The primary purpose of assessment is to improve students’ learning and teachers’ teaching as both student and teacher respond to the information that it provides. This section covers three main aspects of assessment:
Effective teachers use diagnostic and formative assessment:
Use diagnostic assessment to learn about your students and to find effective ways of engaging them in the learning process.
You can undertake diagnostic assessment formally through pre-tests or informally through a variety of tasks and activities.
You could introduce the context of race relations in New Zealand using a variety of stimuli to encourage students to share what they already know and to engage their interest. This activity could involve students as a class, in groups, or as individuals.
Relevant sources could include:
You could create a set of jigsaws of selected photographs (sourced from The National Library) and allocate each student one piece of one puzzle. Have the students form groups and use their pieces to complete each photograph.
In their groups, students could then:
Formative assessment flows seamlessly out of diagnostic activities. Students learn when they are actively engaged.
Encourage engagement through providing multiple opportunities to explore contexts in rich and varied ways. Students should have ‘as many ways of showing what they know as possible – through formal and informal measures, through tasks chosen by both student and teacher, through speaking, writing, and other forms of presentation’ (Levstik, L. and Barton, K. [2005]. Doing history: Investigating with children in elementary and middle schools. New Jersey: Laurence Erlbaum, pages 22–24).
Formative activities must be based on historical evidence and should be planned as part of the teaching programme.
Activities (undertaken as a whole class, as a small group, or by individuals) could include:
Assessment opportunities of the above kind recognise and accommodate the different rates and ways that students learn. Different kinds of assessment are likely to occur in senior history classes as part of a teaching and learning process that leads to a summative assessment (internal or external). The positive influence that a student-centered approach has on engagement and achievement will outlast the effects of any single summative assessment. Teachers will find that using a student-centred approach will improve outcomes for students and encourage them towards lifelong learning.
It is possible to use any of the history achievement standards with any of the achievement objectives. Teachers will choose the contexts and emphases that best suit their students and their programmes.
Students need to be aware of the requirements of the generic standards. They should be studied and discussed as an explicit process of preparation for externals.
Unpack the standard for and with students to make them aware of the requirements of the standard. Relate this to the contexts studied.
Practise with students the process of applying the generic questions stem to the contexts studied using previous exam questions and answers.
Last updated November 24, 2023