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Creating active citizens: Interpreting, implementing and assessing ‘personal social action’ in NCEA social studies

Introduction Since 2013, one internally-assessed Social Studies achievement standard at each of the three levels of the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has required students to actively participate in a social action. Whilst these new personal social action[1] standards hold the potential to support transformative citizenship education, previous research suggests that taking social action can be viewed as ‘risky’ and time consuming. As a result, teachers stick to ‘safer’ and efficient versions of active citizenship (Taylor, 2008; Wood, Taylor, & Atkins, 2013). Our 2-year project sought to examine how these personal social action achievement standards were understood and enacted by both teachers and students and how more critical and transformative

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Smoothing the path to transition

1. Introduction Successful transition of secondary school students into tertiary study is a priority for secondary schools, tertiary institutions and government alike (see, for example, Bazerman, 2007; Batholomae, 2005). The National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) has, as one of its goals, the effective preparation of senior secondary students for higher education; the Tertiary Education Commission’s (TEC) Tertiary Education Strategy 2014–2019 highlights student success (particularly of at-risk students, including Māori and Pasifica) in higher education as one of its goals; and universities are responding to this strategy by implementing enhanced transition and retention strategies. This research was a response to anecdotal evidence that, despite best intentions by secondary schools and tertiary

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“Better to do than receive”: Learning to think historically through internally assessed course work

Introduction This research project examined the contribution internally assessed course work makes to motivating young people to think historically; that is to develop reasoned, evidence-based understandings of the past that equip them to participate in society as critical citizens who can think independently and adjudicate between competing claims of historical authenticity. Our findings indicate that conducting internally assessed course work makes a major contribution to how students (as novices) learn to think critically about the past. developing the ability to think historically is counter-intuituive and has been described as an “unnatural act” (Wineburg, 2001). It can seldom be acquired from everyday experiences. Rather, it requires systematic instruction in how the discipline

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