The complex learning and socio-emotional profiles of students who are twice exceptional are often accompanied by challenges to their identification and support in the primary school. This exploratory research project, conducted in a primary school in New South Wales, Australia, focused on developing and trialling a comprehensive and useful assessment tool for teachers to use in the preliminary stage of investigating whether students might be twice-exceptional. Using mixed methods research methodology and a Participatory Action Research design, three primary-school teachers (including the first author) developed the Teacher Checklist Questionnaire (TCQ) based mainly on published research and anecdotal findings. All teachers at the school site from Years 2 to 6 (N = 10) participated in the first trial of the TCQ and the results from the analyses were positive in terms of validity, reliability, and usefulness. The main conclusion is that the tool shows promise as an early investigative tool to assess twice-exceptional students.

With the increasing casualisation of the teacher labour force, there is little written on the experiences of casual teachers and the challenges they face in brokering professional identities within constantly shifting and uncertain work contexts. Being a category bound casual teacher (a product of category boundary work) is a complex subject position. The aim of this article is to advance our understandings of the identity work inherent in casual relief teachers (CRTs) performativity. Anti-essentialist theories support this exploration of CRT subjectivities and processes of discourse appropriation. Using collective biography methodology as restoried memory work, this article speaks back to neoliberal politics of casualisation. The stories draw attention to how both experienced practitioners and newly graduated teachers might 'do' category boundary work within the complexity of school politics as they navigate the uncertainty of gaining and maintaining employment in the Education market.

Dataset contains questionnaires, interview recordings, and interview transcriptions relating to a study of gifted/high-ability children with learning difficulties. The data was collected to offer preliminary assessment strategies for primary school teachers.

Technology permeates daily life to the extent that, in modern western civilisation at least, its prevalence is tantamount to society's dependence on electricity or running water. Its ubiquitous role has significant implications for how society functions and interacts, and this is no more evident than in the ever-evolving landscape of education. If educators are to cater to an audience that has developed a diet for rich, interactive, and engaging technology use as part of their learning experience, a range of considerations must be afforded to its integration.
This mixed methods research sought to identify how varying levels of access to technology affect retention of lesson content and how the key educational stakeholders in parents, teachers and students perceived the efficacy of technology for learning. The mixed methods research uses quantitative measures to provide an insight into how Australian secondary school retain lesson content under different conditions of technology use within the Year 10 science classroom. The three procedures, or instructional methods, from the traditional pen and paper method of note-taking, to an unrestricted approach where students were permitted to use their device for whatever purpose they saw fit, were implemented in a naturalistic quasi-experimental design. Students were presented video content as part of their lessons, with a subsequent test used to measure their content retention under the varying conditions. Quantitative analysis found that students at School A (all boys) and School B (all girls) were not impeded by any technological distraction to a statistically significant extent. Qualitative semi-structured interviews gathered insights on the perceived efficacy of ICT integration from the three key educational stakeholders in parents, teachers, and students. Whilst opinions varied between individuals across all groups, the recurring theme of perceived distraction proved to be the greatest concern for learning. The incongruity between the quantitative results and the qualitative responses highlighted that negative perceptions can often skew how ICT's efficacy is valued as a learning tool. Harnessing the educational benefits of ICT integration, whilst attenuating the distractive allure that so often impedes the ability to focus on content, proves to be a significant challenge presented to both teachers, parents, and students alike.

It is the norm for the casual teaching precariat to experience insecure labour conditions requiring an additional skill set to teachers with stable employment. As more beginning teachers than ever before commence work in casual employment-often a tenuous and unsupported transition into the profession-it is beholden on teacher educators to re-think aspects of their preparation. Four teacher educators undertook 'memory work' based on their previous experiences as casual teachers. Content analysis of follow up focus group discussions stressed the emotional and challenging nature of casual teaching, for both novice and experienced teachers. Findings from this small study, as well as previous research on casual beginning teachers and casual teachers, provide significant insights that have ramifications for initial teacher education, highlighting the importance of the emotional practices of teachers.

