Nerida Spina
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View article: A Decade of Elementary School Improvement Data: Documenting Longitudinal Associations Among Attendance, Suspension, School Climate, and Achievement
A Decade of Elementary School Improvement Data: Documenting Longitudinal Associations Among Attendance, Suspension, School Climate, and Achievement Open
School improvement is generally assessed by the extent to which several indicators show improvement over time. However, much less is known about the ways in which these indicators interact over time. This study analyses 10 years of school-…
View article: Datafication in the First Year of Schooling
Datafication in the First Year of Schooling Open
Schools collect enormous amounts of data, including in children’s first year of formal schooling. Having ‘data’ has sometimes been seen as a panacea, enabling teachers and school systems to quickly get to know children transitioning from p…
View article: The Equity of Class Ability Grouping Practices in Australian Education: Findings from a Survey in Western Australia and Queensland
The Equity of Class Ability Grouping Practices in Australian Education: Findings from a Survey in Western Australia and Queensland Open
Grouping students into separate classes according to their ‘ability’ is an inequitable practice that does not, overall, improve academic outcomes. Research has continued to show that class ability grouping widens the educational gap betwee…
View article: Enquiring into a teacher performance assessment: towards intelligent professional responsibility in initial teacher education
Enquiring into a teacher performance assessment: towards intelligent professional responsibility in initial teacher education Open
Teacher education is broadly seen as a policy problem in that it has failed to produce sufficient ‘classroom ready’ teachers. One accountability measure that has been introduced in Australia to address this purported problem is the capston…
View article: Back to zero? Precarious employment in academia amongst ‘older’ early career researchers, a life-course approach
Back to zero? Precarious employment in academia amongst ‘older’ early career researchers, a life-course approach Open
Despite the diversity of entry points into academia, little research exists examining the experiences and impact of precarious employment at different life stages. Drawing on interviews with 19 academics employed casually or on fixed-term …
View article: Teachers’ representations of genders and sexualities in primary school: the power of curriculum and an institutional ideological code
Teachers’ representations of genders and sexualities in primary school: the power of curriculum and an institutional ideological code Open
Texts such as curriculum and policy documents work in complex ways to coordinate teachers’ work and approaches to diverse genders and sexualities. Although it might be assumed that official, mandated curricula determine teachers’ curriculu…
View article: Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops
Towards faster feedback in higher education through digitally mediated dialogic loops Open
How feedback is understood and enacted has shifted from the traditional practice of providing individual feedback on summative tasks at key points to a more ongoing series of dialogues between the teacher and students during the teaching p…
View article: Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: Primary school boys who <i>love</i> reading fiction
Disrupting the 'boys don't read' discourse: Primary school boys who <i>love</i> reading fiction Open
This article disrupts dominant discourses around boys and reading that often homogenise young males as reluctant, disengaged and, at times, adversarial readers. Rather than essentialising boys, we argue there is a need for a more sophistic…
View article: Data Culture and the Organisation of Teachers’ Work
Data Culture and the Organisation of Teachers’ Work Open
Data Culture and the Organisation of Teachers' Work provides an in-depth look at how the political and media scrutiny of teachers, pupils and schools now organises teaching and learning. Spina also examines how educational data is used in …
View article: Governing by Numbers: local effects on students' experiences of writing
Governing by Numbers: local effects on students' experiences of writing Open
The global neoliberal context and the emergence of new forms of ‘governance by numbers’ is now recognized as a ubiquitous educational phenomenon. In this context, large-scale assessments such as PISA are used to justify marketised ideals o…
View article: The quantification of education and the reorganisation of teachers' work : an institutional ethnography
The quantification of education and the reorganisation of teachers' work : an institutional ethnography Open
This thesis explores how significant aspects of teachers’ work are being re-organised by the rise of large scale assessment regimes. The research shows how teachers’ work is connected to chains of texts that link education data to funding …
View article: The centrality of ethical leadership
The centrality of ethical leadership Open
Purpose – The central argument in this paper is that ethical school leadership is imperative in a context of increasing performance-driven accountability. The purpose of this paper is to focus on school principals’ perceptions of how they …