Given the recent movement toward standards-based education there is a heightened need for teacher competency in the area of assessment and evaluation. However, despite demands for teacher assessment literacy, there are few instances of mandatory assessment courses in preservice teacher education programmes. Further, there is generally a lack of research ...

In a world where schools are accountable for ensuring that all of their students are academically well prepared to enter “the knowledge society”, using assessment in the service of learning is a critical skill for teachers. This article contends that in order to prepare teachers to use assessment for learning ...

Assessment for learning (AfL) practices observed in case studies in a North Queensland school were analysed from a sociocultural theoretical perspective. AfL practices of feedback, dialogue and peer assessment were viewed as an opportunity for students to learn the social expectations for being an autonomous learner, or central participant, within ...

This article provides a synthesis of the literature on formative assessment, self-regulated learning and adaptive help seeking. We do this by developing a classroom model of adaptive help seeking. The model focuses on self-regulated learning, within which the processes of adaptive help seeking and interactive formative assessment are theoretically integrated ...

This paper puts forward a proposal for reviewing the role and purpose of standards in the context of national curriculum and assessment reform more generally. It seeks to commence the much-needed conversation about standards in the work of teachers as distinct from large-scale testing companies and the policy personnel responsible ...

New Zealand’s previous examination-based secondary assessment system can be viewed as encompassing cultural values presenting unfair challenges for indigenous and other nonmajority students. The standards-based National Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA) incorporates enhanced flexibility, student choice and grading practices independent of comparisons with others. These features may be a better ...

The Premier New Zealand Scholarship, awarded annually to students performing at a high level in multiple secondary school subjects, has historically been dominated by students with successful results in mathematics and the sciences. Three possible explanations for this dominance are explored in the present article. The first is that greater ...

Before I trot out my starter-kit proposal, however, I need to make sure we are considering the same entity here, so let me first offer a definition of formative assessment and, after that, provide a brief rationale for why more teachers should be using it.

Key messages:

• The need to identify students’ language, phonic and alphabet knowledge early on, and to systematically teach those skills in the early years.
• Schools need more support from reading specialists, and access to it needs to be easier.
• Prereading skills should be taught at preschool.

The skills of oral narrative and phonological awareness are seen as precursors and predictors of reading development. In this study of bilingual Māori primary school students, Fleur Harris found that current methods of assessing these skills are based on the English language and Western modes of storytelling, and cast these ...