Assessment Principles Mandated Materials

Assessments should arise naturally out of the teaching and intended learning of the curriculum and syllabus. They should be carefully constructed to enable judgements to be made about students' progress in ways that contribute to ongoing learning.

To do this, assessments should provide information about fine changes in student learning related to specific aspects of that learning. They should help teachers understand where students are in their learning, what they need to learn next as well as identify any misunderstandings or misconceptions that the students have. It is this fine-grained information that enables teachers to plan programs that challenge students to go beyond what they already know, understand or can do in order to build new knowledge, understandings and skills.

There are myriad ways that teachers can find out where students are in their learning including one-to-one conferencing with individual students, the range of formative assessment strategies that allow teachers to check students' understandings during the course of the lesson, learning journals, exhibitions, portfolios as well as teacher-devised tests and standardised assessments. All the information teachers collect about their students should become an integral part of the planning of instructional activities.

Teachers need to give careful consideration to planning for assessment as well as planning for teaching. This preparation should include planning how they will draw on their own observations and planning for summative assessments. Teachers also need to consider how they will refine their teaching programs based on the information they collect.

Reflecting on integrating teaching and assessment

Background

Fine-grained assessment refers to assessment that examines very specific aspects of learning. It includes 'in the moment observations' of a student or students; posing a question in the middle of a lesson to see who has 'got it' and who hasn't; as well as devising assessments that provide information about specific aspects of learning. Fine-grained assessment is an essential component of formative assessment.

Carefully constructed rubrics, score keys and marking guides that arise out of the teaching need to be developed if formal or recorded assessments are to provide fine-grained evidence of learning. Where possible, assessments should focus both on learning that has been achieved and understandings and knowledge that are yet to be acquired, so that the information collected is relevant for both summative and formative purposes.

Consider how you integrate Teaching and Assessment

• Is assessment an integral part of your lesson planning?
  • What information do you collect during lessons (your observations, student responses to questions, student participation in group activities and so on) and to what extent is this information used to shape subsequent lessons?
  • How do you use assessment information as the starting point of your lesson?
  • To what extent is your planning for assessment incorporated into lesson planning?
• Do the rubrics, score keys and marking guides that you use reflect what you have taught and provide you with fine-grained evidence of student learning?
• What standardised assessments does the school use and to what extent are you using these assessments to inform your teaching?
• Are there any assessments being conducted where the data collected is not being used to inform your teaching or to evaluate the school programs?

Ensure your assessments provide fine-grained information about student learning

You can check whether your assessments provide fine-grained information about student learning by asking yourself:

• Does the assessment enable me to say what students know and understand about specific aspects of learning?
• Does the assessment inform me as to what each of my students needs to learn next?
• Does the assessment distinguish between students of different abilities?

If your answer to these questions is yes, it is likely that your assessments do provide you with fine-grained information.

Assessment practices should be educationally sound and contribute to learning. Assessments may do this in a number of ways. Firstly, assessment activities should encourage in-depth and long-term learning. Secondly, assessments should provide feedback that assists students in learning and informs teachers' planning. Thirdly, where appropriate, assessment criteria should be made explicit to students to focus their attention on what they have to achieve and provide students with feedback about their progress.

Assessment needs to be comprehensive and balanced across various domains of learning and assess knowledge and higher order cognitive skills such as problem solving and critical thinking. Assessments need to be aligned with the curriculum and use a variety of assessment strategies, on the basis of their relevance to the knowledge, skills and understanding to be assessed and the purpose of the assessment.

Students need to be included in the assessment process. With expert support, students can learn to assess and evaluate their own learning in a way that further extends that learning. It is important that teachers are responsive to the unexpected ways students reveal their thinking. These opportunities can be used to extend or redirect teaching.

Reflecting on educationally sound assessment practices

Background

In-depth long-term learning refers to students having a deep foundation of factual knowledge; understanding ideas in the context of a conceptual framework; and organising knowledge in a way that facilitates retrieval and application.

It is therefore important that feedback to students provides logical connections between what they know and what they need to learn next. If feedback is to be effective, it needs to be clear, purposeful and compatible with students' prior learning.

Assessments also inform the teacher because they enable teachers to determine how successful their teaching strategies have been and which students require further instruction.

Consider feedback to your students

• Have you determined what information your students need to support their learning?
• Does your feedback relate specifically to the task?
• Does it identify for students what they got correct and point them in the direction of what they need to pursue next?

