Curios of the week #94 🎅🎅

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

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Summer hit hard and fast this week with a miniature heat wave. Across Sunday and Monday, temperatures ground their way up to an impressive 40°C in Ballarat. That’s rare for December. I took the opportunity to fire up the barbecue for the first time this season and make one of my favourite side dishes—one I learned from my sister—consisting of just tomatoes, basil, salt, pepper and olive oil. It helped that heirloom tomatoes were available in the supermarket.

Our senior staff met on Monday through to Wednesday, with the respite of cooler weather arriving on Tuesday. This is not an auspicious time to achieve things because everyone is tired at the end of a long year. However, it was productive and I finished upbeat about the year ahead.

This week’s Curios include some perceptual load, a null result, a winning blog post and much more.

Substack of the week

Rebecca Birch has written an excellent post on disability in Australian schools, how we used to understand it and how that understanding is shifting. She makes the key distinction between accommodating a need and addressing it, head on:

“The key difference compared to what has passed as acceptable before now is that more and more educators believe students should be able to access grade level content, not some alternative worksheet where they colour in instead of write, à la UDL [Universal Design for Learning]. It’s no longer acceptable to simply accommodate non-readers by assigning them an adult human reader in place of being taught to read.”

Birch also discusses the perverse impacts of two Australian policies. The National Consistent Collection of Data (NCCD) has motivated schools to endlessly document evidence of differentiation in the hope of attracting funding and the advent of National Disability Insurance Scheme (NDIS) has correlated with an increase of autism diagnoses that are covered under this scheme.

Book nonexamples of the week

I put out a call on Twitter/X for people to nominate really bad books:

If you have Twitter/X and can click through, the thread is quite fun. And please feel free to add your own contributions.

Null effect of the week

One of the problems with education research is that null effects— the finding that a particular intervention made no difference—are not sexy. However, when there is an ongoing and passionate debate about an approach or practice, null effects are important. And there is one issue where the heat of the debate contrasts greatly with the size of any effects.