As always, some very useful and timely links from Andrew Leigh. I would be interested in pursuing randomised trials in our Education Sector. Randomising in the UK. In 2003, the UK government started a major randomised evaluation of the Employment Retention and Advancement project (ERA), to test the effectiveness of interventions to improve job retention and advancement prospects for low…
Tag Archives Research
Why didn't girls play videogames?. At TED in 1998, Brenda Laurel asks: Why are all the top-selling videogames aimed at little boys? She spent two years researching the world of girls (and shares amazing interviews and photos) to create a game that girls would love. [Creative Economy : Reports]
Message to the Coalition: people respond to incentives. I was listening the other day to Tony Abbott claiming that the price elasticity of petrol is zero (Joshua Gans quotes the Coalition’s Greg Hunt making the same claim). It was perhaps the first time that I had heard a politician use the word ‘elasticity’, and it made me wonder whether Abbott…
Another good one from Andrew Leigh. As we draw near to budget time, there has been plenty of talk about what “middle Australia” will get. But where exactly is the middle? To provide a more precise sense, I’ve tabulated the pre-tax annual income distributions for individuals and households, in the 2008-09 tax year. My raw data is the 2006 HILDA…
If ever there was essential reading for every teacher and every teacher-educator, the work of Professor John Hattie from the University of Auckland, New Zealand, would be at the top of my reading list. The clarity and focus of such an extensive, system-wide meta-study that focusses on the EFFECTs of what teachers, schools and education systems DO is very compelling.…
Teachers are not as smart as they were 20 years ago, an Australian study by economists Andrew Leigh and Chris Ryan from the Australian National University concludes, in a finding that will reinforce concerns over declining classroom standards. The study used literacy and numeracy tests as the best proxy available for assessing teachers' academic abilities. Link: Teachers not so clever any…
Peter McMahon, writing in the On line Opinion presents an intriguing position that... The radical impact of new information technologies and the rise of the global crises (global warming, peak oil and the like) are forcing a new kind of politics into being. He suggests [as many of us would agree] that twenty-first century society will be defined by the…
This paper outlines the research methodology and findings of a unit development project on an online collaborative learning component, for a first year Bachelor of Education course run in 2001, at the University of New England. The original premise for the project was that the application of activity based processes that required students to participate with one another in focussed…
Enquiring Minds is a three-year research and development project investigating how children can shape their own learning, by changing the emphasis from what they learn to how they learn. [Source: Enquiring Minds: a new approach to learning.]