Consider feedback to you

• Have you determined what information you need to better understand your students' learning?
  Do you plan for the collection of evidence (within your lesson planning)?
• Do you anticipate how you will use the information to refine your lessons?
• Do you use assessments to identify the point at which a misconception or gap in learning has developed?
• Do you use assessments to identify the next skill or understanding a student or group of students needs to learn?

Ensure your assessments are educative

There are several ways you can ensure your assessments are educative.

• Plan focused and specific learning aims and plan assessment strategies that are compatible with those learning aims. When focused learning and focused assessment are planned together the assessments are more likely to contribute to student learning.
• Use strategies that enable ongoing checking for understanding and accounting for every student's learning. These strategies should be clearly evident to students so they get regular information about how they are progressing.
• Provide feedback to students to support them in understanding what they currently know and can do, and what they need to learn next. Ensure your feedback is clear, purposeful, and meaningful; that it helps students connect prior knowledge with what they are currently learning; and it helps them establish short- and long-term goals.
• Provide feedback in a manner that supports and encourages learning, and extends students' thinking.
• Give students opportunities to provide feedback to you about aspects of their learning that they feel uncertain of, so that you can act on these concerns in a timely manner.

Assessment needs to take account of the diverse needs of students, to be equitable with regard to gender, disability, background language and socio-economic status and not discriminate on grounds that are irrelevant to learning.

If assessments are to be fair they should provide valid information on the actual ideas, processes, products and values expected of students. A valid assessment is one that assesses what it is supposed to assess. For example, recall of facts should not be assessed if the primary purpose of the assessment is to collect information about problem solving skills.

Assessments should also provide reliable indications of students' knowledge, understandings and skills and should be based on the integration of a range of types and sources of evidence.

Reflecting on fair assessment

Background

If you have made sure that your assessments are integral to your teaching and learning program and that they are educative and equally available to all students, without discrimination, then it is likely that your assessment of all your students is fair.

Consider how fair your assessments are

• Do your assessments closely match your lesson objectives?
• Have you defined the aspect of learning that you are assessing and not allowed other aspects to influence your judgements? For example, when assessing students' ability to write a narrative, have you made sure their handwriting and presentation have not influenced your judgements?
• Have you assessed your students in a way that does not give some students an advantage because of factors that are irrelevant to your lesson objectives?
• Have you collected a range of information (including anecdotal information) on students so that your judgements about their skills and understandings are reliable?

Ensure your assessments are fair

• Check that what you are assessing and how you are assessing provide worthwhile information about students' learning.
• Reflect on the different groups in your class and whether you allow any characteristics not related to the purpose of your assessment to unfairly influence your judgements of a group.
• Reflect on individual students and whether you allow any characteristics not related to the purpose of your assessment to unfairly influence your judgements of the individual.

Information collected to establish where students are in their learning can be used for summative purposes (assessment of learning) and for formative purposes (assessment for learning) because it is used to inform subsequent teaching. The principles of assessment apply to all forms of assessments.

Summative assessment involves assessment procedures that aim to determine students' learning at a particular time, for example when reporting against the achievement standards, after completion of a unit of work or at the end of a term or semester. The aim of the assessment is to identify students' achievement at that point in time and it is particularly important that the assessments are fair and that teacher judgements are reliable.

Formative assessment involves a range of informal and formal assessment procedures used by teachers during the learning process in order to improve student attainment and to guide teaching and learning activities. It often involves qualitative feedback (rather than scores) for both students and teachers that focuses on the details of specific knowledge and skills that are being learnt. Therefore it is essential that the assessments provide fine-grained information about student performance that supports teachers to plan learning that challenges students to go beyond what they already know, understand or can do in order to build new knowledge, understandings and skills.

Reflecting on the different purposes of your assessment

Background

There is a growing body of research that shows that assessment is essential for effective teaching. Yet, you may feel that if you were to attend to the Principles of Assessment, you would have no time left to teach. One way of getting the correct balance is to consider the purpose of the assessment.

The other way to help you get the right balance is to examine to what extent an assessment informs your teaching. Only use assessments that give you worthwhile information and support you in improving student learning.

Consider how you can achieve the right balance between assessment and teaching

• Are you clear about the purpose of your different assessments?
• Do you know how you will use the information you collect to improve student learning?
• Are there assessments that you administer but which you don't use to inform your teaching?
• Are there strategies you can adopt which would provide you with quick information about your students?

