Towards improving public understanding of judgement practice in standards-referenced assessment : an Australian perspective

Internationally there has been a move towards standards-referenced assessment with countries such as Australia developing a National Curriculum and Achievement Standards, New Zealand adopting National Standards for literacy and numeracy that involve schools making and reporting judgements about the reading, writing and mathematics achievement of children up to Year 8 (the end of primary school) and in Canada, classroom assessment standards aimed at the improvement of assessment practice of K-12 education are being formulated. Standards-driven reform has major implications for teachers’ work. The consequences of adopting a standards-driven approach to educational change by systems are often under-estimated with the unintended effects not fully understood by either the policy writers, and the public, including parents. It is for these reasons that the contention developed in this article relates to the teacher’s role, which it is argued remains central to policy focused on the improvement of the quality of education and educational standards.

Conceptualising teachers’ assessment literacies in an era of curriculum and assessment reform

Teacher assessment literacy is a phrase that is often used but rarely defined. Yet understanding teacher assessment literacy is important in an international curriculum and assessment reform context that continues to challenge teachers’ assessment practices. In this article situated examples of classroom assessment literacies are analysed using Bernstein’s (Pedagogy, symbolic control and identity: Theory, research and critique, Taylor and Francis, London, 1996; Br J Sociol Educ 20(2):157–173, 1999) theoretical tools of vertical and horizontal discourses, classification and framing. Drawing on a sociocultural view of learning, the authors define teacher assessment literacies as dynamic social practices which are context dependent and which involve teachers in articulating and negotiating classroom and cultural knowledges with one another and with learners, in the initiation, development and practice of assessment to achieve the learning goals of students. This conceptualisation of assessment literacy aims to make explicit some underpinning theoretical constructs of assessment literacy to inform dialogue and decision making for policy and practice to benefit student learning and achievement.

Over time assessment data analysis tracking a school's on-going performance

In Australia, as in some other western nations, governments impose accountability measures on educational institutions (Earl, 2005). One such accountability measure is the National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) from which high-stakes assessment data is generated. In this article, a practical method of data analysis known as the Over Time Assessment Data Analysis (OTADA) is offered as an analytical process by which schools can monitor their current and over time performances. This analysis developed by the author, is currently used extensively in schools throughout Queensland. By Analysing in this way, teachers, and in particular principals, can obtain a quick and insightful performance overview. For those seeking to track the achievements and progress of year level cohorts, the OTADA should be considered.

Exploring the conditions to support assessment for more equitable learning outcomes

NAPLAN RESULTS HAVE gained socio-political prominence and have been used as indicators of educational outcomes for all students, including Indigenous students. Despite the promise of open and in-depth access to NAPLAN data as a vehicle for intervention, we argue that the use of NAPLAN data as a basis for teachers and schools to reduce variance in learning outcomes is insufficient. NAPLAN tests are designed to show statistical variance at the level of the school and the individual, yet do not factor in the sociocultural and cognitive conditions Indigenous students’ experience when taking the tests. We contend that further understanding of these influences may help teachers understand how to develop their classroom practices to secure better numeracy and literacy outcomes for all students. Empirical research findings demonstrate how teachers can develop their classroom practices from an understanding of the extraneous cognitive load imposed by test taking. We have analysed Indigenous students’ experience of solving mathematical test problems to discover evidence of extraneous cognitive load. We have also explored conditions that are more supportive of learning derived from a classroom intervention which provides an alternative way to both assess and build learning for Indigenous students. We conclude that conditions to support assessment for more equitable learning outcomes require a reduction in cognitive load for Indigenous students while maintaining a high level of expectation and participation in problem solving.

The effects of standardised assessment (NAPLAN) on teacher pedagogy at two Queensland schools

The purpose of this qualitative interpretative case study was to explore how the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) requirements may be affecting pedagogies of two Year 3, Year 5 and Year 7 teachers at two Queensland schools. The perceived problem was that standardised assessment NAPLAN practices and its growing status as a key measure of education quality throughout Australia has the potential to limit the everyday literacy and numeracy practices of teachers to instructional methods primarily focused on teaching to the test. The findings demonstrate how increased explicit teaching of NAPLAN content and procedural knowledge prior to testing has the potential to negatively impact on the teaching of everyday literacy and numeracy skills and knowledge that extend beyond those concerned with NAPLAN. Such teaching limited opportunity for what teachers reported as valued collaborative learning contexts aiming for long-term literacy and numeracy results.

