Measurement

In his first Teacher column of 2024, Professor Geoff Masters AO discusses assessment reforms proposed in New Zealand to reverse that country’s declining student performance.

Our latest Teacher’s Bookshelf features Building a World-Class Learning System: Insights from some top-performing school systems, by Professor Geoff Masters. It explores what British Columbia, Estonia, Finland, Hong Kong and South Korea have in common, the strategies they employ, and the decisions they are making to support students now and in the future.

Research shows parents want more frequent communication about their child’s learning, and that communicating both a student’s individual achievement, and learning growth is important. In this article, we speak to one school about their new approach to student reporting.

In our latest expert Q&A we talk to Greta Rollo, who leads the Primary Early Childhood and Inclusive Research team at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), and ACER Research Fellow Dr Kellie Picker, about the place of phonics in early reading instruction.

A new research paper, Creative self-beliefs among children and adolescents, published in the Australian Journal of Education, seeks to understand more about young people’s confidence in their creative abilities, as well as their beliefs about whether these abilities are fixed or malleable.

‘At Dromana College we had an issue with only a few teachers having the confidence to write a decent rubric…As a school, we therefore came up with our own guidelines on how to construct rubrics for years 7-10.’ In this reader submission, Assessment and Reporting Coordinator Jodi Wilson shares how the Victorian secondary school has been helping teachers to improve their own rubric design skills.

‘A parent who is now told that their child’s reading is "developing" in each of years 3, 5, 7 and 9 is never likely to know what that means.’ Professor Geoff Masters AO says recent changes to NAPLAN reporting won’t help teachers and parents, and are ‘bewildering’.

In today’s Q&A we catch up with Dr Dan Cloney – a Senior Research Fellow in the Education Policy and Practice Program and a Member of the Centre for Global Education Monitoring at the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER) – to discuss early years transitions, assessment and learning progressions.

NAPLAN’s National Minimum Standard is the ‘agreed minimum acceptable standard of knowledge and skills without which a student will have difficulty making sufficient progress at school’. Ahead of the 2023 tests, we compare the percentage of male and female students in year 9 achieving at or above the standard in Literacy, over time.

In the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests, the national minimum standard (NMS) is the ‘agreed minimum acceptable standard of knowledge and skills without which a student will have difficulty making sufficient progress at school’. This infographic looks at the performance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in Year 9, over time.