UNLEASH

ED

Tag: PaCT

  • Primary schools to measure student progress

    In response to https://beehive.govt.nz/release/primary-schools-measure-student-progress – August 26, 2017.

    Measure. Measure. Measure. Weigh. Weigh. Weigh. Data. Data. Data.

    “The Government has made a decision to shift towards a system that measures student progress, alongside National Standards / Ngā Whanaketanga Rumaki Māori, to help ensure every student gets the support they need to achieve…
    Monitoring student progress gives teachers more data on which to tailor learning plans for their students – and we want to roll this out to all primary schools and kura.”

    says Education Minister Nikki Kaye.

    More data. More weighing. More testing. More assessment.

    Guess what. Teacher’s already monitor progress. I can show you the progress each of my students are making (or not making) in each of the three big subjects that now dominate the New Zealand Curriculum. Obviously not enough though.

    “Measuring progression means teachers will be able to see how far children have come in the specific learning areas that make up National Standards.”

    In some regards, it is good that the Minister has acknowledged what teachers have been saying for a while. Some students make incredible progress within a year, but are still below or well below the expected standard set by the Standards.

    “The change also reflects the education sector’s observation that we don’t adequately show a student’s progress over time, particularly for students who may be below the standard, and this will help address that.”

    This is all well and good, but as schools have come to know through the berading from ERO and senior advisers, progress don’t mean jack when it comes to achievement, which is all ‘the Ministry’ and ERO actually care about. 85% At or Above. 85%. 85%. 85%.

    Ultimately however, this will actually just lead to the mandatory use of PaCT.

    To support teachers the Ministry of Education has developed progress tools, such as Learning Progression Frameworks, the Progress and Consistency Tool and Whakatupuranga, that help show how children are doing and how they can progress. These have been developed in a number of areas including reading, writing, maths and digital technologies.

    The Government wants to roll out tools like these to all primary schools and kura as evidence shows they deliver real benefits for teachers and kaiako, by streamlining paperwork and reducing their reporting workload.

    There has been copious amounts written about PaCT and it’s potential. Just have a look at the following

    Education continues down this reform, with National determined on making National Standards legitimate.

     

  • The Other Side of the PaCT Coin

    Last time I was here

    Last year I wrote an article about the Progress and Consistency Tool. I tried to take a fairly positive approach to it, and tried to advocate as best I could for schools getting involved.

    This time, however, I follow NZEI’s warning against getting involved with it, after recent discussions with other professionals in education.

    My statement still stands when I said

    “I think that if the government wanted to align student achievement with teacher salaries (i.e. performance pay), that they would already be able to do so without using the PaCT tool anyway.”

    However, the PaCT will just make this more streamlined, more direct, and easier to access and/or distribute.

    How it works

    From the workshops that I have attended, ‘The Tool’ works as a bank of illustrations in different areas of Mathematics, Reading, and Writing. Mathematics was developed first, and so most of the examples are based around this. The teacher matches up their student with the illustrations and, after adding all of the different aspects together, the Tool will recommend an Overall Teacher Judgement for the teacher to use. More info on this can be found here.

    The recommended judgement is not set in stone however; but is just a recommendation. If teacher’s are unhappy with this judgement, they can ‘override’ the Tool’s recommendation, and insert a different OTJ, before saving it off to their School Management System (SMS) and the Ministry.

    How it REALLY works…

    I am very much used to working with databases, such as in MySQL. Many website utilise such a database, and I have used both pre-packaged databases such as WordPress, as well as building my own. Building your own is quite an involved process, but very worthwhile when you get all the functionality that can come from using them.

    Putting my IT skills to use, I can see how PaCT will become a threat, and how it will be used beyond what it is heralded to be.

    Firstly, every student will have their NSN as a unique ID in the database. This will ensure that the right student always has their OTJ made against them, and not another student.

    Each of the aspects in Maths for example, will have a dedicated column, for each year of the student’s schooling. For example: lets say there were only 3 aspects, it would be: aspect1-firstyear, aspect2-firstyear, aspect3-firstyear, followed by – aspect1-secondyear, aspect2-secondyear, aspect3-secondyear etcetera.
    When a judgement against an aspect is made, it will be noted in these columns. Then there will be a calculation made from these values, and based on that calculation, the recommendation will be made.

    This is where I’m going to stop for now, because this is when it gets interesting.

    At this point, the data is in the database, and is accessible by two parties – the teacher, and the Ministry. With this data, the Ministry can access both the assessment that the teacher has made, as well as the values, calculation, and the recommendation. Collate all the student’s under this teacher’s care for the year, and you have yourself a picture of that teacher’s class, and their achievement (or non achievement). They also have the recommendation that the Tool has made.

