Assessing Your Child’s Progress

Before we can begin to assess how your child is progressing at school, we have to know where he/she is at the start of the year.  We do this through reviewing the work produced by your child and using various tests.

We do testing at the start of Term 1 as this helps us obtain our baseline data for the year for each child as quickly as possible.  This means that we can start the individualised teaching programme for your child sooner rather than later.  At Mid-Year we test the children again, and once more at the end of the year.  This testing is more as a check on the on-going assessment made by your child’s teacher.

The best form of assessment is the on-going assessment that takes place throughout the year.  Your child’s teacher is constantly marking and examining your child’s work and providing your child with constructive feedback on how he/she is progressing and what needs to be learnt and mastered next.  In this way both the teacher and your child can gain an accurate idea of the progress he/she is making and find any gaps in his/her learning so they can be plugged.  It is very much a joint process of teacher and student working closely together.

The Tests

The tests we use are mainly New Zealand ‘normed’ tests so that a score gained by a student at this school on a test can be directly compared with that of another student at a different school who has used the same test.  These are also known as ‘standardised tests’.

These tests include:

We also use non-normed tests which give us extra information the better to assist your child:

Teacher Judgment

Tests by themselves do not give a true indication of how a child is progressing or how much they have achieved.  They are a quick snapshot which can be very much influenced by how the child is feeling on the day of the test.  A child who has come to school after an argument at home, or suffering from a nasty cold, is not going to a good test result or an accurate view of his/her achievements.

What is needed to get a true assessment of your child is a combination the professional judgement of your child’s teacher assisted by the use of standardised test(s) and other test results which provide a snapshot benchmark.

Your child’s teacher is working with your child all year.  He/She has an excellent knowledge of the progress being made and where extra help is required.  It is this on-going understanding and knowledge that are so important in assessing the level a child has reached at any one point in time.  If a child has performed at the expected level in their classwork but had a disastrous test result, the teacher’s professional judgement allows the classwork level of achievement to be taken into account.

In countries, such as England and the USA, where complete reliance upon a single set of tests has been used to determine the progress made by a child, education has suffered badly and the children have not made the hoped for progress.  This is a situation we do not want to see happen in New Zealand!

Conclusion

With a combination of the teacher’s professional judgement and the normed and un-normed tests given at the school, the teacher has an excellent picture of where your child is performing in relation to other children of his/her age and where he/she needs extra support.

It is this information that we pass onto you in the Mid-Year and End-of-Year Reports and at our Parent/Teacher meetings.