australia. The survey sought responses from international students studying onshore in the higher  ducation, vocational education and training (VET) and English Language Intensive Courses for Overseas (ELICOS) Students sectors, using the International Student Barometer (ISB) survey instrument. A separate survey instrument was used to seek responses from international students aged 16 years or over studying in Australian secondary schools in years 11 and 12. The 2014 International Student Survey (ISS) follows equivalent surveys conducted in Australia in 2012 and 2010. This 2014 overview report focuses on the satisfaction levels reported by respondents against a number of key indicators. In addition, high-level comparisons are made with 2014 international benchmarks obtained from use of the ISB survey instrument in other major destination countries for international students. Hence the report not only provides information about international students’ experience in Australia, but also how their experience compares to international students studying elsewhere in the world

Action now: classroom ready teachers

This report provides recommendations intended to achieve improvements in both the content and delivery of initial teacher education courses in Australia. Executive summary The evidence is clear: enhancing the capability of teachers is vital to raising the overall quality of Australia’s school system and lifting student outcomes. Action to improve the quality of teachers in Australian schools must begin when they are first prepared for the profession. Initial teacher education in Australia has been the subject of a large number of reviews, but the outcomes have had limited impact on the policy and practice of developing new teachers. The goal of the Teacher Education Ministerial Advisory Group is to provide strong, implementable options to initiate genuine national reform. It is clear that there is significant public concern over the quality of initial teacher education in Australia. This concern is intensified by both media comment and political intervention. There is much debate over entrant selection and the desirable balance between academic skills and personal characteristics. There are mixed views on what teachers need to know, how they should teach, and how best to integrate theory and practice to have a measurable impact on student learning. Debate extends to assessment of classroom readiness and support for graduate teachers once they enter the profession. The Advisory Group found a high degree of variability in the quality of practice across initial teacher education in Australia. There are examples of excellent practice, where providers deliver evidence-backed programs that are constantly reviewed and improved. Disturbingly, there are also significant pockets of objectively poor practice, and these must be addressed decisively. It is the Advisory Group’s view that the standard across all initial teacher education programs must be lifted. A culture of high expectations, best practices and continuous improvement is necessary to give Australian parents, students and the community confidence in those delivering school education. Higher education providers and the teaching profession must together embrace the opportunity to fully participate in a reformed, integrated system of initial teacher education. This participation will be essential in embedding the reforms necessary to deliver high-quality teaching in every Australian school. The Australian Government has a vital role to play in driving this structural and cultural change. National leadership is needed to bring providers, the government and non-government sectors and schools together to transform initial teacher education, so that every Australian school student has an effective teacher drawn from a high-quality, national teaching profession

Longitudinal surveys of Australian youth annual report 2013

The purpose of LSAY LSAY is designed to examine major transition points in young people’s lives, including completing school and transitioning to work or further training and education, as well as other aspects of their lives. LSAY follows nationally representative cohorts of young people over a ten-year period, with interviews taking place annually. Each cohort starts out with about 14 000 students. Survey participants enter the study when they turn 15 years or, for earlier studies, when they were in Year 9. To date, there have been five cohorts,1 the first starting in 1995 (known as Y95), followed by further cohorts in 1998, 2003, 2006 and 2009 (known as the Y98, Y03, Y06 and Y09 cohorts respectively). The last three of these cohorts were still active in 2013 (although it was the last year for the Y03 cohort). Interviews are conducted by telephone, with online interviews also possible from 2012. Since 2003, the sample for the initial wave has been coordinated with the Organisation for Economic Development (OECD) Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA). Only six other countries have surveys that use the PISA sample (Canada, the Czech Republic, Denmark, Germany, Switzerland and Uruguay), making LSAY a relatively unique survey. LSAY provides a rich source of data relating to the transitions of students from school to post-school destinations; it also explores their social outcomes, such as wellbeing. Information collected as part of the LSAY program covers a wide range of school and post-school topics, including: student achievement; student aspirations; school retention; social background; attitudes to school; work experiences; and what students do when they leave school

United Nations Sustainable Development Goals: Promoting health and well-being through physical education partnerships

