Moderation forwarded so far has indicated that some providers have submitted material that is not at the national standard. In some cases student evidence has been superficial and lacking the depth expected for a six-credit standard.
Providers are reminded that six credits for an Achievement Standard equates approximately to 60 hours teaching, learning time and assessment time. Use of Achievement Standards may require a change from the previous Unit-Standard-only teaching and learning programme.
Where existing Unit Standard material has been used as a starting point, moderation material submitted is not allowing students to meet the requirements of the standard.
Significant modification is required of assessment material to allow the requirements of Excellence, Merit or in many cases Achievement to be met. It may be preferable to start with new material.
Writing the assessment tasks
Once the assessor has established what knowledge or skills students need to demonstrate, they need to establish tasks that will enable the students to provide appropriate evidence.
- Start from, what do the students have to show they know?
- What sort of responses will they have to provide to achieve the standard?
- What sort of responses will they have to provide to achieve the standard with Merit?
- What sort of responses will they have to provide to achieve the standard with Excellence?
- When the tasks are worded, include criteria that tell the students clearly what they have to do to gain A, M or E. This should be very transparent. It is suggested that internal assessment activities for other learning areas such as Health, Social Studies and History be referred to for examples of wording, scaffolding of questions and layout.
- Use the same language as the standard in the assessment material, for example "examine" or "analyse"
- One test of a quality task could be: could this task be used to respond to examples on the standard?
Evidence Statements
In order to make accurate and consistent judgements teachers need samples of responses that would meet the standard for each level.
Until exemplars of student responses at each level A,M and E, are available to use to make judgements, assessors will need to write their own, that is, answer all the questions themselves in the format in which the student would be expected to respond. It is in doing this, that the requirements of the standard will become clear, and then the assessment questions will be able to be more clearly worded.
Each question should be "scaffolded" so that the learner is able to see clearly the criteria for gaining A, M, or E.
Making Judgements
Students have a right to know on what basis the decision will be made regarding their grade and clear judgement statements assist departments to ensure consistent decisions between assessors and year by year consistency. It is recommended that departments use the Internal Moderation Cover sheet to help this process.
An effective model to use is this social studies example on TKI. Achieved responses are documented and then at Merit and Excellence the additional evidence required to gain the higher grades is given.
If this process is followed the preparation of the assessment schedule is simplified, and judgement about an overall grade for the standard is easier to make.
The last explanatory note in each standard states:
It is expected that the descriptions and explanations are largely sourced from material supplied, or previously supplied, by a supervisor or teacher through textbooks, lessons, scholarly works, or other teaching tools that form a delivery package.
Teachers must be confident when awarding the standard that the student has demonstrated they have met the specific criteria, e.g. describe key features, analyse religious expression in New Zealand.
Due to the nature of the subject it is appropriate that students have access to resource material. However, the material particularly lessons, teaching tools and textbooks must not provide so much guidance that the teacher cannot be confident the student demonstrates the skills or understanding required by a specific standard. If the student simply copied from provided material they would not have demonstrated knowledge of the standard.
The source material such as scholarly works or other teaching tools refers to the official version of a particular religion or belief, not a lay person's beliefs.
Further information
Useful websites include:
http://www.leaderu.com/orgs/probe/docs/w-views.html (external link)