Our research

Can administrative records inform estimates of the extent and nature of harmful sexual behaviours?

Australia lacks contemporary data on the extent of the problem of children displaying harmful sexual behaviours. Studies that do exist are now dated and were generated from one-off point in time studies with no mechanisms for routine monitoring of prevalence or incidence.

Open Parachute Mental Health and Wellbeing Program

This research project is a collaboration between UniSA and Open Parachute Aus Pty Ltd (Open Parachute), aiming to create new and innovative approaches to support educational mental health and wellbeing programs and change the landscape of educational mental health and wellbeing research. 

Enhancing responses to harmful sexual behaviours among teachers and parents: Co-developing training materials and resources

This project will use a participatory action research design including co-design methodology and mixed-methods implementation and impact evaluation to create research and practice outcomes that will support the upskilling of teachers and school leaders to enable staff in Education settings to better prevent and respond to harmful sexual behaviours displayed by children and support child-centred responses by parents to children who have displayed or experienced concerning or harmful sexual behaviours in school settings.

“We own the campaign”: Adapting a global adult literacy Campaign to an Australian First Nations Context

This research project is in partnership with The Literacy for Life Foundation, to document, inform, analyse and report on the curriculum co-design process involving Cuban 'Yes I can' adult literacy campaign as it is rolled out into various Indigenous communities across Australia.

Promoting wellbeing through school-based anti-racism initiatives

This project will seek to evaluate the enactment of an anti-racism policy in a South Australian secondary school alongside building a local network of schools interested in undertaking anti-racism work and a national network of Education Department officers responsible for anti-racism initiatives.

Exploring Homework Policy, Practices and How they Shape Family Life: A Research Study of Three Countries

Homework has been a disputed practice in education for decades, with debates fuelled by contradictory claims about goals, effectiveness, and the roles of various stakeholders, including teachers, students, and families (Farrell & Danby 2015; Grinshtain & Harpaz 2022; Scott & Glaze 2017).

Reimagining leadership for school inclusion: school community members driving change

Employing a single case study design at Holy Family Catholic School (Years R-6) in South Australia to explore school inclusion, this project aims to: identify empowering opportunities provided by the school leadership to the staff; capture educators’ perceptions and experiences of driving change; and develop a Framework of Leadership for School Inclusion. This project is significant because scant empirical evidence is available on how schools establish an inclusive community.

Preparing the next generation of principals

The South Australian Secondary Principals' Association (SASPA) has received Research and Development funding from Principals Australia Research Foundation Limited (PARF). The research aims to provide information about the principal 'pipeline' that will inform SASPA programmes and policy recommendations

Culturally responsive interventions to justice-involved African-Australians: research evaluation

This project will evaluate a 12 month funded program which aims to provide culturally responsive interventions to justice-involved African-Australians presenting with a pattern of high risk offending aged 10-18. The program is being developed and implemented by the Inclusion Support Program team in the Department of Human Services

North-West Adelaide Communities for Children Evaluation of Emergency Housing Services for Families with Children Under 12 Years of Age

The research goal is to examine the impacts of living in emergency accommodation on children 0-12 in motel and specialised accommodation models. It will involve a literature review, interviews with resident families across 3 sites, plus drawings and interviews with their children; interviews with caseworkers and project service organisations.

Rapid Response Evidence Review – Civics and Citizenship

To help inform Curriculum and Learning’s understanding of Civics and Citizenship, the Department is interested in the academic perspectives of Civics and Citizenship, and have commissioned the Fraser Mustard Centre to investigate, summarise and compile the findings into a rapid literature review.

Talking science: Dialogic pedagogy for student engagement in science education in rural Australian secondary schools

This project aims to combine genre and dialogic pedagogies to create a new dialogic pedagogy that supports students in rural contexts to be successful during the years of schooling when the linguistic demands of science increase.

Language learning strategies of refugee-background students in university pathway programs

This project is a cross-institutional research project with Murdoch University and aims to address a lack of understanding of the language learning strategies employed by students from refugee backgrounds (SfRBS) in enabling education programs at UniSA College as a case study. Particularly, it investigates what strategies that SfRBs employ in English language learning and to what extent their strategies differ by contextual factors such as gender, first language, education experience, country of origins, and academic disciplines.

