Page 3550 - Week 09 - Thursday, 23 August 2018
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personalised learning led by a student in partnership with their teachers and parents.
Minister, in practical terms, what does this mean?
MS BERRY: I thank Ms Lee for the question and her interest in formative assessment tools for students, teachers and parents in our schools in the ACT. Currently ACARA is actually working on a formative assessment tool which will be able to measure a child’s learning, and gain in learning across a year, and be able to measure their growth by having an ICT tool that would be able to properly measure and be used effectively by teachers, students and parents to be able to see that assessment across a year from the start of the year to the end of the year, to be able to measure that growth, depending on a child’s ability and needs, and their support through school.
That is the sort of assessment tool, that formative assessment, which was asked for when I was having conversations over the past 18 months or so which led to the strategy being developed, that teachers, parents and students wanted to be able to see in a way that was easily read but that easily guided students to where they needed to be and to different kinds of support that they would need, and a teacher would be able to see where they could support a student from the start of the year to the end of the year and very clearly parents could see the growth over a year.
As I said, there is a tool being developed by ACARA. The ACT government looks forward to seeing that work. We are also looking forward to learning from our sister city Wellington in New Zealand, in the work that they are doing around the formative assessment since they abolished their national standardised test.
MS LEE: Minister, is NAPLAN a part of that development? What impact will the Assembly’s education committee’s current inquiry into standardised testing and the federal education minister’s review into NAPLAN have?
MS BERRY: As Ms Lee should know, the NAPLAN review is on the use of that data: whether that data is being used appropriately; whether it is providing teachers, students and parents with the information that they need to support a child in their learning; and whether it is providing the benefits to students, schools, teachers and parents that it was originally designed to; or whether it is causing more harm by identifying schools and pitting schools against each other.
The review goes to that particular part of NAPLAN. At this stage, there is not a review of NAPLAN overall. Literacy and numeracy are important and vital parts of a child’s learning. That will not change. But how we measure a child’s learning from the start of the year and throughout the year to ensure that they get a year’s learning from a year’s schooling is where a formative assessment tool takes into account more than just a moment-in-time test based on a very limited amount of data that is not timely and does not provide the information that teachers need to support children in their learning.
MR MILLIGAN: When will the ACARA assessment tool be available?
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