1 Introduction

2010 was the most significant year in our teaching careers. Sir Ken Robinson’s influential Changing Paradigms speech hit our Youtube screens, Sugata Mitra revealed his findings in regard to Minimally Invasive Education,  and it was also the year that National Standards were implemented into New Zealand primary schools.

It was a year where we watched our Youtube screens punching the air with enthusiasm, eager to make our schools better places for all of our students, and it was the year we read our daily newspapers shaking our heads muttering,

“We’re doomed - we’re all doomed!”  

We knew that education was going to change...

This report explores the major tension that New Zealand primary school teachers face in the decade beginning 2010. On the one hand we are required to provide our students with diverse and personalised 21st Century Modern Learning Environment, yet on the other hand we are required to report to the Government using Standardised Data.

“Public schools were not only created in the interests of industrialism—they were created in the image of industrialism...” (Robinson 2009: 230)

The model of Education used in today’s schools can be traced back to European (e.g. Victorian) models used to build and maintain the industrial revolution and the British Empire (Mitra 2011, Robinson 2010). It was crucial to educate students in this way so that the students could develop essential ‘life-skills’ to a certain ‘standard’ in order to participate, and contribute, to their society.

Assessing whether or not the student had an ‘education’ was done through standardised testing systems.

“They are given standardized tests at set points and compared with each other before being sent out onto the market…” (Robinson 2009: 230)

The education system was extremely efficient, drawing upon notions of bureaucracy and industry. We can still see very clearly the bureaucratic nature of schooling in New Zealand. Learning is broken down into curriculum areas, days are organised into blocks of time, many schools continue to use bells, and most schools organise their students according to their chronological age.

Sir Ken Robinson argues that this ‘factory based paradigm’ is not the way forward for our education systems and that given the changing needs of our society, education must be reformed.

“The key to this transformation is not to standardize education, but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.” Robinson 2010

Yong Zhao also argues that the 20th century skills are becoming increasingly dated:

“We need more creative entrepreneurs who create jobs, not just more employees.  We need to create personalised education to enhance our students’ strengths, not more standardized tests to simply fix their deficits.” (Yong Zhao 2012)

We have travelled to many schools in New Zealand where we have seen classrooms and teachers who are breaking the ground on personalised pedagogy.  We have seen purpose built Modern Learning Environments (MLEs) used in creative and innovative ways, we have also seen MLE pedagogies taking place in traditional school settings. We have seen schools that have been opened up to collaboration by removing traditional classroom walls.

We witnessed students discovering their passions via initiatives such as Project Based Learning (PBL) and ‘Passion Projects’. We discovered primary schools around the country exploring personalised student learning systems such as timetables. We saw several effective models of inquiry based learning and eLearning initiatives that enable learning to be more flexible, personalised and ubiquitous. Teachers spoke strongly and passionately about wanting to provide environments for their students that required them to become critical thinkers, innovators, creative, and self organised.

Formal reporting assessment systems remained unchanged however. Innovative assessment practices were starting to take place in the schools that we visited but these were not used as a part of the formal reporting process.  The main reason cited for this was because of the benchmark assessment requirements.

We argue that these developing assessments are far more valuable and insightful than the commercially produced tests currently used for benchmark testing. Personalised assessment practices and the use of Overall Teacher Judgements (OTJs) enable students who would normally ‘flunk’ a traditional test to have their skills and knowledges formally recognised. For example a student who achieves Stanine 2 in a PAT reading test may well have exceptional critical thinking skills. Personalised assessments are embedded in the teaching and learning programme where students can be responsible for providing evidence of their own learning. Further, personalised assessments will give students who are not necessarily good at regurgitating information in isolated test conditions the opportunity to show their learning and be formally recognised for it in an alternative way to standardised data.

Standardised data is acquired through the use of standardised (or benchmark) testing. This report argues that the use of standardised testing is doing an injustice to a group of students we will refer to herein as the ‘Marginalised students’.  

Marginalised students include students who might have alternative Cultural values (e.g not Pakeha), an alternative Socio Economic background (e.g. not middle class nor had middle class experiences), or an alternative or atypical way of thinking (e.g. on the dyslexia or autism spectrums), or display alternative behaviours (e.g. on the adhd spectrum).

New Zealand is an incredibly diverse nation, it is a "heterogeneous society with a diverse socio-cultural demographic." The Ministry of Education states that schools “must cater for diverse learners” (Ministry of Education 2011:7).

New Zealand students learn in diverse ways and in varying contexts. The New Zealand Curriculum Framework (NZC) recognises this and encourages a personalised learning approach for all our students. (Ministry of Education 2011).

However, through the use of standardised testing many students are labelled, from as early as age 6, as below standard. It is argued that this is not intended to be a label of failure, but an ‘early intervention’ to ensure that the student in question gets adequate support in an attempt to ‘lift’ the student’s achievement to an acceptable level.

However we question the definition of achievement. We believe that National Standards implementation and reporting has narrowed achievement to two core areas - Numeracy and Literacy. By putting these two subject areas on the educational pedestal, students who are deemed ‘below standard’ are receiving extra doses of numeracy and literacy throughout their school day. These students face an entire school career of receiving these excessive doses at the expense of being able to identify and fulfil their passions.

