Year 3
Technologies Support Materials
Assessment Principle 6
Assessment should lead to school-wide evaluation processes
Food and fibre production snapshot: Investigation and report on milk production
Technologies/Design and Technologies/Knowledge and understanding/Technologies and society/ Food and fibre production
| Content Description |
|---|
Role of people in design and technologies occupations Types of food and fibre produced in different environments, cultures or time periods, including the equipment used to produce or prepare them |
Background information
The Years 3 and 4 teachers collaborated to develop an assessment task that they could use to evaluate the Design Technologies program. They devised a task that could be used to assess both Year 3 and Year 4 students.
Nature of the assessment
Extended task
Purposes of the assessment
To determine the range of ability in Years 3 and 4
To evaluate students’ growth in learning as they progress from Year 3 to Year 4
Stage in the Teaching sequence
At the end of a teaching cycle – summative assessment
Assessment task
Students were required to investigate and report on:
- the history of milk production
- how changes in technology have affected milk production.
Assessment process
Students know how to conduct an investigation and record findings. They were given class time and homework time to conduct their research and write a report.
Using the information
The teachers assessed the students’ reports.
They collaborated to develop their marking criteria and assessed the students’ reports in terms of the students’ technology understandings and their report writing skills, literacy being a school-wide focus. They used their assessment of the technology understandings to evaluate:
- the spread of ability within a year level
- the overlap of ability across year levels
- typical growth in understandings from Year 3 to Year 4.
They also used their assessment of the students’ report writing skills as part of their evaluation of their school-wide literacy program.