Australian Council for Educational Research

In 2025, ACER published the Teacher Practice Improvement Tool (TPIT), as part of its family of improvement tools. A comprehensive review of international research was undertaken to inform the development of the Tool, which resulted in the inductive development of five inter-related domains that holistically capture the practices of highly effective teachers. This document summarises the research evidence underpinning each of the five domains of the TPIT, drawing on a review of 102 studies. While recognising the interconnections between domains, it presents a structured narrative of key evidence and research-informed considerations for each domain. The five domains, or aspects of practice, have been identified from this evidence. Research shows that highly effective teachers make a positive impact by: teaching with purpose and passion; planning for learning; optimising learning environments; engaging and empowering learners; and enhancing individual and collective practice. This summary offers a high-level overview rather than a comprehensive account of all evidence that informed the framework. As such, the references included are illustrative rather than exhaustive.

Sustainability is one of the new focus areas of the International Civic and Citizenship Education Study (ICCS) 2022. The European student questionnaire measured students’ attitudes related to environmental sustainability (i.e., their endorsement of environmental cooperation in Europe), and students’ behaviors related to sustainability (i.e., their reports on political consumerism behaviors and sustainable behaviors). Findings highlighted that nearly all students were in favor of different forms of cooperation among European countries to protect the environment and that this support was positively associated with higher socioeconomic backgrounds and higher levels of civic knowledge. Results also showed that students’ political consumerism behaviors and their sustainable behaviors differed widely across countries, with more than half of the students, on average, reporting having bought green products in the last 12 months or having asked their parents or guardians to do so. Across countries, most of the students reported that they have reduced the use of electricity, have reduced food waste, and have repaired rather than replaced items they owned in the last 12 months. In almost all countries, female students, students from above average socioeconomic backgrounds and students with higher levels of civic knowledge reported more frequent sustainable behaviors.

Constructed-response questions (CRQs) require effective marking schemes to ensure that the intended learning objectives and/or professional competencies are appropriately addressed, and valid inferences regarding examinee competence are drawn from such assessments. While the educational literature on writing rubrics has proliferated in recent years, this is largely targeted at classroom use and formative purposes. There is comparatively little guidance on how to develop appropriate marking schemes for summative assessment contexts. The different purposes mean that different principles and practices apply to mark schemes for examinations. In this article, we draw on the educational literature as well as our own practical experience of working with medical and health professional educators on their questions and marking schemes to offer 12 key principles or tips for designing and implementing effective marking schemes.

Abstract The focus of this chapter lies with women middle-level leaders. It reports on themes from women in leadership programmes designed and delivered by Barbara Watterston, through the lens of a programme especially developed for the Association of Independent Schools of South Australia (AISSA). This chapter begins by profiling a description of the programme. The main aim was providing women leaders with an opportunity to take stock of their careers, consider ongoing challenges impeding their work as school leaders, and identify options for the future. After the programme finished, volunteers were invited to write a narrative encapsulating their career journey. Three women leaders volunteered, and their insightful reflections regarding their career trajectories constitute a significant portion of this chapter. The final part of this chapter identifies three common themes that emerged from their stories, resonating with ideas which are frequently illuminated in similar programmes and research. These include the importance of ongoing professional learning to be a successful leader, gender-based barriers that caused the women to doubt their abilities and readiness for leadership, and the deep appreciation the women expressed from learning with and from like-minded other women leaders.

The paper describes a theoretical framework for the study of teachers’ promotion of self-regulated learning in the classroom. The Self-Regulated Learning Teacher Promotion Framework (SRL-TPF) utilizes the ICAP theory to assess the affordances of the learning environment for the indirect promotion of SRL, proposes new variables in the investigation of the direct promotion of SRL, and examines how these two ways to promote SRL are related. The SRL-TPF was used to examine the direct and indirect promotion of SRL in filmed observations of 23 Australian classrooms. The results revealed a paucity in the design of Constructive and Interactive lesson tasks that support the indirect promotion of SRL and a preference for the direct support of SRL through implicit strategy instruction and the provision of metacognitive reflection and support. There were important teacher differences in both the direct and indirect promotion of SRL, but the teachers who were more likely to design Constructive and Interactive lesson tasks did not necessarily promote SRL directly and vice versa. The research contributes to a better understanding of the relationship between teaching what to learn (subject content) and how to learn (SRL knowledge and strategies).

Returning to work after maternity leave poses significant challenges, with potential long-term implications including decreased engagement or attrition of clinicians. Many quantitative studies have identified challenges and supports for women during pregnancy, maternity leave and re-entry to clinical practice. This qualitative study explored the experiences of anaesthetists returning to clinical work after maternity leave, to identify influential factors with the aim of providing a framework to assist planning re-entry. We conducted semi-structured interviews with 15 anaesthetists. Attendees of a re-entry programme were invited to participate, with purposive sampling and snowball recruitment to provide diversity of location and training stage, until data saturation was reached at 13 interviews. Five themes were identified: leave duration; planning re-entry; workplace culture; career impact and emotional impact. Leave duration was influenced by concerns about deskilling, but shorter periods of leave had logistical challenges, including fatigue. Most participants started planning to return to work with few or no formal processes in the workplace. Workplace culture, including support for breastfeeding, was identified as valuable, but variable. Participants also experienced negative attitudes on re-entry, including difficulty accessing permanent work, with potential career impacts. Many participants identified changes to professional and personal identity influencing the experience with emotional sequelae. This research describes factors which may be considered to assist clinicians returning to work after maternity leave and identifies challenges, including negative attitudes, which may pose significant barriers to women practising in anaesthesia and may contribute to lack of female leadership in some workplaces.

It has often been observed that what is assessed often becomes what is taught. To enable teachers to teach 21st century skills, it is crucial that school systems upskill their models of designing high-quality competency-based assessments. This chapter reports a competency-based formative assessment used to equip students with the skills required for successful survival in the 21st century. It reports a formative assessment task in which story writing is used to develop graph development skills among STEM students studying in middle grades in an Indian school classroom. The results indicate that competency-based assessments unravel student-held misconceptions which can be used by the teachers to provide appropriate formative feedback.

Core concepts in physiology, designed by physiology educators to promote improved learning and teaching, have existed for over a decade. This study aimed to investigate the extent to which a set of 15 core concepts of physiology (derived by a USA team) are reflected in the Learning Outcomes (LOs) of units (subjects) comprising physiology majors in Australian universities. From publicly accessible online information, we identified 17 Australian universities that offered a physiology major for undergraduate degree students and downloaded 788 LOs from the 166 units that comprised the majors. Each LO was blindly mapped against the 15 core concepts by eight physiology educators from three Australian universities. Additionally, text matching software was employed to match keywords and phrases, (identified as descriptors of the 15 core concepts) against the LOs. The frequency of individual words and two-word phrases for each core concept was calculated and ranked. There was variability in rating LOs for the same university amongst academic mappers, nevertheless, many of the 15 core concepts did not appear to be adequately covered in the LOs. Two core concepts most matched manually were in the top three most mapped by the software. These were, from most common, Structure/function and Interdependence. Our findings suggest a lack of alignment of LOs with the current set of core concepts across Australian physiology curricula. This highlights the need for Australia-wide agreement on a set of core concepts in physiology as the first step in collaboratively improving assessment and learning and teaching practice in physiology.