Assessment

In the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) tests, the national minimum standard (NMS) is the ‘agreed minimum acceptable standard of knowledge and skills without which a student will have difficulty making sufficient progress at school’. This infographic looks at the performance of Indigenous and non-Indigenous students in Year 9, over time.

Public speaking is a daunting prospect for many students. Loreto Normanhurst in New South Wales has developed a Year 9 unit which supports students to research and confidently deliver a speech on a topic they are passionate about.

In this special episode of The Research Files, Teacher magazine’s Dominique Russell and Zoe Kaskamanidis take a look back on last month’s Research Conference, sharing and discussing some highlight sessions.

ACER’s Research Conference 2022 has kicked off today. This afternoon, ACER Research Fellow Dr Fabienne van der Kleij delivered her presentation ‘Reimagining classroom assessment and feedback to meet learner needs’. In this Q&A, she expands on what was covered in her presentation.

In this episode, we’re joined by two international guests ahead of their presentation at ACER’s Research Conference 2022, Louisa Rosenheck from Kahoot! and YJ Kim from the University of Wisconsin-Madison. They share what playful assessment is, and how teachers can embed this practice in the classroom.

ACER’s annual Research Conference kicks off in 2 weeks’ time and this year, Dr Diane DeBacker from the University of Kansas will be delivering the Karmel Oration Keynote, titled ‘Making learning visible: Moving from nouns to verbs’. Here, Dr DeBacker gives Teacher readers a glimpse of what she will be speaking about, and outlines the current state of competency-based education internationally.

ACER’s Global Academic Challenge was held for the first time this year and offers higher-performing students in Years 4, 6 and 8 the opportunity to attempt the kinds of questions sat by students in international schools around the world. ACER Senior Research Fellow Frances Eveleigh, who led the development of the challenge, shares some of the insights in this article.

When writing assessment questions, do you think you are achieving equitable gender representation? Research Fellow at ACER UK, Theodora Ntoka, says assessment questions often promote gender stereotyping, and has five strategies educators can use to avoid this.

How can we make assessment work for learners and learning in a rapidly changing world? How can we establish where students are at in their learning, including in the hard-to-measure skills and attributes they need to flourish in life? These questions will be explored at ACER’s Research Conference 2022, where the theme is ‘Reimagining assessment’.

Students have a diverse range of personal and contextual factors that influence their access to and achievement in their education. A new global study calls for a re-evaluation of education systems to promote personalised education.