Growing a local teacher workforce with university-school partnership

This research project investigates the development and enactment of two pilot ‘grow your own’ employment pathways at Whyalla Secondary College and Ngutu College. The pilot ‘grow your own’ projects aimed to create a supportive employment pathway to secondary teaching for SSOs already employed at each school.

Multilingual and multicultural pre-service teachers - recruitment, engagement and retention

Much contemporary educational research notes an increase in the diversity of linguistic and cultural backgrounds represented in school student cohorts across Australia. Observations have been made that teacher workforces do not reflect the same linguistic and cultural backgrounds as students.

Culturally and Linguistically Responsive Early Childhood Pedagogies

Australian early childhood education and care setting are becoming increasingly diverse. Many educators are struggling to respond to the superdiversity that exists within their settings, often leading to disengagement and poor learning outcomes.

Fostering school attendance for students in Out-of-Home Care

This project aims to investigate why children and young people in Out-Of-Home-Care in Australia are absent from school far more than their peers. The project expects to generate new knowledge about the reasons for their absences and to develop solutions to improve attendance through: children’s own voices; detailed absence data; policy audit; and case studies of promising practice.

Improving teacher induction: Supporting precariously employed early career teachers to manage student behaviour

This project aims to examine the induction phase for precariously employed early career teachers, that is, teachers within the first two years of graduation, employed on short-term contracts of less than 1 year, or as casual teachers.

Being Heard: Remixing Critical Literacy for Active Citizenship

The project is based on a teacher-led analysis of current school initiatives on student voice, and on discussion of quantitative system-generated data being used to inform school-level decisions (including surveys of wellbeing and agency, and standardised test results).

Teachers at breaking point

This study, commissioned by the Australian Education Union (South Australian Branch), examines the shifting nature of teachers’ work, pointing to growing complexity and increasing professional demands. This research is the first of its kind in South Australia and provides new insights into the impact of increased demands upon teachers’ wellbeing and ability to focus on their key responsibilities for teaching and learning.

Developing mathematical thinking in the early years

It is widely reported that early educational experiences are the foundation for later achievement. Despite this understanding, there are several misconceptions that are perpetuated and exist in relation to how mathematical thinking is communicated, therefore the teaching and learning of mathematics for young children.

Protecting children online: Investigation of suspects’ opening chat grooming language and interactions

The recent pandemic has seen a rapid rise in the use of online social networks by children. These networks present opportunities for predators to access, groom, and exploit children.

Culturally responsive schooling

Australian schools are struggling to respond positively to the increasing cultural diversity of the student cohort. The aim of this study is to research how schools become culturally responsive and specifically explores how the affective environments of schools attend to the diverse cultural, academic and emotional needs of their communities.

Western Australian Catholic Teacher’s understanding of Problematic Sexual Behaviour and their Training Needs

This research project aims to inform the training needs for Catholic educators in relation to identifying and responding to PSB in schools.

Parents' knowledge, views and experiences of service responses to children's harmful sexual behaviours (HSB)

The study examines parents' knowledge, views and experiences of services systems’ responses to children's harmful sexual behaviours (HSB). 

Schools and Homes Networking Digitally (SAHND)

This three-year project examines how digital and social networks connect students to their schools, homes, and other domains.

Arapaho Language and Culture Immersion Project: Creation of a dual-language immersion school at St Stephen's Indian School (SSIS), Wyoming

Developing an innovative, sustainable and equitable approach to professional learning across diverse early childhood contexts: Early childhood literacies professional learning in Wyoming

Multiliteracies for addressing disadvantage in senior school science

This project develops discipline-specific pedagogies in senior physics, chemistry and biology to improve the engagement and achievement of disadvantaged student

A History of Early Childhood Education in South Australia – key milestones

The Government Party grants the grant amount to the Recipient to proceed to stage 2 of The History of Early Childhood Education in South Australia

A history of early childhood education in South Australia – innovators, educators, crusaders: milestones identified in historical context

The project will further develop a web-based timeline showing milestones in early childhood education (ECE) from First Nations to present day.

Cultural Preparedness to Teach in the Middle East

Faculty within Education Futures at UniSA – were awarded a Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT), Council of Australia-Arab Relations (CAAR) grant in 2020 entitled: Cultural Preparedness to Teach in the Middle East.