Assessment

Teachers are often encouraged to take up opportunities to mark external exams or tests. There is extra money to be earned, but they are also often told that it is good professional development. But what do people mean when they say that, and what parts of your professional practice does marking help to develop?

In the first of a series of articles on how schools communicate student learning progress, Dr Hilary Hollingsworth and Jonathan Heard examine some of the recent history of reporting in Australian schools and highlight some of the competing forces that have influenced current practices in student reporting.

Research shows that in Australia the most advanced 10 per cent of students in a year level are about five to six years ahead of the least advanced 10 per cent. This infographic shows approximate distributions of students in NAPLAN Reading.

Raising the expected performance standard in each year of school and holding all teachers and students accountable for achieving these higher standards may not be the most effective way to improve levels of performance in Australian schools, Professor Geoff Masters AO writes in his latest Teacher column.

Taking a postgraduate qualification is an opportunity to not only upgrade your personal skill-set, but also add to the collective staff expertise in your school community.

There are good reasons to rethink how we organise the school curriculum. An alternative would be to structure the curriculum as a sequence of proficiency levels unrelated to age or year level, according to Professor Geoff Masters AO.

In today’s video Teacher magazine sits down with Australian Council for Educational Research CEO Professor Geoff Masters AO to discuss why it is important that students are involved in the process of setting goals for their own learning and can monitor the progress that they’re making.

In today’s video Teacher magazine sits down with Australian Council for Educational Research CEO Professor Geoff Masters AO to discuss new ways of thinking about assessment.

The decision to move NAPLAN online provides an opportunity to place less emphasis on comparing the performances of schools and more emphasis on supporting student learning, according to Professor Geoff Masters AO.

It’s often asserted that some things can’t be measured, Professor Geoff Masters AO writes in his latest column. But how true is this? And if we can’t measure something, should we stop pretending we can teach or develop it?