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52 stories
Week 27: International and national assessment
Reliable assessments help teachers ensure each learner is engaged in challenging learning opportunities appropriate to their readiness and needs.
‘There’s a great deal of thought, collaboration, discipline, creativity and attention to detail in developing robust and reliable assessments,’ says Stavroula Zoumboulis, a Research Fellow in Assessment and Reporting at ACER. Stavroula is one of many in ACER’s test development team who works on international and national assessments to support teaching and learning. ‘I work in the mathematics and science curriculum team, developing tools like the International Schools Assessment (ISA) to assess the progress of learners.’
ISA papers are developed annually for some 50 000 students from Grades 3 to 10 in more than 300 schools around the world. ‘The ISA seeks to assess the ability of students to relate their knowledge to situations encountered in daily life,’ Stavroula says. ‘Our detailed reports give teachers valuable information about student progress on an item-by-item level. Teachers can see which questions were answered correctly and any misconceptions or gaps in learning their students may have.’
Developing test items for the ISA cohort, says Stavroula, has its unique challenges. ‘Item contexts need to be carefully selected to be relevant to a broad cultural base. The level of reading and language complexity needs to be kept to a minimum, without compromising the ability of the test to provide authentic contexts in which to ask questions.
‘The items we write are subjected to a number of layers of scrutiny. They are critiqued by colleagues with extensive experience in developing assessments and they are also trialed by students in classrooms. Feedback from this process then informs the careful selection of items for a final test paper, so that they provide a balanced, reliable means of assessing student ability.’
Stavroula’s involvement in ISA also involves working with large teams of markers every year, addressing a trial marking and two sittings of the final paper. Developing assessment items has also taken her into schools to run class pilots and cognitive laboratories, and to Western Australia, to train teachers to mark science trial scripts for the WA Monitoring Standards in Education tests.
‘Classrooms are incredibly busy places, so having a robust, well-researched suite of assessment items on hand to help teachers make judgements about student progress is truly invaluable.’
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Week 52: State of the art psychometric and statistical analysis
Week 51: Assessing civics and citizenship
Week 50: International research into teaching and learning
GOAL 1
Learners and their needs
every learner engaged in challenging learning opportunities appropriate to their readiness and needs
GOAL 2
The Learning Profession
every learning professional highly skilled, knowledgeable and engaged in excellent practice
GOAL 3
Places of learning
every learning community well resourced and passionately committed to improving outcomes for all learners
GOAL 4
A Learning Society
a society in which every learner experiences success and has an opportunity to achieve their potential
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Pursuing Quality and Equity through Evidence
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