Research Conference 2021: Excellent progress for every student: Proceedings and Program

The focus of the 2021 Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) Research Conference is on evidence-based strategies for ensuring that every student makes excellent ongoing progress in their learning. This is an important topic because many students in our schools do not make good, steady progress. Some slip behind and fall increasingly behind the longer they are in school. By the middle years of school, this contributes to significant levels of student disengagement. ACER has invited a number of leading educational researchers to join us to share the findings of their research relevant to this topic. An important conclusion of this research is that support for learners’ ongoing progress depends on a deep understanding of the nature of progress itself – that is, an understanding of how more sophisticated knowledge in an area of learning, deeper understandings, and higher levels of skill typically unfold over extended periods of time, often across many years of school. When the nature of long-term progress is well understood and documented, it provides a frame of reference for establishing the points individuals have reached in their learning, identifying useful next steps for teaching, and monitoring learning growth over time