Assessment Matters 16: 2022

Science capabilities were introduced within the New Zealand context following the revised New Zealand Curriculum (NZC). These capabilities are a small set of things that NZC intends students to be able to do in science, which weave the nature of science with content strands. Using pedagogical content knowledge (PCK) to understand teacher knowledge, this article explores how a New Zealand secondary school embraced science capabilities and how it is assessing them. A concerted and targeted… Read more

In this article, we consider how assessment might reinforce New Zealand curriculum goals of knowing and doing in science for active and informed participation in societies that rely on scientific knowledge to guide decision making. This focus constitutes an orientation towards “sustainable assessment”. Sustainable assessment encompasses the capacities students need to learn lifelong across formal and informal settings, and alerts students to the use of their learning for societal good.… Read more

Due to anthropogenic impacts generated by colonial and neocapitalist cultures, the world is now moving on accelerating trajectories toward dystopian futures. Education, traditionally engineered as an instrument of cultural reproduction, now urgently needs to adopt a leadership role for cultural transformation to generate a sustainable future. To fulfil this role, the aims, objectives, and practices of education must be strategically revisited. Here, in the context of Aotearoa New Zealand,… Read more

A standards-based assessment system provides opportunities to join curriculum intentions to demonstrations of complex learning. In this article we use New Zealand’s senior secondary qualifications system—the National Certificates of Educational Achievement (NCEA)—to illustrate how adaptations of existing structures might help to better reflect future-focused curriculum intentions in high-stakes, summative assessments. We frame an analysis of the structure of the achievement standards that… Read more

Designing an assessment that is fit for purpose in the initial teacher education (ITE) setting is complex. The assessment must meet the university and New Zealand Teaching Council regulations, mirror educational best practice, support ITE students to learn curricular and pedagogical content as well as be practicable to teach and assess. This article outlines a novel integrated assignment for first-year primary ITE students in science, English, and mathematics that was implemented in 2020 as… Read more

This article provides a snapshot of assessment for learning in action. It introduces the drawings made by children who had been studying “Planet Earth and Beyond”—Matariki as a context in science in a New Zealand primary school. The visual data are drawn from the Te Ao Hurihuri project (The Changing World) in which students were offered structured opportunities to represent their thinking with visual constructions. The wide range of constructions created by the students, as well as their… Read more

Integrated STEAM education (science, technology, engineering, art, and mathematics) has been shown to effectively foster global competencies as well as school and societal engagement for 21st century learners of diverse backgrounds. However, facilitating quality STEAM teaching and learning can be challenging for teachers, particularly in the area of subject integration and assessment. This is especially true in communities where value is placed on standardised testing and traditional single-… Read more