In this issue:

• The movement of non-metropolitan youth towards the cities
• Time is right for a common curriculum
• ACER UPDATE

More than one third of young Australians from non-metropolitan areas relocate to a major city in the years immediately after leaving school and, although some return, non-metropolitan areas experience a net loss of a quarter of their young people. A new report, released by ACER on 22 February, is the first Australian national longitudinal study of young people’s geographic mobility. It focused on the experiences of around 5000 young Australians who were living in a non-metropolitan area in their final years of school. They were tracked from 1997 (when most were in Year 11) until 2004 when most were 23 years old.

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ACER chief executive Professor Geoff Masters was invited by The Advertiser newspaper in Adelaide to write an opinion article in response to the release of the ALP position paper on a national school curriculum. The following article was published on 2 March 2007.

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ACER opens Perth office

ACER’s new West Australian office was officially opened on Wednesday 21 February 2007 by chief executive Geoff Masters. The opening of a Perth office follows ACER’s recent acquisition of Unicom Education, a supplier of special needs and speech and language resources for teachers, established in the late 1990s. Shane Thompson, who has owned and managed Unicom for the past five years, joins the staff of ACER Press as an Education Consultant for Western Australia.

The Perth office is located at 7/1329 Hay Street West Perth, WA 6005, Telephone 08 9485 2194, Fax 08 9485 2195

ACER named Employer of Choice for Women

ACER has been successful in obtaining a 2007 Employer of Choice for Women citation from the Federal Government's Equal Opportunity for Women in the Workplace Agency (EOWA) for the second successive year. ACER is one of 131 organisations across Australia to receive the award this year and it has done so on the basis that its policies and programs support a commitment to fully utilising, developing and retaining its staff, including women.

Centre for Research on Educational Testing (CRET) Japan

ACER welcomed a group of five researchers from the newly formed Centre for Research on Educational Testing (CRET) Japan in early March. CRET has been formed by its parent organisation the Benesse Centre for Educational Research and Development with a mission to research and develop educational testing and technology for the future. CRET is currently developing items for large scale assessment of reading literacy. ACER staff worked with the key members of CRET over several days to further develop their understanding of large scale assessment and item construction.

Leading Lights of Learning Seminar

ACER will conduct the first in a series of Leading Lights of Learning lectures with the Queensland Studies Authority at the Hilton Hotel in Brisbane on 26 April. Professor Janette Elwood from Queen’s University Belfast will give a presentation entitled Views of assessment, learning and mind. Professor Elwood will explore the links and the implications for emerging trends and perspectives in assessment. In particular, she will outline some links between assessment, theories of learning and theories of mind; present a continuum as a framework to consider these ideas; and critique the emerging trend of ‘assessment for learning’ within this framework. The 45-minute presentation plus question time will be followed by drinks and canapés.

Professor Elwood is Director of Research in the Queen’s University School of Education and is responsible for the research cluster of Assessment and Curriculum. She is also responsible for the MPhil/PhD course.

It is hoped that three lectures on Leading Lights of Learning will be held at ACER in Brisbane during 2007. For further information including a registration form visit the ACER website or contact Carmel Cranitch, ACER Brisbane office by email:.(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address) or phone on 07 3831 5062