Assessment Reflections - Collaborative Activity for Mindlab

As teachers, we dream of students engaged in their learning, exploring their passions in a myriad of ways.

The reality is more often students doing work that is dictated by assessment needs.

As part of our Mindlab session this evening, we were asked in small groups to discuss assessment practices. As three high school teachers, there are aspects of our assessment practice that we would like to change. One of the primary reasons is that we think that changes in assessment would benefit our students by increasing agency of their learning.

Among the issues with assessment that we identified are:
  • standard /assessment is driving the teaching and learning rather than teaching and learning driving assessment.
  • NCEA and National Standards pressures
  • 'exam' based assessment tasks
  • assessments predominantly individually assessed where work could be submitted as group - how to manage this?
  • over-testing within school
  • reliance on written assessments
Overall, we would prefer an increase in alternative ways of assessing, such as use of portfolio based assessment in real-life contexts.

If these assessment practices could be adapted then students would, theoretically, have more buy-in and become more engaged in their learning. There would be opportunities for them to take more ownership of what is assessed, how and why.

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