Reading: Where to now with assessment, post National Standards?

Where to now with assessment, post National Standards?
By Adrienne Carlisle, Garry Taylor, Allan Powell- Feb 8, 2018

What now?
Don't throw the baby out with the bath water.
1. Keep some key principles in mind...
Effective assessment-

• benefits and involves students and helps them learn better
• helps teachers teach better
• helps leaders lead better
• helps whanau and parents support their child's learning
• measures things that are important
• is valid and fair

2. Think about who needs that assessment information and for what purposes.

• Students need to know what they are learning and why
• Teachers need to know achievement levels and progress; plan for it
• Parents need to now how their student is doing
• BOT and SMT-resourcing, set targets and support teachers to make improvements
• Kahui ako- COL- support their community
• MOE-resourcing

3. Think about the different levels of achievement within the classroom

4. Think about what tools are worth keeping and why, such as moderation, pact, literacy learning progressions, learning progression framework, use e-asTTle and PAT for formative assessment.

It is a golden opportunity to rethink, rejuvenate and improve our assessments.

And from me...

I agree that we need to think about the what and why but also the "How often" with assessments. We are currently over testing at the expense of quality teaching and learning, and we are over complicating the identification of at-risk/target students. We are still talking about anniversaries rather than goals for end of each year. We are still not clear about how school data should be reported and who does the analyses. 

Room for rethinking these aspects this year.