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School-based assessment gives me the opportunity to tailor assessment instruments to best suit
the needs of my students. I'm the one who's taught them. I've prepared the learning experiences
for them, so it makes sense that I can also prepare the assessment instruments that I
use to judge them against the demands of the syllabus.
Before we look at a unit and what we're going to be doing in that unit, we should always
be thinking about how we're going to assess it. And that assessment has got to match the
sorts of things that the students are doing in the unit. Now during that there's going
to be places where students can do simple drill and activities well, substitution of
a formula or whatever it might be � straightforward graphing � and then, of course, you start
to move into ideas where they're going to take that and apply it in ways they've seen
before and ways they haven't seen before. In Mathematics C we assess using pen-and-paper
tests, as well as assignments, extended modelling and problem-solving tasks a number of times
throughout the course of study. I'm really interested in what you think about
this assessment item. It's for an upcoming unit on matrices and transformations in
Year 11 Maths C. And what I've tried to do with this item � the extended modelling
and problem-solving task � is to make sure that I've given students the opportunities
to meet the general objectives, and also that range of standards. Would you mind having
a look at it for me to see what you think? Yeah, well as we know it's really important
to write effective assessment tasks that do give students those opportunities. And I can
see here that your early questions are certainly giving students the opportunity to demonstrate,
in the general objective of knowledge and procedures, a numerical sense, spatial sense,
algebraic facility. And these routines are simple and routine. These questions are simple
and routine. Then when you get to these other ones here, that's becoming simple and non
routine, and then through to some that are becoming complex and non-routine. So certainly
you are able to show a range of abilities in that one question. And the other thing
I like about this, is you've managed to address the communication and justification objective
by asking them to provide supporting arguments, in the form of proof. So that's another strength
of that question. The key is writing good assessment tasks and
making sure that we can match the things in our tasks with the objectives, and when I
look here I can see that you have in fact got some of these questions here that will
allow students the opportunity to identify assumptions and their associated effects,
which is great. That one is tricky in Year 11 because often
the students aren't quite sophisticated enough to identify the assumptions so I've given
them the assumption but I'm after, for them, to identify the associated effects which we'll
build on in Year 12 when they move into that. So that's great if you think that does that
� that question does that. And I've taken it down so it becomes more general and more
algebraic, but still allows students to use the technology, the graphing techniques, the
number and spatial concepts that are required here. Do you think that I'm doing that with
that sort of series of questions there? Well that one question does bring out a lot
of the points in Standard A as well as some of those in Standard C. So in the modelling
and problem solving and in the knowledge and procedures objectives, we're addressing or
giving students a lot of opportunities there. Oh look that's really pleasing, because you
know that's something I really want to make sure that they can all get that opportunity.
One of the issues that comes up a lot is the idea of the non-routine questions. So I just
wondered what you thought of this one. I've taken them through some work on Eigen values
and Eigenvectors, and it leads through where I've shown them how they could find them for
themselves. Then I've given them one to do and then I've finished with this one. Now
do you think that we're meeting that idea of the non-routine complex task with that
three-by-three matrix question there? Well certainly I can see that this is a complex
and non-routine task, so there is opportunity for your best students to achieve at an A
standard there. But you've also got entry level for the less able students here. So
I think that's ideal. When we're preparing assessment instruments
we match the questions with the general objectives from the syllabus, and make sure that students
have opportunities to address those objectives.