Assessment of naturally occurring evidence of literacy

Recent changes to New Zealand’s senior secondary school qualifications include the introduction of standards that allow students to demonstrate evidence of competency in literacy and numeracy via “naturally occurring evidence”. Such evidence can potentially be drawn from routine learning activities in a wide range of subject areas. However, teachers of other subjects may not have the literacy or numeracy expertise to identify and leverage relevant opportunities, or to accurately judge the quality of evidence generated so that judgements against the standard are made reliably. This paper documents a system of distributed professional learning, decision making and record keeping that one secondary school has evolved to address these challenges.