Bilingualism, literacy and NAPLAN : ongoing challenges for EAL/D education [Editorial]

Advocacy is integral to the work of many TESOL specialists. For several decades, ACTA and the state TESOL associations, along with other professional associations, and individual teachers, researchers and administrators have all engaged with conversations about EAL/D education in public forums. These advocates have drawn attention to implications of policy developments for EAL/D students; they have proffered alternative forms of curriculum, pedagogy and assessment to better account for the particularity of EAL/D learning pathways; they have argued the necessity of specialist EAL/D teaching. In response to the Australian Language and Literacy Policy of the early 1990s, for example, there was “a frenzy of writing responses… a conference… and attempts to publicise what was going on through the press and television” (Moore, 1995, p. 6). It is in this spirit that this double issue of TESOL in Context has been compiled...

A shared reading intervention with parents to enhance young children’s early literacy skills

Parental reading to children from an early age has been shown to enhance children’s emergent literacy skills. A pragmatic randomized controlled trial (RCT) was used to investigate the effects of two forms of shared reading interventions on children’s language and literacy skills. Parents of 80 preparatory year children from outer suburban schools of an Australian metropolitan city were trained to use shared reading strategies in an eight-week home intervention. Families were assigned to one of three groups: Dialogic Reading (DR), Dialogic Reading with the addition of Print Referencing (DR + PR), or an attention-matched control group. The sample comprised 42 boys and 38 girls ranging in age from 4.9 years to 6.3 years (M = 5.5, SD = 0.3). Data were collected at pre, post, and at three months follow-up. Measures assessed children’s oral language (receptive and expressive vocabulary), phonological awareness (rhyme, word completion), alphabet knowledge, and concepts about print. Analyses of change from pre to post showed significant effects for the DR and DR + PR groups compared to the control group on three of the six measures: expressive language, rhyme, and concepts about print. At 3-month follow-up assessment, the two intervention groups maintained significantly better performance on the measure of concepts of print only. At both time points, there were no group differences between the DR and DR+PR conditions. These findings illustrate the potential of a brief home focused intervention on promoting children’s emergent literacy.

Reframing Conceptions of Contemporary Literacy Capabilities in Pre-Service Primary Teacher Education

This chapter describes the challenges of integrating new technologies with literacy education in pre-service primary teacher education in Australia. The authors describe the policy context and regulatory mechanisms controlling pre-service education, including a national set of professional standards for graduate teachers, a new national curriculum for school students, the introduction of high stakes national assessment for school students, and the looming threat of decontextualized back-to-the-basics professional entry tests for aspiring teachers. The chapter includes three case studies of the authors’ pedagogical practices that attempt to reframe conceptions of the literacy capabilities of pre-service teachers to reflect the complex and sophisticated requirements of teachers in contemporary schooling. The authors conclude the chapter with a discussion of the implications of these case studies as they illustrate the ways that pre-service teachers can be scaffolded and supported to develop creative capacity and critical awareness of the kinds of literacies required in the digital age despite restrictive regimes.

Reflexive writers : re-thinking writing development and assessment in schools

Writing is a complex and highly individual activity, which is approached in different ways by different writers. Writers reflexively mediate subjective and objective conditions in specific and nuanced ways to produce a product in time and place. This paper uses a critical realist theory of reflexivity to argue that the teaching and assessment of writing must account for the different ways that students manage and make decisions in their writing. Data from linguistically and culturally diverse primary students in Australia are used to illustrate how four distinct reflexive modalities constitute the ways in which students approach writing. The paper offers a new approach to assessing writing for and of learning that considers writers as reflexive and agentic in different ways. It posits the importance of making visible and explicit the context and reflexive decision-making as writers shape a product for a purpose and audience.

Language and literacy in mathematics: stepping stones or stumbling blocks in accelerating junior-secondary students

The authors have collaborated in the development and initial evaluation of a curriculum for mathematics acceleration. This paper reports upon the difficulties encountered with documenting student understanding using pen-and-paper assessment tasks. This leads to a discussion of the impact of students’ language and literacy on mathematical performance and the consequences for motivation and engagement as a result of simplifying the language in the tests, and extending student work to algebraic representations. In turn, implications are drawn for revisions to assessment used within the project and the language and literacy focus included within student learning experiences.

