Using 3 Forms of Assessment

Understanding how we will report national standards

The purpose of this blog entry is to provide our parent community with an opportunity to familiarize themselves with the format used when reporting their child's achievement against each National Standard. Teachers will use the relative progress chart (see images below) to illustrate where each student is achieving against both the standard statements and accompanying 'key characteristics', in reading, writing and maths. It is hoped that by familiarizing our parents with the progress charts less time will be spent explaining what they show therefore freeing up more time to focus on discussing more important things such as progress and next learning steps.

Things to consider:

• It is important to understand that students start at different points and progress in their learning in different ways and at different rates from one another.
• This is a mid year teacher judgment on how your child is 'tracking' against an end of year standard.
• Double click on the images to make them larger.
  

Reading: The standard addresses the overall purpose of reading and learning. It does not distinguish all the items of knowledge or specific skills and attitudes that students use as they read. Instructional reading text levels are based on both an accuracy rate in reading text and comprehension.

Writing: The standard addresses the overall purpose of writing in learning. It does not distinguish all the items of knowledge or specific skills and attitudes that students use as they write. Student's writing skills have been assessed using student's samples of writing. It is not expected that students will show all the skills or understandings for a level.

Maths: Students knowledge and strategies in number, geometry, algebra, measurement and statistics are all considered when assigning a level. The expectations for number are the most critical for meeting a standard. It is not expected that students will show all the skills or understanding for a level.

We strongly recommend that parents take the time to familiarize themselves with the above progress charts in order get the most out of the up coming parent-teacher interviews. Although it is important for teachers to report against the standards our top priority will be to share the strengths and next learning steps. Teachers will unpack this by talking through evidence in from samples of your child's work.

Mid Year Written Reporting

On Friday 25th June Muritai School parents will receive a mid-year report about their child's learning. The main purpose of the report is to inform parents about how well their child is doing. The report includes a 5 point scale that clearly identifies learning strengths and areas of weakness. Teachers have elaborated on key aspects of each child's learning in the comments boxes where they have also shared what the next learning steps will be.

It is hoped that parents will read through the report and identify any areas of their child's learning they want to discuss. They can bring these questions with them to the following weeks parent-teacher interviews. Their teachers will talk through samples of student work to illustrate the strengths, weaknesses and identify next learning steps.

There are two distinctive report formats. We have a Y1/2 junior report and different report for Y3 through to Year 8. Each syndicate report has been slightly modified to reflect the increasing achievement expectations for each year level. I have included two examples below, a Year 1 and a Year 5/6 report.

Double click on the images to enlarge.

Year 1 Report:




Year 5/6 Report:

Collaborative Problem-solving

At Muritai School we embrace challenge and pride ourselves in our culture of collaborative problem solving. A recent example of this can be seen with the Year 3/4 teaching staff who worked collaboratively to develop observation sheets aimed to assist teachers in the decision making process for national standards. The attachment below is a screen grab of the Y4 reading observation sheet (double click on it to enlarge the image).

The observation sheet is designed to assist teachers when making overall teacher judgments. The diagram below shows how teachers intend to use observations, assessment data and the national standard together in triangulation when making an OTJ.

Teacher observations will always be subjective and depend greatly on the teacher. It is hoped that by defining and prioritizing specific areas of focus for each year group the level of subjectivity between classrooms and from year to year will be greatly reduced.

The observation sheets are by no means the perfect fix. Students each have varying knowledge, skills and attitudes across the learning areas of reading, writing and mathematics. Having to tick just one box as an overall judgment of achievement neglects to acknowledge the specific strengths and weaknesses of each student

The purpose of todays blog entry is to simply share with you an example of how our staff work collaboratively when faced with a problem to overcome. It is through such a supportive culture that I believe we are as prepared as we can be for reporting to parents at the end of this term.

Learning from others

In this post I would like to thank Cockle Bay School for sharing the work they have been doing as part of their efforts to implement National Standards on their website . Although the intended audience for this is more than likely their parent community it has been great for us to learn about the approaches and strategies being developed and used by other schools. Of particular interest has been the 'Progress Grids' that they have created (click on the image link below to be able to download pdf files of each progress grid).


What I like about these grids is that they are a nice visual which help parents see where their child is achieving against the respective standard. They also provide the teacher with a visual tool to direct the teacher-parent conversation towards student progress and ultimately strengths, weaknesses and next learning steps. I have shared the progress grids with our teaching staff who found them beneficial when trying to differentiate between the respective standards.

This year our school wide umbrella theme is "Learning from others". Thank you Cockle Bay school for allowing us to model this learning theme.

Using Assessment and Mid-year Reporting

At Muritai we have been on a journey of self-review and reflection for some time now. We continue to use student achievement data to:

• Inform decision making and for strategic planning.
• Inform our teaching and learning programmes.
• Help develop each students understanding of what they are doing well, not so well and what their next learning steps will be.
  
• As a means of monitoring student progress against set expectations. (individual or groups)
  
• Support the schools commitment towards on-going self-review and raising student achievement.
  

Developing student awareness and understanding of their learning has been an area of focus for our school over the past 4-5 years. It supports the vision of the NZ curriculum in that we want our children to be confident, connected, actively involved and life-long learners; as well as the schools vision of 'being the best that you can be'. With our mid-year written reports due to go out in week 10 of this term, staff at Muritai are aware for the potential for getting caught up in the National Standards debate. Our priority for the mid-year report will be to use these as a vehicle for informing parents about their child's level of achievement, level of progress and next learning steps. The written reports will then be followed up by teacher-parent conferences the following week. Here teachers will be able to give greater meaning to the findings highlighted in the written report by talking through examples of work presented in the student portfolio. Although there has been much emphasis from the ministry on written reports being in 'plain language' this year, feedback from our community surveys suggest that the most useful means for developing an understanding of their child's learning comes from the parent-teacher conference.

Tukutuku Korero - Education Gazette

The New Zealand Education Gazette is the official magazine of the Ministry of Education. It is published under the authority of the Minister of Education, every couple of weeks. This year I have been following the Q & A on National Standards section as each edition is rolled out. Volume 89 Number 7 is the most recent and I thought I'd share with you the second of two questions answered as an example and one that I personally found quite interesting.

q&A – national standards

Q. How many students are expected to achieve the standards?

A. National Standards are designed to inform teaching and learning so that the next steps for each child are clearly identified. They have been set at a level that will ensure students who meet them are able to read, write and do maths well enough to support their learning in all other learning areas. The standards have been designed so that students who meet them will be on track to achieve NCEA Level 2.

Based on current data we estimate that in reading approximately:

50 percent of students are likely to be at or above the standard after 1 year at school

60 percent are likely to be at or above the standard at Year 4

60 percent are likely to be at or above the standard at Year 8.

We estimate that in mathematics approximately:

80 percent of students are likely to be at or above the standard after 1 year at school

70 percent are likely to be at or above the standard at Year 4

50 percent are likely to be at or above the standard at Year 8.

In every classroom children achieve at different levels and progress at different rates; some children will be working well beyond their peers, and others will be working well below. Principals, BOTs and teachers need to set annual goals for their students and their schools that are challenging, but achievable for them.