The Alberta Teachers’ Association

A great idea that needs more work

New Zealand has developed a standards-based approach to curriculum and “high stakes” assessment (i.e. assessment for accountability purposes) at both primary and secondary school levels. There are many challenges when implementing standards-based approaches, and some of these have proved tricky. One really big challenge concerns ways to incorporate teachers’ professional  judgments of their students’ learning progress into systemwide processes that make fair comparisons between classes and schools, based on rich learning tasks that are necessarily different in their contextual and conceptual specifics. Nested within this challenge is an even trickier one. How often do we draw on insights and evidence of learning generated by students themselves? Doing this is especially important as we open up the scope of learning targets. For example, these might include making  judgments about students’ dispositions as part of their competency development, or a metacognitive focus on “learning to learn.” Students’ thinking and motivations are essentially private. Most teachers learn the hard way that it can be dangerous to make inferences about what is really going on based on observed behaviour alone. It pays to check! This article explores this challenge, drawing on an idea that I think has yet to realise its potential in a “21st century” curriculum that includes aspects such as key competencies.

Directions for Assessment

Almost a decade ago I was part of a small working group commissioned to write some advice about the directions New Zealand’s national assessment policy should take. After a series of very intensive working meetings we produced a report called Directions for Assessment in New Zealand (the DANZ report for short). 1 ; The central idea of that report was that our whole education system should be geared towards helping every one of our students, no matter their age and abilities, to become more “assessment capable.” In what follows I explain what that idea means and then outline some things that would need to happen if the vision were to come true — for students, for teachers and for the system as a whole. 

What students need

The central premise of this paper is that young people should be educated in ways that support them to assume control of their own learning and they can only do this if they develop the capability to assess their own learning. …. Students need to participate as fully in assessment as in learning. What we aspire to for one, we should aspire to for the other (DANZ, p.18).

Students are in a better position to make decisions about assessment if they are clear about what they are trying to learn, and what indicators or criteria they should use to judge progress, and if they are able to be honest with their teacher about their learning struggles (DANZ, p.9).

Ponder for a moment the subtitle I gave this paper: “great idea, needs more work.” You can probably recall getting feedback like this somewhere in your own learning/assessment career. All of us have probably also given students this sort of feedback. But what can you do with it? It does tell you something (you’re on the right track) but not what more might be needed and hence what to do next. There is no basis for learning to be assessment capable in this sort of global judgment. 

Giving students feedback that helps them determine their next steps is the central idea in assessment-for-learning, so you might be wondering what’s new in the idea of assessment capability. Think for a moment about who usually makes the assessment judgment, even in assessment for learning. That would be you, the teacher. We typically impose our  judgments on students, even if we then involve them in discussions about next steps. The idea of assessment capability goes that one step further by advocating for actively involving students in the actual assessment decision making and judgment making. Of course this needs to be informed involvement if it is going to help students move forward in meaningful and challenging ways, so it is easier said than done. Students need a lot of help and support: 

• No student is ever going to admit to learning challenges and gaps, or even motivation challenges, if the classroom environment does not feel safe to take learning risks. 
  A range of well-known pedagogical strategies support student involvement in assessment of their own work. However, evidence from the New Zealand Council of Educational Research’s national survey 2 ; of New Zealand’s teachers shows that these pedagogies are not as widely used as we might hope. There is clearly something that holds teachers back from using them more often. Both they and students need lots of practice, support and resource materials for self-assessment, peer assessment, three-way reporting conversations with parents and so on.  

• One really important support (again for both teachers and students) should come in the form of resources that help everyone build a shared understanding of what counts as quality work. Students can’t learn to judge the standard of their own work unless they are supported to build insightful understandings of what you are looking for, and hence what they might try next. (This comment could be extended to parents—when they worry about progress, clear signals about the desired standard and possible next steps can be helpful for them in also proving support and encouragement from home.)

What else do teachers need?

Teachers require in-depth pedagogical content knowledge if they are to choose the most appropriate form of assessment and, following assessment, the teaching and learning approach that best fits their students (DANZ, p.9). 

Some of the assumptions underpinning the national curriculum, particularly those that relate to levels and achievement objectives, continue to be contestable. Analyses show that, by and large, the objectives do not provide a sufficiently clear basis for discriminating levels of achievement or judging learning progress (DANZ, p.12).

Professional learning about robust pedagogies for formative assessment/assessment for learning is a great place to start, however this sort of learning probably won’t be sufficient for real shifts in practice to happen. Here are a few other areas where teachers need help and support. 

Exemplar materials that support students’ involvement in assessment will show a range of levels of achievement. Too often the “best” pieces of work are lauded but students don’t get to see the full range of efforts—from best to “worst.” This means that they can’t develop a clear idea of where they sit in terms of the whole range of possibilities. Teachers would rightly be concerned about using actual work from a class to show this range (imagine being the student who generated the lowest ranking exemplar). Also, it’s a waste of energy if everyone is being asked to reinvent the wheel. I think this challenge is best addressed via a systemwide curriculum conversation (what aspects of learning really matter and why) followed by development of exemplar resources that address those aspects of learning that are widely agreed to be really important. Curriculum experts need to get alongside talented teachers to create these sorts of resources.

