The assessment tool is primarily designed to help educators to identify the strengths and weaknesses of learners’ literacy and numeracy skills. This will help educators develop programmes for learners that match their needs and strengthen their literacy and numeracy skills. The assessment tool will also allow learners to track their progress over time and enable educators and organisations to report on the progress made by groups or cohorts of learners.
Some of the features of the assessment tool are described later on this page.
The assessment tool is being developed for the TEC by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER). A blog site has been set up which will help you learn about the assessment tool and allow you to provide feedback on some of the material which is being used in the assessment items. It also includes a set of FAQs - a series of questions and answers to common questions about the assessment tool.
If you have any further questions, you can contact the project manager David Deacon - david.deacon@tec.govt.nz .
Help trial the tool's assessment items!
Approximately 2500 literacy, writing and numeracy assessment items are being developed. Each assessment item uses a New Zealand adult context and will be linked to the reading, writing, and number and measurement Learning Progressions.
To make sure the items are robust, there is a need to trial each of them. Each item will need to be trialled by a minimum of 150 learners.
We are asking organisations to volunteer learners for item trials in August 2009.
Find out more and let us know if you can help!
Features of the assessment tool
- Reading, writing and numeracy content linked to the Learning Progressions.
- Hundreds of assessment items, using New Zealand adult contexts, in a web based item bank.
- Printed assessments if required.
- Adaptive assessments - the computer alters the difficulty of the next question depending on the learner’s response. Adaptive assessments will be fully marked by the computer.
- Tailored to the learning needs of adults in New Zealand.
- Reports for educators and learners.
- Reliability - the technical infrastructure has been built and tested to IT industry standards.
- Flexibility - it can adapt to changing curriculum needs.
What can you do with assessment tool results?
- Educators will be able to use the information generated by the tool to inform decisions that will improve the teaching and learning of literacy and numeracy skills.
- Information from the assessment tool will allow adult learners to set goals and measure progress.
- Providers will be able to use the information from the assessment tool to report on learner progress.
The role of assessment in strengthening literacy and numeracy skills
Assessment is an integral part of the teaching and learning process.
It helps the educator and the learner understand and respond to the following questions:
- What literacy and numeracy skills do I need to meet my needs (in relation to qualifications, work demands or social contexts)?
- Where are my current literacy and numeracy skills?
- What is my next learning step to progress towards my target?
How the assessment tool will function: an educator’s perspective
The following outlines how an educator may use the assessment tool.
1. Select the content for the assessment
The first release of the assessment tool in 2010 will address literacy and numeracy by assessing the following strands of the Learning Progressions:
- Read with understanding
- Write to communicate
- Make sense of number to solve problems
- Measure and interpret shape and space.
2. Computer adaptive or not?
- In a computer adaptive assessment the difficulty of the questions adapts depending on the learner’s response. All items in an adaptive assessment are either multiple choice (selected response) or closed items.
- An educator will also be able to select a non-adaptive test. The learners can sit a non-adaptive test online or as a pen and paper assessment.
3. Assign learners to the assessment
The educator decides when and where the assessment is to be taken. All learners could sit the same assessment at the same time or the educator could select an assessment for an individual learner to sit online or by paper at a different time.
4. Mark any “open” assessment items
- If the assessment is adaptive there is no marking.
- If the assessment is non-adaptive and completed online then only the open items need to be marked by the educator.
- If the assessment is taken off-line then the learner’s answers need to be entered and marked.
5. View and print the assessment reports
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| (sample diagnostic report) |
There are two main types of reports:
Diagnostic reports detail the strengths and weaknesses of the learner in relation to the Learning Progressions assessed.
Progress reports measure the achievement of the learner overtime. The assessment tool has been developed using Item Response Theory (IRT). IRT is a mathematical model by which the difficulty of the assessment items and the ability of learners can be located on a common logistic scale. This means that assessments comprising different items are still directly comparable.
Reports will be tailored for learners, educators and organisations.
How can I be involved in the development of the assessment tool?
As the assessment tool is being tailored specifically to the cultural, social and work contexts of New Zealand adult learners there is a need to actively engage with the tertiary education sector in its development. In particular there is a need for large numbers of learners across the diverse contexts within the sector to trial items as part of the process to ensure the items are reliable and accurately located on a common scale.