Ensuring your assessments fit the purpose

• Review your various assessments/assessment strategies and categorise them in a way that works for you. (For example, categorise them as Assessment for learning or Assessment of learning.)
• For each assessment within each category: identify what information the assessment provides to both you and to your students; determine how useful that information is; and how much time it takes to collect that information.
• Based on this analysis, decide if you need to refine the assessment/assessment strategy and how you need to do this, or decide to discontinue using an assessment that does not provide you with worthwhile information.

Reporting happens at the end of a teaching cycle and should provide an accurate summary of the formative and summative assessment information collected for each student. The purpose of reporting is to provide feedback to students, parents, and teachers. The information is also valuable for school and system-wide planning. It is important that, in addition to providing an accurate synopsis of student performance, the judgements of student achievement are reliable.

Reflecting on reporting

Reporting using grades

It is a federal government requirement that schools report student achievement to parents using grades. Grades are a broad classification of student performance and while they are a useful way of communicating with parents, grading students as A, B, C, D and E does not provide a level of detail necessary to inform teaching programs. It is recommended that grading is an end process that is completed after more detailed assessment has been conducted.

As reporting student achievement in terms of grades is a broad classification of performance, each grade represents a wide range of student ability.  Many students will be given the same grade in semester 1 and semester 2, even though their teachers will have observed growth in learning. Bearing in mind that work in semester 2 builds on semester 1, maintaining a grade indicates students have held their own in the face of more advanced material and in this way have grown in their learning.

Moderation of teacher judgements

Moderation of teacher judgements is an important component of reporting student performance. It is however useful to consider two broad purposes of moderation, Moderation for Learning and Moderation for Reporting. The two purposes of moderation are complementary and the one can be used to support the other.

• Moderation for Learning supports teachers within and across schools in developing shared understandings of students' learning and shared expectations of student performance. It is closely aligned with the formative purposes of assessment.
• Moderation for Reporting enables teachers to develop consistent judgements of student performance and is closely aligned with the summative purposes of assessment.

Moderation for Learning focuses on teachers working together to reach more in-depth understandings of their students' learning relative to a broader group of students. This broader group may be students who are in the same year level or students from across year levels. When moderation processes focus on learning, they support teachers in refining their understandings of what their students know and what they need to learn next. In this context, the moderation process should use fine-grained information about specific aspects of learning.

Because Moderation for Learning is concerned with understanding learning at a fine-grained level, it will be very difficult to ensure teachers' judgements are highly comparable and teacher time will best be used in analysing the different features of students' work and what that means for learning.

Moderation for Reporting focuses on those aspects of assessment where schools are required to be accountable for student performance and where it is important that teacher judgements are comparable. When undertaking moderation for reporting purposes, the emphasis is on broad classifications of student performance (e.g. reporting student performance in terms of grades or in terms of achieving the standard), and ensuring teachers have consistent interpretations of these broad classifications.

Highly effective schools pay particular attention to teachers' qualitative and quantitative data and standardised test data. Teachers and school leaders need to understand current and past student achievement levels, be explicit about targets for improvement and be explicit about how progress towards those targets will be monitored. School leaders need to plan for how they will evaluate the effectiveness of school initiatives and programs. Teachers should plan for how they will reflect on and evaluate their teaching practices. This implies that schools and teachers need to be willing to identify and evaluate both the intended and unintended consequences of any initiative or program.

Reflecting on school-wide evaluation

Background

The distinction between summative assessment (assessment of learning) and formative assessment (assessment for learning) is useful when describing the different ways in which information about student learning is collected (how it is collected, when it is collected, why it is collected, and how it will be used). School-wide evaluation processes require that school leaders and teachers use all data collected to better understand and improve student learning.

Consider your school-wide evaluation processes

Which assessments do you use in the school and how is the data from these assessments used to evaluate:

• school programs?
• teaching practices?
• Do you have a culture of involving all teachers in evaluation of school programs?
• Do you value and use data from standardised testing programs as well as teachers' qualitative and quantitative data?
• Do you use data to evaluate the learning of each and every student?

Ensure your evaluation leads to improved school performance

• The process of collecting data is more likely to lead to improved school performance if:
• The data collected is meaningful (i.e. the assessments address the preceding assessment principles).
• The school has a strategic plan for the collection of a range of student data (both test data and classroom assessments).
• Many, if not all, staff members are committed to using data to evaluate school programs and to evaluate their teaching practices.
• Teachers use data to evaluate each student's learning and the school always 'puts faces on the data'.