The authors of this article had been exploring the notion of continuity for an individual learner, and this led them to also explore the notion of continuity within the bigger picture. They provide an example of what they call a centre storyline: an ongoing project that developed over an extended period of time and across a number of experiences. They called this storyline “Stone Crazy”. The article analyses this storyline in terms of the relationship between an intentional teacher and an intentional learner. An intentional teacher is one who is in tune with learners’ intentions and co-constructs curriculum with them. The authors discuss the intentional strategies used by one of the teachers, and two different versions of an “intentional learner” are described.
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In January 2005, during my induction into Te Kotahitanga, I was challenged to consider my role, as a non-Māori teacher, in addressing the disparities that exist for Māori within our education system. Thus began my learning about, and through, a culturally responsive pedagogy of relations.
This study explored whether using process drama to teach social studies would engage Year 10 Pasifika boys at a secondary school in Auckland. The author describes how, while in role, students used their existing knowledge and experiences to explore and develop new knowledge, and how process drama addressed the goals of The New Zealand Curriculum through an integrated inquiry approach. The results show that the students' low expectations of themselves were raised when they participated in role.
Media headlines ensure that we are constantly reminded of the presence of bullying in our schools. This article draws on responses to a national survey on barriers to student learning. The strategies that primary and secondary schools that responded are implementing to address bullying are discussed in relation to the approach known as “health promoting schools”—an approach that is internationally recognised for its effectiveness in addressing mental health issues in schools.
It has been suggested that focusing on the metacognitive skills secondary students need to make informed decisions about literacy challenges they encounter is a central element in raising literacy achievement. However, it is also recognised that struggling students are often not metacognitively skilful and are reluctant to use skills once taught them. This article uses findings from years 3 and 4 of a 5-year project in the south-west of the United States to discuss the approaches used to support students in raising their literacy achievements through a focus on metacognition.
This article describes one primary school’s approach to countering the “summer drop” in reading achievement. By the deliberate sharing of strategies to support reading at home during the holidays through a “summer reading contract”, Clayton Park School has successfully reduced the drop in reading achievement over the summer, including for the lowest performing students across all ethnicities.
The purpose of this paper is to understand how teachers’ identities as assessors in a standards-referenced assessment system may be developed through their participation in online social moderation meetings. In these meetings, teachers negotiate and share their understandings of assessment standards and judgement decisions. In particular, the paper focuses on the relationship between the technology, the moderation processes and teachers’ development in this assessment system. This paper draws on sociocultural theories of learning to analyse the qualitative data collected through observations of 11 online moderation meetings and interviews with the teachers involved in these meetings. The results provide insights into the mediating role of the technology with regard to teachers’ development of shared meanings and common practices within a standards referenced assessment system.
In November 2007, changes to the New Zealand curriculum were published, with an expectation that schools would fully implement these changes by February 2010 (Schagen, 2011, p. 1). Among the changes were aspects that encouraged greater recognition of an entrepreneurial orientation. We set out to gauge the understanding preservice teachers have of entrepreneurship. We found divergent perspectives on whether entrepreneurship is more closely associated with economic processes and commercial activity, or can be more broadly applied to subject areas such as the arts, languages and music. However, a consistent finding across all groups was that preservice teachers are unaware of the requirement to teach entrepreneurship across the curriculum. Teaching entrepreneurship was seen as a “bolt on” subject and not as embedded in current subject matter. This indicates a lack of familiarity with the intent of the revised New Zealand curriculum, which has made it clear that teachers are expected to encourage New Zealand school students to have an entrepreneurial outlook.
In this article, Yvonne, a junior school teacher, describes how she decided to explore how key competencies could be integrated into the daily programme, and assessed, without creating extra workload for teachers. The article outlines how, with support from research co-ordinators Keryn and Sue, Yvonne developed a way in which she could document the learning of key competencies and the learning of the subject-related learning areas at the same time. She recognises that the two go together like “clasped hands with the fingers entwined”, and this leads her to “split-screen” pedagogy and analysis of the learning.
A real challenge children face is how to successfully enter collaborative play that is already in progress. Some children achieve this with little trouble, while others struggle to be included. Through case studies of four children, this study explores the nature of participation strategies, and offers strategies for teachers to develop the play-joining abilities of less socially literate children.
