Assessment Principle 1: Assessment should be an integral part of Teaching and Learning

The teacher in this Assessment Snapshot assessed a small sample of students to better understand the specific needs of different ability groups. Research shows teachers who are aware of the oral language developmental stages and average rates of oral development, are more likely to be effective in raising students’ oral development to new and higher levels (Snow, Burns and Griffin, 1998; Snow, Griffin and Burns, 2005).

Highly effective literacy teachers demonstrate very high levels of oral language teaching and learning, and use fine-grained knowledge of children’s literacy performance in planning and teaching. The authors of Teaching for growth: Effective teaching of literacy and numeracy note that there was a stronger focus on the development of oral language in the more effective teachers’ classrooms. They were more likely to integrate their oral language teaching into a theme and to develop context-specific vocabulary; to engage children in extended and scaffolded discussions; to provide opportunities for children to remember information, analyse, synthesise and evaluate information; and to provide targeted support to individuals. (Louden, Rohl and Hopkins, 2008).

In 2006, Professor David Andrich recommended to the Curriculum Council (now the School Curriculum and Standards Authority) that fine-grained assessment take precedence over broad classifications of student performance. Curriculum documents, like the Western Australian Curriculum, and standards frameworks, like the Achievement Standards, inherently provide broad classifications of student performance. The teacher in this snapshot devised an assessment strategy which allowed her to examine her students’ language skills at a more fine-grained level than is specified in the curriculum.