Since 2007, substantial restructuring of New Zealand’s national school curriculum has occurred. This change has been paralleled by extensive revisions to New Zealand’s high-stakes assessment system, the National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA), which makes the New Zealand context an important one for investigating how teachers come to terms with mandated assessment innovation. The New Zealand ...

This article describes the use of Rasch measurement to improve criteria-based analytical marking keys. The instruments and data described result from a research project which investigated the use and assessment of digital portfolios in the Western Australian senior secondary design course. The study involved two phases and two separate data sets. A criteria-based analytical marking ...

The implementation of a new national curriculum and standards-referenced assessment in Australia has been an opportunity and a challenge for teacher assessment practices. In this case study of teachers in two Queensland schools, we explore how annotating student or exemplar assessment tasks could support teacher assessment practice. Three learning conversations between the researchers and the ...

The report Directions for Assessment in New Zealand (Absolum, Flockton, Hattie, Hipkins, & Reid, 2009) envisages an “assessment capable” system where students are empowered to become self-regulated learners. This article explores the concept of assessment capability. It considers what it means to be an assessment-capable teacher in New Zealand, the lessons that have been learned ...

Whether and how to assess key competencies is a subject of debate and constitutes a main challenge in the implementation of key competencies within the New Zealand curriculum. The use of rubrics in criteria-based assessment may not take into consideration the situated and emergent nature of learning because the assessment ...

Informal formative assessment practices, which occur as part of the dialogic interactions happening in the everyday classroom, are not well understood by many teachers. The successful implementation of formative assessment practices is not widespread in school classrooms. This article examines one aspect of these dialogic interactions—namely, the use of teacher ...

Research has suggested that using early literacy data to inform instruction can prevent reading failure. However, little is known about how teachers learn to effectively link their instruction to student data. The purpose of this qualitative study was to investigate how first-grade teachers used early literacy student data to inform ...

Feedback on students’ written assignments has been deemed critical for improvement. Although teachers’ and students’ views on feedback have been examined, school leaders’ perceptions of what constitutes effective feedback remain unclear. This study investigates school leaders’ perceived quality of feedback that a teacher may provide, with teacher responses formulated based ...

This article introduces the Research, Analysis and Insight into National Standards (RAINS) project, a study of how six schools are enacting the National Standards introduced into New Zealand’s primary and intermediate schools from October 2009. The article provides some background to the National Standards and the RAINS research before concentrating ...