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curriculum and assessment
STELLA's statements about assessment
No doubt it is possible to think of other purposes for assessment. The  STELLA website includes a statement about assessment and a series of provocative questions about this statement. In maintaining a principled position on English teachers’ assessment of students’ work and assessment more generally, STELLA poses many of the issues raised above … and more. The statement reads as follows:
Accomplished English/Literacy teachers understand the central role of assessment in advancing student learning, improving the effectiveness of teaching practice and contributing to planning for future learning. They recognise that the school community as a whole benefits from constructive and co-ordinated assessment and reporting practices. They develop regular assessment and reporting programs to provide students, care-givers and school authorities with timely and accurate feedback on student achievement and progress in language and literacy development. They ensure that their feedback to students recognises achievement while clearly indicating directions for improvement. Accomplished English/Literacy teachers make judicious use of a wide range of formal and informal assessments. They ensure that assessment tasks and items are relevant, valid, fair and transparent and relate as closely as possible to real and diverse conditions of use and practice. They meet the requirements of mandated testing programs without compromising their teaching goals or the learning needs of their students They constantly use assessment information to monitor and re-evaluate their short and long-term teaching and learning goals.
You will also find it worthwhile to read Mark Howie’s
narrative, ‘Reassessing the English curriculum’,
in relation to this statement.
In his narrative,
Howie
describes how he developed curriculum in response to the needs of students
in a high school in Sydney’s outer
western suburbs. This initiative was partly driven by a desire to equip these
students with skills that would enable them to handle the new HSC syllabus
in NSW. It is interesting to observe the way that Mark gauges the success
of his initiatives on the basis of students’ own evaluation of the
program.
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