From time to time the New Zealand Council for Educational Research is asked how test results can contribute to making an Overall Teacher Judgement (OTJ). This is an important and complex question and one that we continue to grapple with. In this Assessment News article I begin to explore what we need to consider when using test results to support and promote teachers' professional judgements.
Two teachers research the documentation, continuity and complexity of key competencies in their combined new entrant, Year 1 and Year 2 classroom. They wanted to find ways to make the continuity visible without losing the complex interconnection of three aspects: key competencies, subjects and topics of interest. They saw the value of analysing case studies, and began to describe them as co-constructed pathways of learning. This article sets out the case study for one of the children, Kaleb, analysing the learning using four dimensions of strength.
It is with great pleasure that we write an introduction to this special issue of the Early Childhood Folio on key learning competencies across place and time. Publication of these working papers (adapted and edited for the Early Childhood Folio) from a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project means they will now be widely available for teachers. These are articles by teachers for teachers.
The articles in this edition of Early Childhood Folio are likely to generate thinking that challenges taken-for-granted practice and beliefs. They all draw on research within early childhood settings.
In New Zealand the majority of students attend schools that reflect the dominant mainstream context, yet these schools include indigenous Māori and learners from diverse cultural and language backgrounds. By building on contemporary cultural knowledge and students’ own experiences, the arts have the potential to enhance educational outcomes for a diverse student population. This research examines the effects of an intensive programme of teacher professional development in culturally responsive pedagogies on classroom activities and learning experiences in the arts. The results reveal varying levels of implementation, with consequent effects on the teaching and learning process for students. The implications of these findings are discussed with reference to the literature on arts integration and how the arts can build on students’ cultural knowledge and experiences.
One of the most important goals for teaching statistics is to prepare students to deal with the statistical information that increasingly impacts on their everyday lives. Students need to be able to critically evaluate statistical information and data-based arguments. The findings of this collaborative research study of Year 9 students suggest that all students can and should be exposed to critical thinking in statistics, and identify some ways that teaching of statistical literacy might be altered for greater effectiveness.
This paper conceives history in the New Zealand curriculum as a curriculum problem. In exposing this problem, history’s identity is thrown into question. I outline a motif of disturbance in light of my professional experiences of history curriculum and assessment policy shifts (1990s to 2010). From a critical pedagogy stance, I conceive the national curriculum’s events-based orientation to history as traditional and played out in pedagogy as exclusive cultural reproduction. From a critical pedagogy stance, I consider a counter approach to history curriculum that engages teacher agency and frees up possibilities for students’ historical thinking.
This article examines the early childhood curriculum in action by looking at two oppositional forces that are at play: authoritative discourse (which is perceived as uncontestable) and internally persuasive discourse (which is open for debate). Unless challenged by knowledgeable teachers, authoritative discourse may dominate. When this occurs, there is little place for uncertainty (that is, “dust”)— significant parts of the curriculum may go underground (that is, get swept under the whāriki). In this location they still exist, but are neither valued nor embraced in the public domain and therefore do not have the opportunity to enrich the curriculum whāriki.
Language and its development is a topic of perennial interest, and particularly so in relation to schooling. After all, it is supposed to be what distinguishes us from animals. Universal and compulsory education systems were established towards the end of the 19th century. At that time psychologists were in the process of establishing themselves as scientists, and psychology became the area of academic study which was called on to explain the processes of education. Psychologists offered advice, based on their own theories, on aspects of the testing, training and development of language. However, language and its structure, meaning, use, its settings and expression in both oral and visual forms have been studied more intensively by linguists of different kinds, and it is good to see reported in this issue investigations which draw on linguistic understanding.
This third issue of Assessment Matters addresses a number of topics that span the complexity and nature of assessment as it is understood and practised in a range of educational settings, in New Zealand, Australia and Canada. Through the papers one can see the multiple, often competing, roles that assessment plays in schools, and the complexity of teachers’ roles within that. There is no doubt that, to enact educational policies for effective pedagogy that integrates assessment for learning as well as for accountability, the onus of responsibility rests with school leaders and teachers.
