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Pasifika students find it motivating when teachers keep them informed about their levels of achievement, share the learning intentions with them and adjust their teaching to scaffold their learning pathways so that they know exactly what to do next.
Key content
Key content
Sharing achievement data with their Pasifika students helps teachers to make their learning explicit and meaningful for them. Pasifika learners find it motivating to have ready and ongoing access to their own achievement data. Their use of the data and the learning conversations they have with others about their progress and next-steps learning improves their achievement patterns. These also develop their self-analysis and self-management competencies and build their confidence as learners as well.
“Effective teachers actively involve students in their own learning and assessment, make learning outcomes transparent to students, offer specific, constructive and regular feedback, and ensure that assessment practices impact positively on students' motivation. Assessment can improve teaching and learning when teachers adjust their teaching to take account of the results of assessment.”
Quality Teaching for Diverse Students in Schooling: Best Evidence Synthesis, page 89
Acknowledgment:
Thanks to the principals, staff and students of Aorere College, McAuley High School, Mangere Bridge School, Sylvia Park School, Mary MacKillop School and Wymondley Road Primary School for their contribution.
Things to think about
Things to think about
- Do you feel confident using data on the achievement of your Pasifika students? If so, how do you use it? If not, why not? How could you improve your confidence and use?
- How do you share data on the achievement of your Pasifika learners in your school? Can you give an example of knowing you’re on the right track as a result of the data you have collected?
- How do you feel about sharing data on the achievements of your Pasifika students with colleagues at your school? Is it important to share your data? Why? Why not?
- Do you share data on the achievement of your Pasifika students with the students themselves? How do you do this? What happens as a result? Do you also share the data with their parents? If you do, what are the benefits? If not, would you consider doing so?
- How do you involve your Pasifika students in their own learning and assessment? Has this made a difference to their achievement patterns? Do you believe you need to improve their involvement? If so, how would you do this?
Transcript
Transcript
Judy Hanna
For many years we have shared the data with the children so that they can understand what the learning is about. And I would say, over the last five years as a school we’ve got better at doing that. So that the teachers understand that the learning belongs to the children, and the data belongs to the children. I may very well collect it all together to look at a school picture, but for me that’s not the important thing. The important thing is an individual child knowing where they’re at, and knowing where they need to be next, and knowing the reasons why, and knowing how they can get there. And knowing they’re not going to have to do it on their own, that the teacher is there to support them in that.
Faaifo - student
It is important to know your stages because when you know them, you know that you have to get a higher stage than what you were before.
Victoria - student
I think it’s important for me to know my levels because if I know that I’m at a low level, I’ll try to push myself to get to the highest level and try and reach it.
Don Biltcliffe
Firstly I need to present back the information, the assessments that I’ve gathered on them, and make sure that they understand what the assessment data is giving. Our next step from that is to really just discuss so that they’re clear about what the next step is.
Teacher-student discussion.
Gus - student
It helps us to achieve because we know what we are on, so we know what we want to get to.
Marcel - student
I think it's good because then you know what to do, then you know what you have to achieve on. So then you have to really work hard because you've got what you want to learn, now you have to try and do it.
Liz Crisp
We sit down together and we set goals. Even with these young children, we have a look at the information that I have gathered about them. We look at their writing or running records, or whatever material I have. We say, "Well this is what you can do, and this is what you need to do next". So I take photos of them, use speech bubbles on the wall, so it's very visual. And when they achieve the goal, we go and get a pink highlighter, and off we go and highlight that. "I can do that now, so I've achieved that learning". And I think again, it’s making it very explicit for them, which works well.
Pouna - student
Our teacher, she puts up paper on the wall and it will have the groups of maths. And they tell us what stage we are at, right next to it.
Ikenasio - student
The teacher will like, you go down to her during lunch, and she will tell you that you're advanced for your group, if you want to be in your own group or just want to stay with them. But if you're not keeping up, she will just, same thing, call you down and say "You need to just keep going", and stuff to motivate you.
Tom Brown
Once students start NCEA levels, then we share their credit gathering with them. So the students should be constantly aware of how many credits they have, what those credits are in, and what they’ve got to do to achieve the next level. It’s really vital that students are engaged in that. If the students don't know what stages they’re at, then they can't really be expected to know what they have got to do to get to the next stage.
Inna - student
We have this system called KMAR. Every student has their own personal profile and the teachers can log on to it. They can show you your academic results. So for level one there’s a pie graph, and teachers upload your results onto the system, and then from that they make a pie graph out of it. So for each level of achievement, so if you got 'not achieved' it will be red, 'achieved' will be blue.
Mercy - student
As sisters we tend to help each other. And just by looking at our results, it does help us. In our graph there’s gold for excellence, and then there’s red which is 'not achieved', and basically we don’t want any reds on our graphs. It’s really depressing having red, so our main goal is to have no red but get more gold in our graph.