In this issue:

• More still needed in overhaul of early childhood education
• Transparent school reporting
• ACER UPDATE

The radical overhaul of Australia’s preschool sector will require better legislating for the sector and increasing the number of early childhood education teachers, according to a policy paper released by ACER on 22 December. The policy brief, Preschool Education in Australia, summarises the current structure of preschool in Australian in contemplation of major policy shifts announced by the Commonwealth. It follows a Council of Australian Governments (COAG) commitment last year to a “radical makeover” of the preschool sector.

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This opinion article by ACER chief executive, Professor Geoff Masters, was published in The Australian newspaper on 22 January 2010. Threats by the Australian Education Union to boycott this year’s literacy and numeracy tests must have many scratching their heads. Why would teachers be opposed to better public information about what is being achieved in our schools? At the heart of the teacher union threat appears to be a concern that test results will be interpreted as direct indicators of how well individual schools are performing. According to the AEU, there are two problems with such an interpretation. First, literacy and numeracy tests measure only part of what students learn in school and so only partially capture the contributions that schools are making. Second, schools work in very different socioeconomic contexts with significantly different resources, meaning that it is harder to achieve high test scores in some schools than in others. For these reasons, the union argues, measures of student performance are not good measures of a school’s performance.

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ACER enters project agreements with Imam University

ACER has entered into a project agreement with the Imam Muhammad bin Saud Islamic University (Imam University), a major institution of higher education in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia (KSA), to help establish an Imam University Centre for Evaluation and Assessment (ICEA). Once established the new centre will have an important influence on the educational process that takes place within the University and will also potentially improve and invigorate higher education throughout the KSA.

ACER will support the establishment of the ICEA by providing guidance, assisting local staff with skills development and conducting seminars to build the capacity of the ICEA staff.

Under a separate agreement ACER will develop a Cognitive Skills Test for Imam University to measure both critical reasoning and problem solving. Imam University will use the test to gain a better understanding of the growth in generic skills attained by its student population over the course of their undergraduate studies.

The project agreements were signed during a visit to ACER’s Melbourne office by a delegation from Imam University in early January.

Indigenous school attendance and retention

ACER has been appointed by the Australian Institute of Health and Welfare Social and Indigenous Group to prepare a paper on Indigenous school attendance and retention. The purpose of the paper is to review the quality and breadth of the available evidence on strategies for improving school attendance and retention, evaluate the evidence base in relation to this, and identify any gaps in the available research.

White re-elected to ISOC-AU

ACER Principal Research Fellow, Mr Gerry White, has been re-elected as a Director of the Internet Society of Australia (ISOC-AU) which is the Australian Chapter of the international Internet Society. The Internet Society is a sub-committee of the international Internet Engineering Taskforce (IETF). The IETF makes the Internet work better by producing high quality, relevant technical documents that influence the way people design, use, and manage the Internet.

The goal of ISOC-AU is to assist the development of the internet for everybody in Australia. The work of ISOC-AU can be seen at: www.isoc-au.org.au