Learning and Content
What students are taught, how it is designed and how it is delivered are among the most debated questions in education.
This collection brings together research spanning curriculum design, instructional practice and the student learning experience across secondary schooling. It examines knowledge-rich approaches to student-centred models, examined through the lens of what sustains meaningful engagement in Years 7 to 9.
Unlocking High Quality Teaching
- OECD
- 2025
Teaching is simultaneously a science, an art and a craft — and reducing it to any one of these diminishes what it actually takes to do it well. This OECD report pushes back against the search for a single correct way to teach, drawing on research across 20 practices and qualitative insights from more than 150 schools in 40 countries to build a richer and more honest picture of what high-quality teaching looks like in practice.
Inquiry vs explicit teaching misrepresentation
- Australian Science Teachers Association (ASTA)
- 2025
The debate about how to teach has become a distraction from what actually matters. This position paper from the Australian Science Teachers Association takes direct aim at the increasingly loud claim that explicit teaching and inquiry learning are opposites — and argues that framing them as a binary is not just wrong, it is actively harming students and undermining the profession.
Why not have the best of both worlds? How to use direct instruction principles in inquiry-based instructional design
- de Jong, T., Georgiou, M., Kapici, H. O., Schwichow, M., & Visser, T. C.
- 2025
This is a practical commentary paper rather than an empirical study. Its argument is straightforward and deliberately conciliatory: instead of continuing the...
Beyond inquiry or direct instruction: Pressing issues for designing impactful science learning opportunities.
- de Jong, T., Lazonder, A. W., Chinn, C. A., Fischer, F., Gobert, J., Hmelo-Silver, C. E., Koedinger, K. R., Krajcik, J. S., Kyza, E. A., Linn, M. C., Pedaste, M., Scheiter, K., & Zacharia, Z. C.
- 2024
This paper is a rebuttal rather than a primary empirical study, which makes its structure and purpose somewhat different from the others in the collection. It...
Outsourced curriculum planning to reduce teacher workload: Tracing the evolution of a policy solution.
- Mockler, N. & Stacey, M.
- 2024
In this paper, we trace the emergence of this positioning of teachers’ curriculum work, highlighting a trajectory in which discussions of centralised...
Secondary teachers’ perceptions of the importance of pedagogical approaches to support students’ behavioural, emotional and cognitive engagement.
- Kelly, M. L., Yeigh, T., Hudson, S., Willis, R., & Lee, M. (2023)
- 2023
The central question is whether teachers' stated pedagogical priorities align with the tri-dimensional framework of behavioural, emotional and cognitive...