St Mark’s is a state-integrated, full primary school in Christchurch with a roll of around 200.
The school has concentrated on building a model of inquiry based on learner-focused evaluation processes. They appreciate the opportunity that the removal of National Standards has given them to reconsider their assessment systems and processes.
The school looked at the range of assessment tools available for literacy and numeracy. The list is large, and includes (but not exhaustively):
- PATs
- e-asTTle
- running records
- PIPs
- GloSS
- JAM
- STAR
- PROBE 2
- BURT
- MidYIS
- NumPA
- NEMP
- ARBs
- Schonell
- New Zealand Curriculum exemplars
- PaCT
- rubrics
- student voice.
So many tools, each with its advantages and disadvantages, all measuring in different ways. School leaders, in consultation with their staff, decided to investigate the Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT) because it seemed to support their criteria for an effective assessment tool. A group from the school attended PaCT workshops and discovered that the tool has the following advantages:
- The Learning Progressions Frameworks are embedded in the PaCT tool. Teachers are able to understand the knowledge, skills and rates of progress described in The New Zealand Curriculum in reading, writing and mathematics.
- Each learning area (reading, writing and mathematics) is broken down into aspects and illustrations are available for all stages of learning.
- The tools are designed for cross-curricular use, for example, there are illustrations from the science and social studies learning areas.
- The tool will align teacher judgments with New Zealand curriculum levels.
- The clear descriptions and illustrations support moderation and collaborative inquiry.
- It supports assessment for learning – teachers can easily give feedback to students about their learning and plan the next learning steps with them.
- The tool produces reports that provide information for students, teachers (individually and as a learning group) and school leaders.
Teachers like the fact that there are guidelines for when a judgment doesn’t match with the knowledge that the teacher has. This supports their knowledge that assessment is never cut and dried and needs careful investigation.
