The growing range of online resources for schools now includes a new resource for assessing school outcomes and monitoring student progress. With the growth of the Internet, schools have online access to an expanding range of resources for use in
school management. A recent addition to this range provides schools with high-quality materials for monitoring students’ literacy and numeracy learning and for collecting
data on school leaders’, teachers’ and middle school students’ attitudes and perceptions on a variety of issues.

This new school assessment service, iAchieve, is provided jointly by ACER and the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Applied Educational Research (CAER). iAchieve aims to:

• assist schools to integrate authentic assessments in core learning areas into their curriculum programs (initially literacy and numeracy);
• provide descriptive and diagnostic reports of student learning outcomes for teachers, students and parents;
• assist schools to assess leader, teacher and student attitudes and perceptions; and
• benchmark assessment and questionnaire data to inform school improvement programs.

An attractive feature of iAchieve is its simple format and user-friendly interface. Another is the ease with which schools can manage student tests and results online. Upon registration, schools receive an iAchieve School Administration password which allows them to control who completes assessments and/or questionnaires, when the assessments/questionnaires are to be completed, and who receives the individual student, class, year level or school reports.

Data collected through iAchieve are recorded at the individual level, and individual and summary reports are provided to the school. Questionnaire responses are anonymous and are reported in a summary table. Schools may choose to have ACER mark student responses, providing an independent external audit. ACER and CAER jointly manage quality assurance processes for iAchieve assessments and questionnaires. iAchieve maintains full confidentiality and does not make data available to any other party (without permission of the school).

Ms Wendy Bodey, ACER Project Manager, points out that online assessments allow teachers greater flexibility in administering, marking and checking student work. “The system caters well for small or large numbers of students. A teacher is able to organise for an individual, a small group of students or the whole class to complete an assessment or questionnaire,” she said.

“Once students’ answers to a question have been marked, they can be sorted by score, allowing teachers to check their marking consistency. This sort of checking is much less time consuming than in paper and pen assessments.”

iAchieve began operating in March 2001 in more than 30 pilot schools and will become fully operational later this year. iAchieve General Manager, Mr Graeme Jane, describes the results of the pilot as encouraging.

“Schools have been very positive about the benefits of the service and the appropriateness of the user interface. In fact, some large schools have successfully had up to 75 concurrent users of the system,” he said.

“Students enjoy the online system and find it easy to use. Schools appreciate the range of assessments and questionnaires and the flexibility to control, at the school level, who completes the assessments and questionnaires and who receives the reports.

“The other advantage identified by schools, is the ability to interpret their results in terms of a standards framework and to benchmark themselves against other schools,” Mr Jane said.

At present, iAchieve provides online student assessments in literacy and numeracy for Years 5–9. Other assessments will be available in the future, including reading assessments at Years 3 and 4.

“iAchieve provides individual reports which describe a student’s estimated level of achievement in terms of the skills and understandings typically displayed at that level. A diagnostic report is available allowing teachers to explore in detail how a student has performed on particular assessment tasks,” Mr Jane said.

“Questionnaire reports provide overall results as well as the percentage of respondents agreeing or disagreeing with each item, allowing schools to identify differences in the
perceptions of leaders, teachers and students, key issues with low and high ratings, and changes in school attitudes over time.”

For further information visit the iAchieve web site at http://www.iachieve.com.au, phone (03) 9277 5755 or email .(JavaScript must be enabled to view this email address)

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