The United Nations recently approved the Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) which forms a guideline policy for all nations. While the UN have strongly advised that partnerships are essential for the implementation of these global goals, within local communities there is little evidence of how this is best done or what it looks like in practice. This paper shares a health and wellbeing community initiative that achieves goals three and four of the SDGs, and in doing so models how to implement physical education partnerships as advocated by the UN. The highly successful innovative initiative is “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness” (2011–2014).This paper shares a health and wellbeing partnership, modelling implementation of physical education (PE) advocated by the United Nations (UN). The Sustainable Development Goals (SDGs) exemplifies global efforts towards equality, specifically Goal 3 and 4 address health and wellbeing. The purpose of this paper is to provide insights into cross sector “partnerships”, identified as essential for the implementation of the SDGs. This is significant as the UN acknowledge a present gap of information on partnerships in action and a need for reporting from the ground level. The project “Best Start: A community collaborative approach to lifelong health and wellness”, began as a partnership between a university and nearby schools and quickly grew to involve Australian Registered Training Organisations, the local health industry, Education departments and sport governing bodies. The collaborations involved pre-service teachers teaching Health and PE lessons to children in a disadvantaged socio-economic area, creating valuable learning experiences for stakeholders. Local and global communities were involved in research and reform. The project creatively optimised resources available through state, Australian and international connections. International partnerships enabled identification of unique contextual opportunities. Programme planning was strengthened with data gathered from an England and Wales Ofsted awarded Primary Physical Education course. Various methods, including; semi-structured interviews, reflective journal, observations, document analysis, and Student Evaluation of Teaching Units (SETU) were adopted. SETU is valid and reliable data collected by the university for the purposes of research. The findings support that partnerships enable SDG implementation and the research paper offers direction for localisation

Do early life cognitive ability and self-regulation skills explain socio-economic inequalities in academic achievement? An effect decomposition analysis in UK and Australian cohorts

SSocio-economic inequalities in academic achievement emerge early in life and are observed across the globe. Cognitive ability and “non-cognitive” attributes (such as self-regulation) are the focus of many early years’ interventions. Despite this, little research has compared the contributions of early cognitive and self-regulation abilities as separate pathways to inequalities in academic achievement. We examined this in two nationally representative cohorts in the UK (Millennium Cohort Study, n = 11,168; 61% original cohort) and Australia (LSAC, n = 3028; 59% original cohort). An effect decomposition method was used to examine the pathways from socio-economic disadvantage (in infancy) to two academic outcomes: ‘low’ maths and literacy scores (based on bottom quintile) at age 7–9 years. Risk ratios (RRs, and bootstrap 95% confidence intervals) were estimated with binary regression for each pathway of interest: the ‘direct effect’ of socio-economic disadvantage on academic achievement (not acting through self-regulation and cognitive ability in early childhood), and the ‘indirect effects’ of socio-economic disadvantage acting via self-regulation and cognitive ability (separately). Analyses were adjusted for baseline and intermediate confounding. Children from less advantaged families were up to twice as likely to be in the lowest quintile of maths and literacy scores. Around two-thirds of this elevated risk was ‘direct’ and the majority of the remainder was mediated by early cognitive ability and not self-regulation. For example in LSAC: the RR for the direct pathway from socio-economic disadvantage to poor maths scores was 1.46 (95% CI: 1.17–1.79). The indirect effect of socio-economic disadvantage through cognitive ability (RR = 1.13 [1.06–1.22]) was larger than the indirect effect through self-regulation (1.05 [1.01–1.11]). Similar patterns were observed for both outcomes and in both cohorts. Policies to alleviate social inequality (e.g. child poverty reduction) remain important for closing the academic achievement gap. Early interventions to improve cognitive ability (rather than self-regulation) also hold potential for reducing inequalities in children's academic outcomes.Anna Pearce, Alyssa C.P. Sawyer, Catherine R. Chittleborough Murthy N. Mittinty Catherine Law, John W. Lync

'Language Background Other Than English': a problem NAPLaN test category for Australian students of refugee background

Since 2008 Australia has held the National Assessment Program: Literacy and Numeracy (known as NAPLAN) for all students in years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Despite the multilingual character of the Australian population, these standardized literacy and numeracy tests are built on an assumption of English as a first language competency. The capacity for monitoring the performance of students who speak languages other than English is achieved through the disaggregation of test data using a category labelled Language Background Other than English (LBOTE). A student is classified as LBOTE if they or their parents speak a language other than English at home. The category definition is so broad that the disaggregated national data suggest that LBOTE students are outperforming English speaking students, on most test domains, though the LBOTE category shows greater variance of results. Drawing on Foucault’s theory of governmentality, this article explores the possible implications of LBOTE categorisation for English as a Second Language (ESL) students of refugee background. The article uses a quantitative research project, carried out in Queensland, Australia, to demonstrate the potential inequities resultant from such a poorly constructed data category