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 ...

This paper suggests The New Zealand Curriculum Exemplars for Learners with Special Education Needs and the accompanying booklet, Narrative Assessment: A Guide for Teachers, can potentially transform the ways we think about teaching, learning, curriculum, pedagogy and assessment for the group of students considered most likely to be learning ...

Directions for Assessment in New Zealand (DANZ), published in March 2009, was written to provide strategic advice to the Ministry of Education to guide and inform the design of new and improved strategies, policies and plans for assessment. The central premise of that advice is that all young people should ...

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 ...

Māori language education settings have resulted in teachers requiring efficient ways to identify the oral Māori language proficiency of students at the beginning of Māori-immersion schooling and throughout their participation as the basis for students’ ongoing learning. Accordingly, three assessment tools were developed using understandings from sociocultural perspectives on human ...

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 ...

Using an interpretive, qualitative case study methodology, the current study investigated 20 primary school teachers’ beliefs and understandings about feedback, and the use of feedback to enhance student learning. The use of Sadler’s (1989) theoretical framework illuminated both similarities and differences among teachers. As teachers’ feedback discourse was examined in ...

The introduction of a revised national curriculum for New Zealand has precipitated a subject-wide project to align requirements for high-stakes secondary school assessments (the National Certificate of Educational Achievement [NCEA] achievement standards) with curriculum aims and intentions. This article considers the process of revising NCEA standards and the potential for ...

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 ...

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 ...