Search

New Zealand's standards system for primary school achievement ('National Standards') was introduced in 2009 and has a number of idiosyncratic features. These include using the broad levels of New Zealand's national curriculum to determine the standard of achievement that needs to be reached at the end of each year in reading, writing and mathematics and teachers making 'Overall Teacher Judgements' against these levels based on a range of assessment tools and their own observations rather than using any particular national test. It has been claimed this 'bold' approach will avoid the narrowed curriculum and mediocre outcomes of high-stakes assessment in other countries. This paper reports early findings from the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, a three-year study looking in depth at how six diverse New Zealand schools are enacting the National Standards policy. Focussing on reading and writing, the paper illustrates that schools' approaches to the National Standards are strongly influenced by local contexts, contributing to a situation that is far from allowing any 'apples to apples' comparison of achievement across schools. Overall, and with the National Standards data being publicly released from 2012, the New Zealand approach to standards seems set to create a particularly incoherent version of high-stakes assessment and one that is unlikely to escape the narrowed curriculum and manipulation of data found elsewhere. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Somewhat surprisingly, an explicit knowledge about language has been often absent from English curricula. The new Australian Curriculum: English (ACARA, 2012) has taken a fairly radical step in placing knowledge about language at the core of classroom practice, thereby raising the issue of an appropriate model of language to inform the Language Strand of the Curriculum. This paper will outline the rationale behind the Language Strand, and will then make explicit its underlying model of language. The paper thus provides a context for the ensuing articles in this Special Focus Issue of AJLL, which take up various concerns in relation to implementation of the Curriculum and especially of the Language strand of the English Curriculum. The paper concludes by canvassing a number of issues relevant to the development and implementation of the Curriculum: student outcomes, terminology, and pedagogy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The ubiquitous use of mass testing regimes in school-based education throughout the Western world continues to be controversial and contested (Biesta, 2017; Ozoliņš, 2017; Stolz & Webster, 2017). Currently, the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA), Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (PIRLS) and Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMMS) constitute international testing schemes, while in Australia, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 across the nation. This paper reports on a study undertaken with secondary school English teachers in New South Wales (NSW) Australia in 2017. The study, utilising a questionnaire, sought teachers’ views on a range of issues including attitudes to the NAPLAN literacy tests and the introduction of a new standard of achievement for NSW Year 9 students. Given the paucity of teachers’ voices and perspectives in public discourses and debates about NAPLAN, one significant aim of this study has been the collation and direct representation of English teachers’ views. Far from endorsing NAPLAN as a beneficial source of data on students to support quality teaching and learning, teachers in this sample questioned the premise, validity and purpose of the tests and considered the new Year 9 requirement as both unnecessary and the cause of deepening stress and anxiety for students. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper presents findings of a study into patterns of literacy achievement and teaching in Year 12 biology, English and mathematics classes from 22 low socio-economic status (SES) secondary schools in New Zealand (NZ). We hypothesised that patterns of literacy teaching in specialised subject areas might contribute to well-documented inequities in education achievement for Māori (indigenous), Pacific Islands and low-SES students in NZ. We analysed participation and pass rates for sets of achievement standards that contribute to the standards based National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), the main national school qualification (http://www.nzqa. govt.nz/qualifications-standards/qualifications/ncea/). These analyses showed that the rates at which students in the low-SES schools in the study participated in, and attained, key high literacy achievement standards were markedly lower than for schools nationally. Literacy instruction data were derived from observations of 104 teachers working with Year 12 (approximately 17 years old) students comprising 28 biology, 39 English and 37 mathematics teachers. Results from the classroom observations indicated that students had comparatively few opportunities to read longer, more complex subject-area texts and that instructional approaches commonly cited in the literature as effective in raising students’ subject area literacy, strategy instruction and extended discussion, were infrequently observed in this study. Infrequent too were teaching about language features (such as nominalisation) in mathematics or biology lessons and teaching to develop students’ critical literacy. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper describes an alternative approach to the ever popular rubrics-based writing assessment. The approach, called functional language analysis, provides a set of analysis strategies that enable teachers to evaluate the content, organisation, and style of student writing based on tangible textual evidence. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper explores inequities in student achievement in literacy that emerge when data are interrogated from a metropolitan, regional and rural perspective. In this analysis, data are drawn from the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) and the Australian National Benchmark results for Years 3, 5 and 7 students. The results in relation to geographical location highlight significant differences in student performance. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Such questions require educators to rethink the literacy assessment practices of the past. Teachers need to collect a range of information in order to make informed, consistent and on-balanced judgements regarding students' literacy achievements. The use of one-off, single testing instruments is not appropriate. Building a portfolio (Fehring, 2003; Fehring & Wilson, 1996) of students' work from a range of multimodal and multidimensional assessment techniques provides the rich data from which teachers and students themselves can build up a profile of a learner's literacy competence. This paper will explore a range of innovative literacy assessment data gathering techniques such as: • Personalised literacy assessment matrices • Rubrics • Digital accumulative literacy assessment portfolios • Online assessment. However, it is still important to keep in mind that all literacy assessment strategies highlight the importance of teacher judgement as being fundamental to efficient and effective literacy assessment and reporting practices in the classroom. Professionally informed teachers who are articulate, knowledgeable and reflective practitioners are the change agents of the future (Fehring, 2003; Fehring, 1999). [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]