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What are they?
The Assessment Resource Banks (ARBs) contain over 2800 formative assessment resources in English, Mathematics, and Science for students working at levels 1-5 of the New Zealand curriculum. Over 1000 of the assessment resources can be completed online, and half of these have an auto-marking function. The resources are free to New Zealand schools. The student tasks and the teacher information are based on New Zealand and international research, and informed by trials in schools.
The ARBs website links the resources to support materials, including:
- planning exemplars and relevant research material
- curriculum and assessment articles
- frameworks (for example, key learning focii in writing and reading)
- assessment guides for writing and oral language
- conceptual maps covering English comprehension strategies and mathematical concepts including:
- basic facts
- fractional thinking
- algebraic thinking
- algebraic patterns
- computational estimation
- probability.
When do you use them?
The principles of formative assessment underpin the design of ARBs resources. The assessment tasks are designed to be carried out as part of normal classroom activities. They can be used:
- as a diagnostic assessment at the start of an inquiry
- as a targeted exploration to find students’ learning needs within a unit
- to find students’ future learning needs at the end of a unit.
You can use ARBs resources any time you want to find out about students’ understanding of the particular learning idea.
Tasks can be worked on individually, in pairs or small groups, or as a whole class. Most tasks can be printed as pencil and paper assessment tasks.
What do they give you?
The tasks are designed to reveal students’ thinking, strategies they might be using to get to an answer, and barriers to learning. They can also be used to help students reflect on their learning.
The Teacher Information pages provide support for making sense of students’ responses, providing feedback and making decisions about what to do next.
Tasks can be further adapted for use when designing your own classroom tasks.
Assessment tasks are mapped to the Learning Progressions Frameworks, as well as the National Standards framework (archived). They can be used as one source of evidence to support mapping student learning to the New Zealand curriculum or a learning framework.
How to get started
Teachers can set up a personalised account on the ARBs website which allows them to save and organise collections of resources. They can share online interactive resources and view their students’ results online.
A login is needed to access the resources. You can register through the website or use the standard login supplied.
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