Spotlight 4: Innovative internal assessment case studies

NZQA has identified schools and teachers engaged in innovative assessment practices. We've asked them to talk about these practices. Assessment can be both innovative and meet NZQA's requirements for assessments to be authentic, valid, and reliable.

We are pleased to showcase the work of a variety of schools from three different perspectives: teachers, students, and management, while also showing a variety of assessment options. Each section starts with a series of video clips. Teachers describe their assessment practices.

Teacher 1: The evidence can be supplied in a variety of ways, from either a project, which has some kind of practical outcome backed up by some sort of research document perhaps, or perhaps I would film the student as they discuss what it is their project is about and show off what it is they've done, or perhaps there's a written report, which goes with a poster or something.

Teacher 2: I've had verbal assessments, and written reports. I've had some combination of both where students will write something and then screencast over things.

Teacher 3: We had videos coming in, voice recordings coming in, snippets of writing. We then also had ongoing Google Docs where students could be crafting and developing their writing.

The students talk about what they did for their assessment.

Student 1: So if someone's a faster learner or a slower learner, they can learn at their own speed. We get to pick when we do our assessments. I decide the standards at the beginning. We look at all the standards that we could do, then we pick out the ones that we think that we'd be best at or what we'd wanna do to lead up to the next one.

Student 2: Oral presentation still shows that you understand this well or a video has all the correct content and that kind of stuff. So it doesn't just have to be written down.

School managers talk about how change happened within their school.

Teacher 4: Thinking about the kids in your class, what's authentic to them, not what's authentic to me as a teacher. Ask them, have some conversations with them.

Teacher 5: We look at forward planning and what went well, what didn't go well. So we do reflective practice in that respect as well. And that's really helpful for keeping tabs on how the students are going and also for how the teachers are going and how they're finding things and ways we can improve and change things.

The next section has discussion tools for individual, departmental, or whole school reflection.

In the final section, we have put together some reading on assessment. We hope this will stimulate further thinking on assessment practices. The schools represented here have given careful thought to tailoring assessment practices for their students' needs. These are simply examples of ways of doing things differently. Viewing the different approaches and the degrees of innovation across these varied case studies may stimulate thinking around assessment practices to suit the needs of students in your school.