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Accountable assessment
Get PDFThere is widespread agreement about the importance of accounting for the extent to which educational systems advance student learning. Yet, the forms and formats of accountable assessments often ill serve students and teachers; the summative judgements of student performance that are typically employed to indicate proficiencies on benchmarks of student learning commonly fail to capture student performance in ways that are specific and actionable for teachers. Timing is another key barrier to the utility of summative assessment. In the US, summative evaluations occur at the end of the school year and may serve future students, but do not help teachers better support the students who were tested. In contrast, formative assessments provide actionable grounds to improve the quality of instruction on the basis of both the granularity and specificity of their content and their timing. Unfortunately, the psychometric qualities of formative assessments are often unknown. I describe an innovative approach to assessment that aims to blend the productive characteristics of both summative and formative assessment. The resulting assessment system is accountable to students and teachers by providing actionable information for improving classroom instruction, and at the same time, it addresses the demands of psychometric quality for purposes of system accountability as it is currently practiced (in the US). The innovative assessment system relies on partnership with teachers to generate (1) a shared conceptual frame for describing instructional goals and valued forms of teaching and learning; (2) a set of electronic tools to help teachers detect, share, analyse, and interpret student learning data; and (3) classroom and school-level community professional development structures to support and sustain a widespread practice of assessing to guide instruction. These features are coupled with new psychometric models, developed by the Berkeley Evaluation and Research Center, that provide more robust estimates of student learning by linking information from multiple sources, including student classroom work, student responses to formative assessments, and summative evaluations. (Mark Wilson will address the psychometric modeling during this conference.) Here I describe challenges and prospects for this innovation with a case study of its implementation in a K–5 elementary school that is seeking to improve the quality of instruction and students’ understandings of measure and rational number arithmetic
The SWANs/ABLES Project: A set of resources developed collaboratively with teachers to support the teaching and learning of students with additional learning needs
Get PDFThe inclusion of students with additional learning needs in schooling is part of policy and practice in Australia. However, it has been well documented that teachers lack the resources and training to meaningfully include students with additional learning needs in the full range of learning in their classrooms. The SWANs (Students with Additional Needs) program of work aimed to fill this gap through developing assessments based on learning progressions to provide targeted information to support the teaching and learning of all students, including students with additional learning needs. The development and implementation of the SWANs/ABLES suite of resources illustrates how a practical assessment tool can support teachers to target the learning of students with additional learning needs regardless of their point of readiness to learn
Modelling greatness
No full textA team of Australian school students has received the second highest honour in the 2021 International Mathematical Modeling Challenge (IM2C), contested by 51 teams from 27 different countries
The importance of measuring adult literacy and numeracy
No full textThe Australian Council for Educational Research’s submission to the parliamentary inquiry into adult skills highlights the importance of these skills to Australia’s well-being and economy, and calls on the government to continue participation in an international assessment to monitor outcomes and improve adult education
Snapshots issue 16: How much effort are students putting into PISA?
Get PDFThe most recent OECD Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) survey enables educators, policymakers and the wider community to compare Australian students with each other, as well as with their counterparts across the world. PISA measures the extent to which 15-year-old students near the end of compulsory education have acquired the knowledge and skills that young adults need to meet the challenges of the future. PISA’s results have become increasingly important in evidence-based education policy. The assessment allows students to analyse and reason; apply their knowledge and skills to interpret and solve real-life problems. PISA is regarded as low-stakes for both schools and students. This is because, unlike other formal assessments, students’ results do not impact their grades and the data cannot be linked to the school (although schools do receive feedback on their students’ performance). This Snapshot examines the self-reported levels of effort students invested in the PISA 2018 test and compares it with the effort they reported that they would have invested if the results counted towards their school marks
How the GEM Centre creates impact
No full textThe third phase of the GEM Centre’s strategic partnership between ACER and DFAT builds on Pathways to Impact to improve learning around the globe
Monitoring progress towards SDG 4 in Southeast Asia
No full textThe Global Education Monitoring (GEM) Centre supports countries in Southeast Asia to report progress towards United Nations Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4, quality education for all
Australia Awards Global Tracer Facility: Case Study — Alumni contributions to the COVID-19 pandemic response
No full textThis case study by the Australia Awards Global Tracer Facility (GTF) explores the extent to which alumni of Australian development scholarships are contributing to the global response to the COVID-19 pandemic. It provides the Department of Foreign Affairs and Trade (DFAT) with a unique snapshot into the type of contributions Australia Awards alumni are making globally during the first 12 months of the pandemic. The report examines findings from eight in-depth interviews and data collected from thousands of alumni as part of the annual Global Tracer Survey in 2020, to showcase the different ways Australia Awards alumni from a range of sectors are using their skills, knowledge and networks developed on award in Australia to respond to the COVID-19 pandemic
Infographic: Foundational literacy and numeracy skills
Get PDFIn the Trends in International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS) 2019, Year 4 principals were asked to report how many students in their school could do foundational literacy and numeracy skills such as ‘write their names’ and ‘recognise written numbers from 1 to 10’ when they began their first year of primary school. Find out how Australian data compare to the international average in this infographic.https://research.acer.edu.au/teacher_graphics/1140/thumbnail.jp