Senior Lecturer in Contexts of Education. Laura's main teaching and research interests fall within the general areas of education policy, comparative/international education, and sociology of education. Her research interests centre on educational equity and student outcomes (academic achievement as well as intercultural sensitivity and communication skills), and the school-level factors that mediate educational equity such as school choice, school composition, school funding and curriculum differentiation. She has been conducting with colleague Andrew McConney secondary analyses of the OECD's PISA dataset about the relationship between school socio-economic composition and student academic outcomes in Australia. In 2010 she was awarded an Australian Research Council Discovery grant to conduct a cross-national comparison of school socio-economic composition (school SES) and student outcomes. At the foundation of all her work is an interest in the ways in which education policies and school structures, contexts and practices influence student outcomes. Laura has extensive international experience, having trained and taught in the USA and the Czech Republic before coming to Murdoch. She has been active in the North American, European, and Australian/New Zealand comparative education societies, and supervises a large number of international postgraduate students.

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