Recent attention to the idea of “student voice” provides an interesting framework
for considering the articles in this edition of set: Research Information for Teachers
as an overall collection. They cover a range of different issues, with a special focus on
mathematics education. The potential to read a “voice” dimension into the collection
raises some interesting possibilities for professional reflection.
What does it take to develop and sustain innovative approaches to supporting students’ learning? This is a theme linking several of the articles in this issue of set: Research Information for Teachers, each illustrating some of the challenges and opportunities of stepping beyond conventional teaching and learning practices and seeking to do things differently.
In a year of unprecedented events in New Zealand’s history, in which I was to lose people close to me and in which I saw firsthand the toll taken on my hometown community of Greymouth and my current place of residence, Christchurch, I cannot reflect on this year in curriculum without relating it to those events. As I write this, the clean-up of the oil spill following the Rena’s grounding off Tauranga is also underway—another example to support the points I will make.
In this editorial I would like to tie together notions of crisis, curriculum and citizenship. In a previous Curriculum Matters editorial, I presented a broad definition of curriculum (Mutch, 2009). This explored curriculum from society’s aspirations, through official documents, to teachers’ interpretations and students’ responses. In the 2011 editorial, I will link the way in which the official curriculum has interpreted society’s aspirations and how the responses to the disasters of the past year demonstrate particular ways in which New Zealanders act as citizens when faced with major crises.
When their funds of knowledge and experiences from home and the community are connected to their school learning, students' learning is supported. In this study teachers used "home learning books" to invite contributions from home into science teaching and learning in the classroom. The flow of knowledge between home and school engaged students and whānau and enriched the science learning.
Test scores reduce complex phenomena, such as achievement in mathematics or ability to comprehend a written text, to numbers. If a test has done a good job of testing what it was designed to assess, then test results can be useful, especially when we want to do things like track progress and make comparisons. However, it is important to understand that test scores are not error free. This Assessment News article is the first of two that provide a “quick guide” to some sources of error that can make our use of test results problematic and the implications this has for practice. In this first article, we look at the impact of measurement error on results for individuals and groups.
This article explores teaching games of chase in the early childhood curriculum. It identifies three areas of teacher involvement: (1) developing a framework for playing games, which prompts the teacher to create teaching strategies that consider both the value of and issues with games in early childhood; (2) engaging with children to explore the games together; and (3) reflecting on and discussing the teaching strategies used.
What are the features of a positive work environment for early career teachers? This article examines this question through interviews with secondary school early career science teachers. Findings suggest a science department that is collegial and collaborative is essential in encouraging teachers in the early stages of their career to stay in the profession and engage in practice that supports student learning. While the article focuses on the science department work environment, the features and issues raised could have implications for different departments or sectors within New Zealand.
The implementation of best practice models for assessment begins with teachers who are working in their own classes to integrate strategies into their teaching context. The effect of best practice strategies is greatly increased when there is a meeting of minds between teachers, students, school managers, academics, policy makers and, increasingly, educational consultants. This paper uses the findings of an observational case study to provide the beginnings of a baseline of information that can be used to plan for systematic evaluation of the effect of assessment innovations in classrooms and schools. It uses problem-based methodology to examine why teachers choose particular assessment practices, as well as describing what they do. This provides a useful basis for determining how professional learning should take place for real, sustainable change to be seen.
What does the term "student voice" mean to you? Does it mean listening to students' opinions? Involving students in decisions about their learning? Giving students equal say in decisions about school management and governance? This commentary analyses and critiques the ways we tend to think about young peoples' responsibilities, roles and rights to participate.
The first year of teaching is a critical stage in a teacher's professional life. Many beginning teachers are employed in short-term positions, but we know very little about how employment status affects first-year teachers' feelings of self-confidence, or their attitudes towards their second year of teaching. This article explores these issues in relation to first-year primary teachers.
This article critiques a recent professional development course for history teachers that explored how students could use memorials and heritage sites to engage with the concept of significance and how this could contribute to them developing expertise in historical thinking. The course challenged teachers to consider historical significance in terms of disciplinary characteristics (as opposed to memory-history), to move away from the teacher transmission/storytelling model and to incorporate the key competencies in their teaching.
