A social enterprise providing education and information to protect and enhance the mental health of young people
Andrew Fuller If you have ever plugged in too many devices at home and caused a blackout, you’ll know what it is like when a circuit becomes overloaded. Everything shuts down. This happens for people too after really high stress situations. We can all shift from ‘all-systems are-go, action stations’ status where we are on [...]
Kate Highfield, Australian Catholic University It is school holidays in Australia and, in many parts of the country, it’s also raining and bitterly cold. This means many children are stuck indoors and many parents will be grappling with how much “screen time” their kids are having. As as early childhood researcher and parent to a [...]
Anabela Malpique, Edith Cowan University; Deborah Pino Pasternak, University of Canberra; Debora Valcan, Murdoch University, and Susan Ledger, University of Newcastle Learning how to be a confident and communicative writer is one of the most important skills students learn at school. But NAPLAN results show a significant decline in Australian students’ writing performance. Research for [...]
Brendan Hitchens, University of Melbourne For decades, many people have viewed academic success measured through grades, exam results, report cards, and tertiary admission rankings. Consequently, learning has been validated as the rote memorisation of bulk content. As the world becomes increasingly globalised and the future increasingly uncertain, the need for emotional intelligence (EQ) alongside global [...]
Sarah Hellewell, Curtin University Understanding the facial expressions of others is an important development stage. It helps us learn non-verbal communication and to recognise when someone is angry or scared and primes us to react to threats or show empathy for others’ feelings. A growing body of evidence suggests our neighbourhood environment shapes this response [...]
Melissa Kang, University of Sydney It’s a tale as old as time. Around half of adolescents going through puberty will get their period. In high-income countries, an adolescent’s first period (known as “menarche”) happens on average between ten and 14 years of age, with most occurring between 12 and 13 years. Why then does this [...]
Rebecca Mitchell, Macquarie University and Anne McMaugh, Macquarie University NAPLAN scores can tell us about a child’s learning, but can they also help us to support learners who have had a serious injury or a long-term chronic illness like asthma or epilepsy? Children who spend time in hospital for these reasons miss out on time [...]
Tiffani Apps, Karley Beckman and Sarah K. Howard, University of Wollongong Schools’ use of educational technologies (edtech) grew exponentially at the height of COVID lockdowns. A recent Human Rights Watch (HRW) report has exposed children’s rights violations by providers of edtech endorsed by governments in Australia and overseas. The lockdowns have ended but edtech remains embedded [...]
P. Daniel Lin and Valsamma Eapen, UNSW Sydney Children diagnosed with neurodevelopmental disorders, such as autism, experience various types of challenges at school. This might be due to communication, and also relationships with other children. Accumulating evidence indicates autistic children are more likely to be bullied. We’ve just published a study which observed autism is the [...]
The Australian Centre to Counter Child Exploitation (ACCCE) is warning that Australia is seeing a global trend in the crime of sexual extortion, with a spike in the number of Australian boys being preyed on by international sex offenders, who are grooming them into producing explicit images and then extorting them for money. The ACCCE [...]
