The Algorithm Age

Nicola Trotman grew up as an avid bookworm, often reading under the duvet by torchlight. So when her daughter Sadie, who will turn two in August, was born, she made a point of instilling a similar love of books. “After bath time, we read stories to her. It’s a habit we really enjoy and that she really enjoys, so much so that everyone says she’s going to be a bit of a bookworm like me,” says the 34-year-old PR director from Melbourne. “It’s really helped a lot with her language development. You can have almost conversations with her … she knows all her animals, she’s learning colours at the moment. She knows her ABCs already.” Bedtime reading at an all-time low New research from HarperCollins UK , however, has found the number of parents reading aloud to children is at an all-time low. Fewer than half of parents of children under 13 said reading aloud to children was “fun for me”, while fewer than half of 0- to 4-year-olds a...

NAPLAN analysis shows the writing skills of Australian children are at an all-time low after what's been described as a "30-year policy failure" in schools. To help reverse the decline, new resources are being launched that will enable writing to be taught across subjects like science, maths and physical education as well as English. The Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) said the resources were designed in response to analysis of 10 years of NAPLAN data that showed many Year 9 students were writing at primary school level. "What we discovered was that there was a large number of students whose punctuation and sentence structure was what we would expect of students at a Year 4 level, so serious cause for concern because writing was such an important skill," AERO CEO Jenny Donovan said. AERO is government-owned and was established by education ministers four years ago to come up with evidence-based solutions to declini...