This adventure game comes courtesy of Victoria’s Department of Education and Training. Click on the graphic, or go here. (Don’t try to do it all. You will die.) If you can be bothered, you can also complete a survey here.
The NAPLAN Numeracy Test Test is intended for education academics and education reporters. The test consists of three questions: Q1. Are you aware that “numeracy”, to the extent that it is anything, is different from arithmetic and much less than solid school mathematics? Q2. Do you regard it important to note and to clarify these distinctions? […]
NAPLAN has been much in the news of late, with moves for the tests to go online while simultaneously there have been loud calls to scrap the tests entirely. And, the 2018 NAPLAN tests have just come and gone. We plan to write about all this in the near future, and in particular we’re curious […]
This year Australia celebrates ten years of NAPLAN testing, and Australians can ponder the results. Numerous media outlets have reported “a 2.55% increase in numeracy” over the ten years. This is accompanied by a 400% increase in the unintended irony of Australian education journalism. What is the origin of that 2.55% and precisely what does it […]
Two years ago, we annotated parts of a speech that ACARA CEO, David de Carvalho, gave at The Age Schools Summit. De Carvalho’s stage-setting for ACARA’s soon-to-be-released draft curriculum was nonsense throughout, and included a cunning reference to the “Joint Maths Statement” from “five of the leading maths and science organisations” supposedly supporting the then […]
So far, there have been about a million columns written on ChatGPT, the AI chatbot that was launched a couple months ago. About half a million of these columns have been devoted to predictions on ChatGPT’s implications for education, both in schools and universities. Many of the columns have been fearful, but a few are […]
The following is our complete Arena article, which we announced a couple weeks ago. It includes footnotes and references and links that didn’t make it into the Arena version.
As was our previous post, this one concerns a very small but very telling detail of the new mathematics curriculum. A minor perversion of the curriculum is the renaming of the study of geometry as “Space”. This stupidity was noted by AMSI last year, in their submission on the draft curriculum:
This one is way, way old. But still, we felt something we should write something. Early last year, Alan Tudge – remember him? – launched a review into Initial Teacher Education.We also wrote about the review, here. The final report was released early year, as we announced here. We had no time then to carefully […]
It’s been fun VCE times down here in Victoria, but reportedly there have also been issues up north. While our students have been lamenting their inability to calculate the area of a 20 x 20 square (Murdoch, paywalled), New South Wales’ HSC students have been struggling with projectiles subject to air resistance. Same same.