Literacy and numeracy project: Final report 2009

Literacy and numeracy are critical for young people during and after their schooling. The subjects and courses that students undertake during their school years incorporate a range of academic literacy and numeracy practices which students must be able manage if they are to be successful. Pathways beyond schooling also require specific, and changing, understandings of, and proficiencies with, literacy and numeracy as new communication technologies increasingly impact on further study, work, and everyday life. Teaching and learning numeracy is a new emphasis in the SACE and as yet we have little understanding about the ways in which secondary schools handle this area. Students in Years 10 and 11 are at a crucial point in their educational and life pathways as they begin to refine their future aspirations. For those who have difficulty with academic literacies and numeracies – and often a long history of such problems – this period can be fraught unless teachers are able to provide specific support when it is needed, or students are able to access it from care-givers or community members. The School to Work Literacy and Numeracy Project involved teachers from nine schools across the three sectors and university researchers working together to design curriculum interventions for students with a history of low measurable achievement in literacy and/or numeracy. The project started from the premise that working with ‘rich tasks’, an approach to learning and assessment developed in the Productive Pedagogies work undertaken in Queensland (Hayes et al., 2006), would improve students’ motivation, engagement and learning and that this work could best be done by teachers working in school-based, cross-curriculum teams with a school leadership team member and a university researcher as mentor. A key idea in designing rich tasks is that students will have opportunities to demonstrate their learning in assessments which are aligned with the learning expectations (for example a film festival to publicly launch student-produced films, advertising to sell student-made cubby-houses, a household budget based on students’ likely incomes in future work). In other words the assessments should be designed to allow for authentic communication and displays of what the students have learned through serious engagement with the curriculum. The project was conducted from Term 1-4 2009, with follow-up checks with some project teachers in the early weeks of 2010.

Interrogating policy contradictions in literacy reforms about persuasive texts

Objectives Our overarching objective is to demonstrate the political contradictions about about how persuasive texts should be taught in the middle years of schooling, analysing two contradictory Australian wide educational reforms. We consider the complexities of power and access to literacy for students in relation to these reforms about the privileged genre of persuasion. Our work is framed by our appreciation of literacy as a social justice issue, and the notion of students’ pedagogic rights (Bernstein, 2000). Specifically, we introduce and analyse the knowledge and skills about persuasive text sanctioned by the Australian high-stakes test, the National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN), for students in the middle years of schooling (ACARA, 2013). We compare this to the contemporary emphasis on multimodal persuasive texts sanctioned by the recently released Australian Curriculum English (ACARA, 2014). We conclude our analysis by identifying biases in the structure of particular knowledges and the inherent threats to democracy.

An exploratory study of the current assessment practices for improving the learning of English as a foreign language (EFL) in two Vietnamese universities

This case study investigated EFL assessment practices at one public and one private university to explore the support of assessment for English language learning (ELL) within the Vietnamese sociocultural context. Findings demonstrated the potential of assessment to engage students in learning; enhance their understanding of the learning objectives; and facilitate their learning reflection. Findings also identified strong influences of contextual factors such as teachers' language assessment literacy, high-stakes testing and institutional administrative policies on the practices of assessment for ELL. This study contributes to research on Assessment for Learning and EFL education at tertiary level in Vietnam and other similar sociocultural contexts.

Written numeracy assessment in the early years: The challenges of pronouns and noun groups

We examine the challenges of pronouns and noun groups in the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority’s (ACARA) Year 3 National Assessment Program - Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) Numeracy Example Test (ACARA, 2015a). Framed by discourses of Literacy as a General Capability (ACARA, 2015b) in the Australian Curriculum: Mathematics (ACARA, 2015c), the pronouns and noun groups used in the Example Test are mapped onto the Australian Curriculum: English Content Descriptions (ACARA, 2015d). The findings are that some of the pronouns and noun groups used in the Example Test are more complex than what Year 3 children are expected to achieve in the Australian Curriculum: English. We thus stress the need for early years teachers of mathematics to account for the unique mathematical register of written mathematics problems so that young children are not only prepared for high-stakes written numeracy assessments, but are also enabled as a numerically literate citizen.

Socioeconomic assessment of shrimp farming in relation to local livelihoods in the south-west coastal Bangladesh

Nine different categories of stakeholders in shrimp farming industry ·were assessed to show the socioeconomic impact of shrimp farming in south-west Bangladesh. Among all the stakeholders the shrimp farmer's average own land was 4 ha whereas the seed collectors and faria's had lowest amount of average land, 0.1 and 0.5 ha respectively. The shrimp farming positively impacted to the livelihood of stakeholders. Income of the coastal people, sanitation, working facilities of women, employment, health condition and the literacy rate increased due to shrimp farming. On the other hand shrimp farming had negative impact on the rice production, livestock, drinking water supply, and social conflict and violence had increased due to shrimp farming. There were internal conflicts between different stakeholders; the farias conflict with the depot owners and shrimp farmers, marginal farmers' conflict with the rich shrimp farmers about leasing lands and saline water control, the rice farmers conflicts with the shrimp farmers about agricultural crop production.