Today there is growing agreement that literacy is at the center of all learning. Expectations for what it means to be literate are rising, and all educators must play a role in helping students meet these expectations. The new Common Core State Standards (CCSS), recently adopted by forty-six states and the District of Columbia, require...

This study focused on a group of 101 Tongan students within the middle and upper levels of primary schools in New Zealand. It examined the hypothesis that explicit vocabulary instruction, using an educational intervention, can positively impact on Tongan students’ reading comprehension and contribute to the improvement of their reading achievement. The implementation of the...

This report presents NAPLAN results by gender, Indigenous status, language background other than English status, parental occupation, parental education, and location (metropolitan, provincial, remote and very remote) at each year level and for each domain of the test. The National Assessment Program—Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests are conducted in May each year for all students...

PISA was administered for the fourth time in 2009. Since in each administration, one of reading, maths or science is chosen as the major domain, the 2009 survey marked the first time that a domain (in this case, reading) was revisited as the major focus of the assessment. This allowed a full review of the...

The extant findings of the 2006 Adult Literacy and Lifeskills survey are examined and some further quantitative analysis is undertaken to clarify the numeracy skills of New Zealand women. Fundamental questions are raised about both the design of the ALL survey and the relevance of the numeracy assessment questions used in the survey for investigating...