5.3 Make consistent and comparable judgements
Demonstrate understanding of assessment moderation and its application to support consistent and comparable judgements of student learning.
As a teacher it is critical to make judgments about student achievement you can then report to students, their families, the community and, in some instances, the system. These judgments generate student achievement data that is used to inform future planning and motivate students.
While on my second practicum my final mathematics faculty meeting was a moderation session. Each maths teacher brought what they thought was an accurate representation of each grade (A-E) from their class. We all then exchanged folios and cross marked each piece of work. While I did not have any work from my own students to contribute at this stage I did mark several pieces of work from other teachers’ classes. My marks were comparable to those of the more experienced teachers. The overall result was that there was very little variation between the marks of different teachers.
Of more interest were the folios of work that teachers brought in for different students whom they were unsure of what a fair cumulative mark should be. These students typically had large variations in marks between different assessment pieces. The group discussions on these marks was interesting and a it was a valuable experience for me to learn how to deal with these kinds of difficulties. However, I left the session with several unanswered questions and found that this document from DECD helpful in filling in some of the gaps.
Overall this experience will assist me to be more consistent in making comparable judgments of student learning.
As a teacher it is critical to make judgments about student achievement you can then report to students, their families, the community and, in some instances, the system. These judgments generate student achievement data that is used to inform future planning and motivate students.
While on my second practicum my final mathematics faculty meeting was a moderation session. Each maths teacher brought what they thought was an accurate representation of each grade (A-E) from their class. We all then exchanged folios and cross marked each piece of work. While I did not have any work from my own students to contribute at this stage I did mark several pieces of work from other teachers’ classes. My marks were comparable to those of the more experienced teachers. The overall result was that there was very little variation between the marks of different teachers.
Of more interest were the folios of work that teachers brought in for different students whom they were unsure of what a fair cumulative mark should be. These students typically had large variations in marks between different assessment pieces. The group discussions on these marks was interesting and a it was a valuable experience for me to learn how to deal with these kinds of difficulties. However, I left the session with several unanswered questions and found that this document from DECD helpful in filling in some of the gaps.
Overall this experience will assist me to be more consistent in making comparable judgments of student learning.