Fractions are important mathematically and in everyday life but are complicated and difficult to learn. Teachers therefore need to be able to work out what students understand about fractions and what is causing them problems. This article reports on a study where students were asked to answer a number of items involving fractions on number lines and measurement scales. The items provided a simple way to assess and interpret student understanding that teachers may find useful.
Peer assessment is now considered a necessary and vital strategy to be embedded within an assessment for learning framework. Grounded in teachers’ practice, this article pays particular attention to the learning environments created by two teachers as they incorporated peer assessment into their primary school classroom programmes. It illustrates the kinds of experiences, interactions and opportunities needed to ensure peer assessment is infused into the learning environment prior to, during and after the production of work.
Assessment, much like learning, is interactive, social and contextual. New information and experience is understood and assimilated in relation to prior knowledge and experiences. While it is increasingly accepted that Māori learners have their own ways of understanding the world which are different from those of their non-Māori peers, teachers need to be careful not to promote a homogeneous approach to Māori learners. This article advocates the use of culturally responsive pedagogies that include assessment practices to meet the specific needs of the students. In association with the development of these understandings, there has grown a shift in focus from the deficiencies of the learner to a closer examination of the role of schools and schooling, the “system” itself and the production and implementation of culturally responsive models and quality teaching programmes that include formative assessment approaches.
This article draws on recent research into early childhood teachers’ views on how they support children’s scientific learning. It identifies four strategies teachers used to increase their scientific knowledge base—learning from parents and children, learning from other teachers, learning with children and learning from outside sources such as books or the Web.
This article looks at the experiences of same-gender parents and their children when they encounter and challenge heteronormativity in early education settings. Drawing on a study that investigated how lesbians and gay men create and maintain family in contemporary New Zealand society, the article highlights the disparity between family experiences and inclusive legislation and policy and draws attention to practices that affirm these families’ diversity and protect their rights to full inclusion.
The aim of this article is to comment on the ways in which beliefs and theories of learning affect the teaching and learning of mathematics. When mathematics is viewed as a static body of knowledge, a transmission style of teaching is often employed. In contrast, a radical constructivist view of learning suggests that mathematics could be a constructive and creative endeavour. We suggest that this perspective of mathematics aligns with the principles, values and key competencies in The New Zealand Curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007). Examples relevant to the context of primary mathematics education are considered.
This paper explores views of mathematics that have been offered in parliamentary exchanges over the past two decades. It makes connections between the development of mathematics curriculum and the political and ideological arrangements in which curriculum is nested. In tracing how school mathematics debates in parliamentary sessions are set within specific social, cultural and economic contexts, we draw attention to an increasing national drive for competitiveness and to heightened allegations of falling standards.
This study investigated the practices involved in the transition to school for children with a range of special education needs. Certain factors emerged as most important for a successful transition, including good ongoing communication and collaboration between families and schools. Teachers’ use of differentiation practices was also beneficial. The article concludes that the critical factor for successful transitions was high levels of communication and collaboration leading to good home–school partnerships.
This article explores how two pairs of secondary content teachers drew on their knowledge of language and second-language acquisition to plan and implement a language-focused lesson sequence in their subject areas. The mathematics and social studies teachers were surprised at the extent to which this language-focused approach engaged their students and developed their cognitive academic language ability in the respective topics.
A research project in this early childhood centre investigated the (school) key competency relating to others. The teachers were particularly interested in this key competency because relationships, and the empowerment of children and families, had always been key concepts for the centre. In order to research their understanding of relationships they asked “What does relating look like for children here?” Staff collected Learning Stories about relating-in-action from the children’s portfolios. Regular reflective meetings on these stories developed three layers of knowing that underpinned their perspectives on relating to others. The empowered child is at the centre of these three layers of knowing.
Since 1995, New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) has been responsible for the national assessment of students’ achievement in each of the learning areas in the curriculum. One of the assessment approaches used by NEMP is the one-to-one student interview. This paper addresses variation within individual teacher administrators’ practice as they conducted interviews during the 2005 round of monitoring in social studies. An observation schedule was used to gather data from 12 randomly selected teacher administrators, across 10 categories, as they carried out three administrations for each of three selected social studies tasks. It is argued that the variations observed within individual teacher administrators’ practice were related to elements of the assessment tasks and teacher administrators’ interpretations of these tasks. In addition, teacher administrators’ subject knowledge, their understanding of the teacher administrator role and their understanding of the “standardised” one-to-one interview process also contributed to variations within individuals. Overall, the nature and levels of variation observed have the potential to pose threats to reliability and have an effect on the consequential validity of information.
