The home tab lets you view key information about the assessments that have been created in your organisation, as well as any system messages that may be relevant to you.

Organisation statistics

Visible only to organisation administrators, the “organisation statistics” section lets you see, at a glance, a current, numerical summary of the organisation's learners, educators, organisation groups, and educator groups.

Current online assessments

The “current online assessments” section lists assessments that you’ve been assigned access to, and which have not yet been automatically retired.

Adaptive and snapshot assessments are automatically retired 26 weeks after creation, while non-adaptive for printing, non-adaptive snapshot for printing and writing assessments automatically retire after 16 weeks.

Retired assessments are removed from your home tab and are then only visible under the assessments tab.

Ready to mark assessments

The “ready to mark assessments” section groups together assessments that can be marked within the LNAAT. That includes writing, non-adaptive for printing, and non-adaptive snapshot for printing assessments. Marking an assessment, in the sense used in the LNAAT, involves entering the learner’s responses into the LNAAT so that it can calculate the learner's scale score. To do this, an educator or organisation administrator must:

• download the marking guide for the assessment, then
• enter in all the responses for each of the learners assigned to that assessment.

Creating an assessment – overview

The LNAAT allows you to assess six different areas:

Reading assessments assess the learner's ability against the Read with Understanding assessment strand.

Numeracy assessments assess the learner's ability against either the Number Knowledge or Number Strategies and Measurement assessment strand – or in General Numeracy, which is a combination of both strands.

Vocabulary assessments assess the learner's ability to use vocabulary knowledge. They are designed for learners who are achieving at or below the lower steps of the Reading Progressions.

Writing assessments assess the learner's writing skills on six dimensions under the Write to Communicate assessment strand.

Starting Points listening assessments assess the learner's knowledge of a basic range of New Zealand English words.

Starting Points reading assessments assess the learner's ability based on the Starting Points assessment guide.

For more information on how to create these assessments see:

• Creating a Reading Assessment
• Creating a Numeracy Assessment
• Creating a Vocabulary Assessment
• Creating a Writing Assessment

Types of assessment

Reading and numeracy assessments can be set as “adaptive”, “non-adaptive”, “non-adaptive for printing”, or “snapshot”, whereas vocabulary assessments can only be set as “adaptive”.

Writing assessments can only be performed as written, offline assessments that are then marked and entered into the LNAAT to be assigned a score.

Adaptive assessments (also called computer adaptive tests, or CAT assessments) mark the learner's response as they progress through the assessment, selecting each next set of questions based on the results of the answers the learner has already given.

In this way, the LNAAT can usually arrive at a more precise assessment of the learner's ability, as it is able to dynamically adjust the questions. This avoids an assessment that is too easy or difficult overall for each individual learner.

Non-adaptive assessments are also performed on the computer. However, they use an algorithm to determine a likely spread of questions based on a starting point that the educator or organisation administrator chooses when creating the assessment.

Non-adaptive assessments have the advantage that everyone is answering the same set of questions. However, they risk being too easy or too hard for some learners.

Non-adaptive for printing assessments are non-adaptive assessments that are specifically created to be printed and handed out to learners for completion (for example, when an online assessment cannot be performed due to lack of internet access).

The answers for these assessments are automatically compiled in a marking guide, which the educator or organisation administrator uses to mark each assessment then enter those marks into the LNAAT.

Snapshot assessments (available only for reading or numeracy) are shorter adaptive assessments aimed at using a minimum number of items to make a broad estimate of a learner’s achievement level.

When creating a snapshot assessment, educators must either set a step-level threshold or choose “no threshold”.

When a threshold is set, the LNAAT will terminate the assessment once there is sufficient confidence around the result to categorise the learner as achieving either below or above the threshold step. If the LNAAT cannot categorise the result after about 16 items, it will terminate the assessment and report a threshold decision of “undecided”.

If the “no threshold” option is selected, the LNAAT will not attempt to categorise a learner as above or below a threshold step and will simply terminate after about 16 items.

Snapshot assessments will always report a best-fit step and a scale score (with a margin of error), whether or not a threshold has been set.

System messages

Within the home tab you may sometimes see one of two types of system message:

• Broadcast messages from the system administrator: These inform users if there is a planned outage to the LNAAT, or any other information that may be relevant to users.
• “Unsupported browser” messages: These are triggered automatically if the LNAAT detects that you are using a browser that has not been tested. This may be because your browser is old or because it is a recent release that has not been tested. In either case, you can continue using the LNAAT, but you may experience problems with certain functions. If you’re using an older browser, we recommend that you upgrade it to a more recent version.