Related but different suites of resources are needed to show everyone (students, teachers, school leaders, parents) what learning progress over time might look like in a specific area of the curriculum. Again, this is not as easy as it might seem at first glance. As one of the quotes above asserts, traditional curriculum objectives typically specify content to be learned at a specific point in time (often a year level) and seldom model progress over time. What progress actually looks like will vary according to the aspect of learning in focus. We might well ask, for example, what progress in developing and strengthening key competencies looks like as students move up the levels of their schooling. Such progress will be multi-faceted and is highly unlikely to be linear. It will almost certainly be impacted by contexts of learning and assessment. Again, as for the production of exemplars, the development of robust models of progress should take place at a state or national level, with teachers strongly supported to use any such materials in appropriate ways as they involve students in meaningful decision making about their learning progress and next steps. 

Negative assessment experiences can do real harm to children, and this can be a considerable source of anxiety for both parents and teachers. You need to do what you can to ensure students don’t get mixed messages, for example, false feedback that they are “doing great” when they are not. Teachers can’t control systems-level assessment practices, of course (we’ll get to them next), but you can set up a classroom climate where facing up to learning obstacles is the norm and every student knows you will help and support them to achieve and get better. 

How the system needs to help

The broad structures of the NQF 3 and NCEA 4 are consistent with our vision of students playing an active role in assessing their own learning and achievement. Levels 1–3 of the NQF create a flexible platform for qualifications that match each learner’s mix of interests and abilities and their plans for future study, work and life. With good support and advice, students can create learning plans and pursue unit/achievement standards 5 that get them started on a learning pathway that continues well beyond the school years. If, however, achievement data from the NQF and NCEA continue to be used as the basis for league table comparisons, the student-centred purposes of the qualifications will increasingly be subverted (DANZ, p. 38). 

This quotation speaks for itself. How high-stakes assessments are designed, conducted and then written about in the media will all impact on how safe it will be for teachers and students to take learning risks that really stretch students, and that set them on pathways that are best for them as individuals. 

We are fortunate in New Zealand to have a flexible qualifications system, but this flexibility is often neglected as teachers stick to more traditional course structures and assessment practices. They need help and support for course innovation. I wonder if having flexibility in both the curriculum and the qualifications structure is too overwhelming for busy teachers. Again strong exemplar materials, well supported with professional learning, would be a big help. Choosing constructive pathways also implies a need for robust guidance and support systems as students make course choices, especially as they advance through secondary school, where more options open up.

Finally, I’d like to mention moderation systems designed to ensure comparability in teacher judgments across different settings. With two colleagues I have recently compared moderation processes used for NCEA and those used for moderating primary school national standards.6 We noticed that the processes used at the primary level are geared to enhancing teachers’ learning and insights about where the standard actually resides in a specific case. NCEA moderation processes were also geared towards professional learning when the qualification was first introduced, and secondary teachers still have opportunities to take part in “best practice” workshops7 from time to time. However systems-level moderation has, over time, become more geared towards accountability and checking on within-school systems and teacher consistency. There isn’t the same level of opportunity to build shared knowledge and insight across the system when such processes predominate. 

So what?

This article illustrates the challenges involved in meaningful participation of students in making decisions about their own learning progress. This is not an easy sort of change to make and we still have some way to go. The payoff (if we can get more traction in the sorts of areas outlined) is that more students will leave school ready to be self-motivated lifelong learners—i.e., reality might come a bit closer to our curriculum rhetoric. As a bonus, another rich source of evidence will be added to assessment judgments we make about students’ progress in developing complex sets of learning outcomes, such as those developed when key competencies and traditional curriculum content are woven together in really rich learning challenges. 

1. Absolum, M., L. Flockton, J. Hattie, R. Hipkins and I. Reid. 2009. Directions for Assessment in New Zealand. Wellington, NZ: Ministry of Education. Also available at http://assessment.tki.org.nz/Research-and-readings/Research-behind-DANZ (accessed April 24, 2017).
2. The survey is available at http://www.nzcer.org.nz/research/national-survey.at http://assessment.tki.org.nz/Research-and-readings/Research-behind-DANZ (accessed April 24, 2017).
3. New Zealand’s National Qualifications framework.
4. National Certificates of Educational Achievement — New Zealand’s school exit qualification. 
5. Standards can be viewed at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/qualifications-standards/standards/.
6. Hipkins, R., M. Johnston and M. Sheehan. 2016 NCEA in Context. Wellington, NZ: NZCER Press. National standards are available at http://nzcurriculum.tki.org.nz/National-Standards.
7. Workshops can be found at http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/about-us/publications/qa-news/archive/march-2012/bp-workshops/.

Dr. Rosemary Hipkins is a chief researcher with the New Zealand Council for Educational Research and co-led the three-year Curriculum Implementation Exploratory Studies (CIES) project for New Zealand’s Ministry of Education.