Understanding how students direct their individual learning has received growing interest among educational practitioners in recent years. Researchers agree that metacognition is an essential key to successful learning (Alexander, Carr and Schwanenflugel, 1995; Armbruster, 1983; Dinsmore, Alexander, and Loughlin, 2008; Efklides, 2001; Magno, 2010; McCormick, 2003; Paris and Winograd, 1990; Schneider, 2008; Schraw and Moshman, 1995; Shavinina, 2009; Tariconne, 2011; Whitebread, Bingham, Grau, Pino Pasternak, and Sangster, 2007). As Australia prepares to roll out the Australian Curriculum, there appears to be growing concern in the wider community (Pyne, 2014) about how the curriculum will prepare our students to live and work in a very different and globalised world.

For over thirty years sporadic research has attempted to address the underrepresentation of Aboriginal students in gifted programs. What emerges from the literature is the need for cultural understanding, flexibility and sensitivity when dealing with definitional issues of giftedness, and cultural inclusivity when designing talent development programs that respond to the particular needs of gifted learners from Aboriginal backgrounds. This article will explore these issues and highlight the need for schools to value the funds of knowledge Aboriginal students bring to their classrooms, which in turn will allow for more appropriate identification protocols and programs to be put in place for these students.

Gifted students have been provided the opportunity to study three core subjects through an academically selective virtual high school in western NSW, Australia. At the same time these students continue to attend their local public high school for their other subjects. This article presents the mechanisms that have provided this opportunity, and describes successes and challenges. Students are located across 385,000 km² and meet online through web conferencing to engage in real time. They are also able asynchronously to access study materials in an online repository.

Standardised achievement tests alone cannot define the learning profile of twice-exceptional students. 'Real-time' teacher observations/assessments made during students' task applications (referred to as an on-line strategy) could be a useful data source. To investigate one such source, a think-aloud procedure and an assessment framework (the Adaptive Think-Aloud Framework – ATAF) were trialled focusing on students' abilities in reading, critical thinking and metacognition. Using a case-study design, six purposively selected primary/elementary school students (N = 6), aged 9 to 12 years, read text samples aloud and articulated their interpretations/perceptions. Data analyses indicate that oral reading results supported students' self-report about their reading abilities and contributed to more comprehensive reading profiles. There were, however, some indications of high ability in critical thinking and metacognition that were not always consistent with students' school standardised-test results. Subject to further trialling, the think-aloud/ATAF combination shows promise as an instructional/assessment strategy for the investigation of twice-exceptionality, and for wider classroom usage.

The traits linked to gifted children with learning disabilities (twice-exceptional) are diverse and complex. Identification of these children can be hindered by a combination of factors, including variations in teacher knowledge and experience, inconsistencies in the visibility of high abilities coexisting simultaneously with one or more learning disabilities, and also the lack of a practical assessment tool. This mixed-methods study addresses the need for such a tool and other assessment strategies that primary school teachers can implement in the preliminary exploratory stage of identifying possible twice-exceptional children. In this process, the focus centres on learning strengths and difficulties. The first phase of the Study focused on procedures leading to the development and trialling of a comprehensive and useful teacher checklist questionnaire (TCQ). Its comprehensiveness was developed through reviewing research-based characteristics, anecdotal lists and teacher perceptions. Section A of the TCQ is based on the six natural-ability Domains found in Françoys Gagné's Differentiated Model of Giftedness and Talent (DMGT 2.0; 2008) or, more recently, his Expanded Model of Talent Development (EMTD, 2013). Section B has three familiar categories of learning difficulties known within the context of the primary school. In the trialling phase, ten teacher participants trialled the TCQ and ranked the selected children in their classes on every item in the nine categories. Overall, qualitative and quantitative analyses suggest promising trends in the preliminary investigation into the TCQ's internal reliability, validity and practical usefulness. In the second phase, six child participants were selected for case studies to determine whether other assessment strategies supported the findings of the TCQ. The results from Interviews with each child, a Parent/Teacher Questionnaire, a non-verbal intelligence test (Raven's Standard Progressive Matrices), and a Think-aloud protocol, affirm the worthiness of the TCQ, but variations in results suggest the importance of its inclusion as part of a comprehensive assessment protocol.