The authors work with infants and toddlers and had become interested in rethinking the language associated with learning dispositions in documented Learning Stories. They decided to develop a different language, one that better reflected their knowledge and understanding of under-2-year-olds and their learning. The teachers returned to the curriculum document, Te Whāriki, for the language, finding a “myriad” of words that described the actions and behaviour of infants and toddlers. Dispositional action words and cues for teachers working with under-2s are set out in detail and examples for each of the five strands of Te Whāriki are included to “test out” the framework.
How can teachers support students' additive thinking? This article focuses on the study of a lesson designed to teach the equal additions strategy for subtraction, in which many teachers, despite having a strong commitment to promoting conceptual understanding, struggled with various aspects of the material and resorted to teaching procedurally. The authors conclude that teachers need to have a deeper, more connected understanding of addition and subtraction in order to develop their pedagogical content knowledge in mathematics.
This article explores the shift from “essential skills” to “key competencies” in the school curriculum. Drawing on information gathered from teacher interviews and observations at a New Zealand primary school, this article suggests that culture and context strongly shape and influence the interpretation of key competencies. The authors develop a metaphor—te tuangi—to theorise the relationship between a learner (akonga) and a teacher (kaiako) in a cultural and social context.
The conceptions teachers have about assessment are assumed to influence their practices and to be consistent with the jurisdictional and policy frameworks in which they work. This paper compares two groups of teachers (i.e., New Zealand primary and secondary) in response to the Teachers’ Conceptions of Assessment (TCoA–IIIA) self-administered survey inventory. The previously reported four-factor hierarchical model for primary teachers (i.e., improvement, irrelevance, school accountability and student accountability) was found to be statistically invariant with good fit characteristics across both groups using nested, multigroup invariance testing in confirmatory factor analysis. The only statistically significant difference was the mean score for the student accountability conception, which was more strongly endorsed by secondary teachers, consistent with their role in administering the New Zealand qualifications system. The study suggests that teachers develop or adopt conceptions of assessment that allow them to successfully function within their own policy or legal framework.
International comparative studies offer unique opportunities to interrogate and challenge embedded practices within education systems. In this paper we explore the textbook presentation of fractions from a Chinese text. The fraction tasks reviewed in the Chinese text involve practice on learnt knowledge as well as exercises designed to extend the learnt knowledge to generate integrated knowledge structures and to develop flexible problem-solving abilities. Designed using the theory of “teaching with variation”, these tasks reflect cultural expectations about what content is important, how mathematics can be taught and what competence is valued for students. In this paper we consider how these task activities compare with those from a recently published New Zealand text.
This article draws on several reviews that have documented known challenges for students when learning to use graphs in science contexts. It then illustrates these challenges with examples drawn from the New Zealand Council for Educational Research’s recently developed test series, Science: Thinking with Evidence. Learning to think with graphically presented evidence is an important aspect of preparing our students to be citizens in societies where science impacts on our lives in multiple ways, and this article alerts teachers to aspects of using graphs where middle school students might need additional support and practice.
This study explored elementary and secondary school administrators’ perspectives on their attempts to build assessment literacy—an understanding of the principles and practices of sound assessment. Using a semistructured interview format, administrators were asked to share successes and challenges with various types of assessment. Transcripts revealed an imbalance between formative and summative assessment practices and a variety of attitudinal, structural and resource factors that constrain administrators’ ability to foster changes that align with recent assessment research. The implications of the findings are discussed in relation to instructional leadership, capacity building and educational reform.
Currently, the Māori word hauora is translated in New Zealand curricula as health and wellbeing or as health and physical education for Māori-medium education. “Hauora, wellbeing” is also an underlying concept within Health and Physical Education in the New Zealand Curriculum, where it is claimed that it offers a “Māori philosophy of health unique to New Zealand”. The use of Māori words and concepts in English-medium curricula is a source of tension, in as much as this usage involves a claim to represent a shared Māori perspective. Understandings of hauora need to go beyond their simplified interpretations within curricula.