Tuesday 18 August 2015

The task of developing and delivering the National Assessment Program — Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) online presents enormous challenges. Nonetheless, the benefits of taking this on are well worth the efforts. With a tailored test design, NAPLAN online will provide a better measure of the Australian Curriculum, more precise results and a significantly faster turnaround of those results. NAPLAN will begin its delivery online in 2017, with an opt-in period until 2019. To ensure readiness, a large amount of research is being conducted through the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority to inform the development process. This presentation will address the advantages of moving online, as well as outline several key research studies to be conducted prior to the test’s implementation, including:
• a trialling study to ensure all item types (traditional and innovative) work in the online environment
• a device-effect study to ensure no disadvantage
to students regardless of whether they use laptops or tablets
• a fonts and readability study, to ensure the best layout for reading test (passages and items)
• an accessibility study to ensure the test is fair for all students, including students with disabilities, students in remote areas, and so on
• an autoscoring study, to demonstrate that computers can score NAPLAN writing as well as teachers.

There are challenges in designing a set of high-quality processes in senior assessment and tertiary entrance that meet the needs of future senior secondary school students and future users of the certified results of learning assessments. Assessment and selection arrangements should look to the future rather than backwards to arrangements that might have existed in the past or that presently operate, unexamined, in other places. Teachers need to be convinced that the richness of students’ learning assessments will not be lost or transmogrified in any new processes for grading or ranking. A set of principles should guide the design of a new system — a set that gives pre-eminence to, but goes beyond, validity and reliability. This paper introduces the principles that guided deliberations in the recent review of senior assessment and tertiary entrance in Queensland, and describes, in simple terms, the design features of a new system based on the review’s recommendations.

There is growing interest in general capabilities and cross-curricular learning outcomes such as literacy in information and communication technologies, creative thinking and collaborative and individual problem-solving. As the expectation for such competencies to be taught in schools has increased, so has the need for teachers and schools to validly and reliably assess student learning in those areas, and to report on them in ways that teaching and learning. In this presentation examine the challenges of assessing on student learning and learning growth capabilities and cross-curricular learning present approaches used in research some of these challenges and reflect can be applied in the classroom.