In listening to teachers across the HSIE subjects at meetings around NSW the changes for the new HSC are in good hands. It is clear that the vast majority of teachers are working hard to see that their 2001 students have every advantage in completing the examinations. Yes, there are still some unknowns, some practices to be improved and some information about standards to be received, but overall teachers have demonstrated a capacity to understand change and to implement it. The depth of experience amongst the current cohort of teachers will ensure that the changes to syllabuses and assessment will be implemented.

Some of the items on your HSC checklist for now and for continued development could
be:

Programs
The new syllabus design with outcomes and learn about and learn to statements has provided more defined content. Teaching programs need to carefully follow the syllabus. In fact, the syllabus should be the basis of any teaching program with learning activities, resources and assessment added. As teachers have been saying, there is a lot of content in these syllabuses, and adding to it is not going to help students prepare for a standards-based examination where the performance standards are based on the syllabus. Unfortunately some of the textbooks, especially in business studies, are misleading in this matter. They often embellish the syllabus and present a course for the HSC that is overcrowded with content. The new syllabuses have enough content to stretch the abilities of all students, additions are not helpful.

Assessment
By far the most challenging aspect of the changes to the new HSC has been school assessment. Teachers have been enthusiastic in trying a range of different approaches to meet the requirements of assessment. Marking guidelines have been the biggest challenge with the writing of levels of achievement for tasks seen as being difficult and time consuming.

Over 2000, CURRICULUM SUPPORT HSIE, published a series of articles on how to approach assessment. These articles are available on the CD-ROM, CURRICULUM SUPPORT 2000, in your school or on the Curriculum Support web site http://www.curriculumsupport.nsw.edu.au by looking under any HSIE Stage 6 subject. In this edition of CURRICULUM SUPPORT, there are more examples of assessment tasks with marking guidelines.

Teachers are encouraged to work towards all Preliminary and HSC tasks adopting the components of outcomes–task–rubric–marking guidelines. Some practical advice includes setting-up an assessment schedule to ensure all outcomes are covered at least once. This can be achieved easily by including in the assessment schedule the Year 11 yearly and trial HSC examinations where most course outcomes are tested. This arrangement provides some freedom to use a small number of outcomes for each other assessment task. Some of the difficulties being faced by teachers are caused by attempting to cover too many outcomes in each task. This action gives a new definition of over-assessment. Choose about three outcomes that are the focus of a task. Don’t include outcomes that are tangential to the task.

With a small number of outcomes write a focused task that has the students doing one thing, not a multifaceted task that has them doing a number of things. Then write a rubric that highlights, in about three or four dot points, the sort of things you will be looking for that will give students higher marks.

When approaching the marking guidelines read the examples given in CURRICULUM SUPPORT for different subjects. Select a format that suits the task and your preference. Write the levels of achievement by piggy-backing on what other people have done. Change the content specific wording to suit the task at hand and try to use wording that expands on the outcomes and rubric. You can use some of the words from the performance bands if these are helpful in distinguishing levels of achievement, but remember, you are not trying to reflect end of course performance bands, you are just trying to set levels of achievement to spread the marks, and reward better performance.

Reporting

Many schools are discussing how they might best report student performance. Most are still working on reporting a mark and rank for either or both the assessment program and half-year and yearly examinations.

Some schools are attempting to report on the achievement of individual outcomes. This is a difficult process and needs to have outcomes-focused programs and assessment processes that allow teachers to gather evidence of student achievement on each outcome. The nature of the outcomes makes this a difficult task with only part of an outcome sometimes being relevant to a particular topic. If the evidence is not gathered then reporting on individual outcomes is not much more than ticking boxes on a bestguess basis.

Given that teachers have the evidence, the next issue is what constitutes achievement of each outcome. Without work samples this is also a difficult question that might be solved at and between schools, by sharing samples of students’ work. Even when this has been established, a greater problem exists, when schools want to report using aperformance scale for each outcome. While the Kidmap scale of working towards, achieved and working beyond, or an expanded five point version, might be useful, some schools are attempting to provide grades of performance using numbers, letters or descriptors. Without clear and comparable understanding amongst teachers of these performance standards based on the work students do, it is difficult for parents and students to understand what they mean when reported.

The bottom line is that schools must follow the assessment processes set down by the BOS but are free to report student achievement twice a year to parents in whatever form they prefer. Clearly some forms of reporting are likely to require considerable effort without necessarily providing useful, comparable and comparative information unless performance standards are clearly defined and consistently applied.

John Gore
CEO, HSIE