Assess, provide feedback

and report on student learning

102090 Secondary Curriculum 2A - Assessment 2

 Standards 

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• Standard 5.1 - Assess student learning

• Standard 5.2 - Provide feedback to students on their learnings

• Standard 5.3 - Make consistent and comparable judgements  

The assessments can be designed into a range of forms, and it sometimes does not has a standard answer. In other words, assessment is more like a stage for students to demonstrate and apply what they have learned, rather than a compulsory event that forces students to meet the requirements set by teachers and parents. In order to make students more confident and capable of demonstrating their learning outcomes, an appropriate and challenging unit is demanded to suit the curriculum and syllabus requirements. Currently, the New South Wales Education Standards Authority (NESA) entitles the participating schools for planning and implementing the assessments individually for their students (2019). This entry represents a greater responsibility for the schools, but it also brings more flexibility to cope with the school's current status. Schools have different resources and facilities, but more importantly, their students are diverse and constant changes. This means that the assessments should be designed not only meeting the needs of the students and the requirements of the syllabus but also be adjustable according to the collected feedback.

Due to the open-ended quality of D&T assessments, timely and helpful feedback are highly demanded to ensure the satisfactory outcomes of students. Academics and educators even suggest that continuous feedback is often more critical than the final mark (De Nobile et al., 2017). In the learning process, students may face some uncertainty and misunderstanding about newly-acquired information. The suitable feedback could effectively correct and redirect the learning method to the syllabus, prevent unnecessary time waste and enhance the outcomes. Some feedbacks with scaffolding properties can even inspire students' creative thinking, critical reflection and innovative ability, helping students construct a comprehensive framework and providing them with a bigger picture. Moreover, the summative feedback at the end of the unit delivers students a detailed comment, which analyses students' mastery and application of knowledge throughout the whole unit, benefits them to prepare for the future learning and practising.

102091 Secondary Curriculum 2B - Assessment 2

Both educators and learners need to abandon the misconceptions that assessments are all about marking and ranking. They are not necessarily equivalent to exams and are not limited to summative ones. Many assessments actually occur during the learning process, and even before the learning begins. Formative assessments are such a form of assessment for learning (AfL). Rather than testing students' understanding of knowledge, these AfL are focusing on encouraging students to think and explore more deeply. Many advantages are found in this type of tasks, but it highly relies on its design and implementation. Besides the content in curriculum and syllabus, educators also need to consider additional techniques such as using open-ended questions and whole-class activities when designing these tasks.

Moreover, it is also recommended to address the potential benefits of the tasks as they could have a positive effect on student engagement and motivations. When formulating rubric and marking criteria, extra attention should be paid to whether all the factors have been considered and can truly reflect the students' learning achievements. For TAS subjects, formative assessment can divide the whole projects into smaller modules, enabling teachers to provide better feedback and guidance on an individual level, which is a powerful strategy that pre-service teachers should consider in their future careers.