This research report outlines what happens to our achievement data if we were to change the definition of achievement to suit the rising pedagogy that educationalists such as Sir Ken Robinson and Sugata Mitra purport. We question that if the Ministry of Education are serious in their claim that: All students deserve to be taught in these new modern learning environments, and benefit from new teaching methods, why then do they insist on receiving standardised data and achievement reports about what our students can not do. Why are they not interested in what our students can do? Why, in this information age, are they not insisting on receiving achievement data that relates to innovation, collaboration, creativity, and self organisation?

We have an exceptional curriculum that will enable innovation, collaboration, creativity, and self organisation to be fostered. We have incredible educators all around the country who are providing our students with rich learning programmes.

However, through the National Education Guidelines and amendments made to the Education Act, National Standards have become increasingly narrow, for example, Section 60A(1) of the Education Act was amended by inserting the following paragraph after paragraph (b):

“national standards, which are standards in regard to matters such as literacy and numeracy, that are applicable to all students of a particular age or in a particular year of schooling:”.

This amendment instantly narrowed our curriculum on at least two levels:

1 - Literacy and Numeracy are valued as 'achievement’ over any other curriculum area

2 - It assumes that children’s achievement is linked to an arbitrary condition (their age).

Within the standards a further narrowing can be seen in relation to the English curriculum where National Standards reporting requires only Reading and Writing and excludes Speaking, Viewing, Presenting and Listening.

National Administration Guidelines require Principals and BOTs to report their National Standards Data in terms of 'external benchmarks'. This means that some form of narrow testing must be used to fulfil their reporting obligations.

This stands in great contrast to the MOEs position paper on assessment. It is clearly stated that the purpose of assessment is to be used as a key component of quality teaching to improve student learning. “For some years now, our approach to assessment has been moving beyond a narrow summative (“end point” testing) focus to a broader focus on assessment as a means of improving teaching and learning...” (Ministry of Education 2011:9)

In the MOEs visionary paper on assessment it recommends that each primary school should decide the best way to assess their student’s within New Zealand Curriculum Framework and their local context. They assert that our National Standards system should be unique and not underpinned by a narrow testing regime.

An 'Assessment For Learning' (AFL) approach is recommended where the primary focus is ‘strengths based’ as well as improving the quality of our education programmes. The primary aim of AFL is to contribute to learning itself. This follows from the logic that when true learning has occurred, it will manifest itself in performance. The converse does not hold: mere performance on a test does not necessarily mean that learning has occurred. Learners can be taught how to score well on tests without much underlying learning. (Ministry of Education 2011:20)

They go on to discuss the implementation of National Standards for literacy and numeracy (and Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori for te reo and pāngarau) and reiterate that there should be no narrow national testing and that standards should be based on qualitative judgements made by teachers. Further it is suggested that:

“...[I]n the classroom context, students, teachers, and parents and whanau can each learn from and contribute to the process and collaboration in the setting of goals, targets, and success indicators to guide further learning.”  Ministry of Education 2011:13

This approach to learning, “is a novel approach when compared with approaches elsewhere in the world...” (Ministry of Education 2011:11).

However, we have found that since the introduction of National Standards, school’s formal reporting and assessment processes have become narrow. Commercially produced standard assessment tools continue to be the ‘tool of choice’ for National Standards reporting.

Benchmark testing (e.g. STAR, eAsttle, PAT and Probe) require our children to prove their ability to achieve in isolation without access to any of their usual learning tools. The content of these assessments test only their ability to  Read, Write, and do Maths.

Benchmark testing is often justified under the guise of ‘validity’ however validity, according to the Ministry of Education’s definition, comes in 4 forms:

• • Face validity - do the assessment items appear to be appropriate?

  • Content validity - does the assessment content cover what we want to assess?

  • Criterion-related validity - how well does the test measure what we want it to?

  • Construct validity - are you measuring what you think you're measuring?

Narrow benchmark assessments do not necessarily meet all, or (in some cases) any of the definitions of validity.

In contrast, this kind of testing values a child’s ability to absorb information, memorise, then recall it in isolation. As Bishop and Glynn argue this is a very western way to measure achievement:

Maori and Pakeha relationships since the signing of the Treaty have not been a partnership of two peoples developing a nation but political,social, and economic domination by the Pakeha majority and marginalization of the Maori people through armed struggle, biased legislation and educational initiatives and policies that promoted Pakeha knowledge codes at the expense of Maori.

While Western science and education tend to emphasise compartmentalized knowledge which is often de-contextualized and taught in the detached setting of a classroom or laboratory, indigenous people have traditionally acquired their knowledge through direct experience in the natural world. For them, the particulars come to be understood in relation to the whole, and the ‘laws’ are continually tested in the context of everyday survival. Western thought also differs from indigenous thought in its notion of competency. In Western terms, competency is often assessed based on predetermined ideas of what a person should know, which is then measured indirectly through various forms of ‘objective’ tests. Such an approach does not address whether that person is actually capable of putting that knowledge into practice . . . (2005: 10)

In order to honour all of our knowledges, a broader strengths-based, embedded assessment system must be developed. Further such a system must be valued through formal reporting structures.

Section two of this report will outline the results of what happened in our Action Research:

• • Flipping the definition of achievement in our classrooms and the impact this has had on achievement

Section three will look at:

• • The standardised tools commonly used by NZ primary schools

  • An analysis of their validity.

Section four will provide some examples of how you could use a more embedded assessment approach in your classroom.