Thinking about school assessment

At this time of the academic year we see a very full schedule with exams, tests, SACs for the VCE girls and on top of that we are also compiling reports. Not to say that the rest of the school year is not busy but from now until the end of Semester 1 all students and teachers will be very focused.

Sometimes it seems we are overly concerned about assessment in schools. We have recently completed the NAPLAN tests for all students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9. Our VCE students are well into their SACs and already attention is turning towards the end of year exams and ATAR scores which are of great importance to our girls who are working so hard at the moment. ATAR and NAPLAN have come under recent scrutiny with calls in some quarters for a review and possibly removal altogether! Time will tell on the long term future of these large scale assessment measures.

At St Catherine’s, teachers are earnestly engaged in providing the best teaching possible but we also aim to use quality assessment measures to assist our girls at all stages of their learning.

Development of large scale and smaller class based assessments is a demanding and challenging exercise. Traditionally we think of assessment as a process to judge how well the students have learnt what they have been taught. Those assessments can be undertaken at the end of the teaching period or during the course of teaching which is helpful for providing feedback so we can identify areas where students may not have mastered what has been taught.

Professor Geoff Masters AO, the CEO of the Australian Council for Educational Research, puts forward the view that “another way of thinking about assessment is to think of it as the process of establishing and understanding where students are in their learning. Where are they up to? What do they know? What do they understand? What can they do at this point in time?” He goes on to say “that if educators think about assessment in this way, they can then use that information to think about what they would teach next and what challenging goals they would set. So it is a different way of thinking about assessment as the tracking of student learning over time.”

Teachers at St Catherine’s are clear in their purpose to improve student learning. There is an increasing emphasis on collecting and evaluating student performance data from quality assessment measures for the purpose of tracking student growth over time. Teachers can then plan and implement more effective learning experiences backed by evidence, rather than what we think they need.

Mr Robert Marshall
Director of Teaching and Learning
Mr Robert Marshall