What’s Wrong With This Picture? Last hour of school on a Friday afternoon and a teacher takes her class out for some games. Sounds wonderful doesn’t it? You can just imagine how pleased the students would be to have some…

Intelligence is what intelligence tests measure.  That quote, (and its variants), has been around for a long time. In 1983 Dr Howard Gardner developed his theory of Multiple Intelligences, because he felt that defining a person’s intelligence with an I.Q.…

What Is Wrong With NAPLAN (Part 1) “It is a ready-made solution to a bureaucrat’s dream of imposing control on a massive system.” (Dr James Athanasou quoted in The Sydney Morning Herald) In 2008, the Federal Government introduced NAPLAN as a…

Much has been said recently about Australia’s downward slide in global academic rankings. Is it a coincidence that this academic spiral coincides with a greater emphasis on NAPLAN? Now the federal solution to Australia’s falling standards is to propose national…

What two things do the following ten countries have in common? Bulgaria, Croatia, Finland, Hungary, Kazakhstan, Lithuania, Poland, Russia, Serbia and Sweden. According to the latest Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), they all outperformed Australia in maths…