    The more devious of us will then take this to the next step. The Ministry, now that they have this data, will be able to produce a picture of the school from all its students. These will undoubtedly be published in the likes of Public Achievement Information before you can blink. They will then be able to target under-performing schools, and begin their next round of teacher bashing. Because as we all know, poor student results is not a reflection on the student, their environment, their home life, poverty, culture, family priority; instead it is definitely the quality of the teacher that these students are struggling. This will be the case until all the teachers get tired of the treatment, and vote with their feet. These schools are more than likely become charter schools, run by private companies with their own agendas which extend beyond just education.

    To add to the case on the ‘poor teacher’ policy, there is a direct link back to the database that will be quite startling for some.
    You see, whilst there is the opportunity for the teacher to ‘override’ the Tool’s OTJ, the original recommended OTJ will still exist in a column inside the database. The calculations made will automatically do this. The database will then also record a) that the teacher overrode the recommendation, and b) what they changed it to.
    This data is the startling bit. Not only do they have the “original” OTJ, but they have whether the teacher changed it (and let’s face it, it will always be to make it better – because no one in their right mind would disagree with the tool and mark students down – they would go, “Oh okay, maybe I’m being too harsh…”). This will give the Ministry the original OTJ which they would just use anyway, and they have records of teachers that change results; and can pick trends of teachers, or purely select individuals that that regularly change results, and label them as poor teachers. It thus will make it difficult for any teacher wanting to keep their job to change the OTJ recommendations that the tool makes, even if they are inaccurate. Suddenly the professional opinion of teachers means nothing, and instead, a computer programme is making the call on the overall achievement of students in the class, as opposed to the teacher. Yes, the teacher still has to align their student with the illustration, and this is a professional judgement call in itself, but its not the final call on where the student is at.

    Trialing

    I have been rather annoyed at the lack of trialing by this government, and have mentioned this in the past as well. First it was National Standards which were rolled out on the country without any trial or input from the teachers who had to be running it. Novopay is another issue all together.

    However, the Government is now trialing PaCT, ironing out the creases, and getting schools involved in using it. As mentioned, it has started with just Maths, with Reading and Writing coming in later on. This will eventually mean that there can be no complaint on the way it was trialed and implemented, and so making it compulsory for schools will become a lot easier for the Government to do. This of course was their intention back in 2013 when the PaCT was announced, but they had to backtrack on that when principals around the country rejected it.

    In Conclusion

    So regardless of what my previous post said in terms of “you may as well get involved”; I’d like to make an amendment. You may as well get involved because they’re going to make it compulsory eventually. You may as well get involved if you’re sick of making your own OTJ’s and would like a computer program to do it for you.

    Just saying!

  • Reliability of National Standards Assessments Called into Question

    A recent report has cast doubts over the reliability of teachers’ National Standards assessments and rises in student achievement.

    It found that just 40 per cent of overall teacher judgments (OTJs) matched the ratings generated by the Progress and Consistency Tool (PaCT), a tool developed to improve the consistency of teacher judgments on National Standards assessments.

    The PaCT was launched in schools in last year with a mathematics pilot. The latest report of the National Standards: School Sample Monitoring & Evaluation Project 2010-2013 compared the judgments from the pilot with a selection of teacher judgments finding significant variance.

    In the past, I have expressed interest in PaCT as a way of standardising National Standards a bit more. But it would seem that even with the tool, getting a consistent standard among teachers, and students, is flawed.

    What I find interesting there is a move in education to individual education programmes, individual assessments, and student centred learning initiatives, yet as our main form of reporting and assessment we are putting them in boxes, and grouping them together, using a ‘one-size-fits-all’ grading system and tool.

    What are your thoughts on the PaCT tool? Have you been to any workshops? Have you seen it in action?

  • The PaCT Tool

    There has been many thoughts around the PaCT tool and it’s use or non-use by New Zealand schools. New Zealand Educational Institute (union for primary teachers, NZEI) has warned against it, but they are bound to do so given the current political climate and their educational policies.

    Using the Progress and Consistency Tool
    However, what I don’t understand is that we (teachers, schools) have been saying that National Standards are not standard and there is a vast difference from school to school as to what is Below, At, or Above since it’s inception. The PaCT tool has been designed to moderate this very problem, as NZEI point out in their article, which is surely what teachers want – to make National Standards more reliable, rather than just doing it because we have to and working with rubbish data about our students.

    You cannot deny that Ms. Parata, however controversial, makes some sense in this article, and essentially makes the same points as I do above.

    It would seem that they (National Standards) are not going anywhere, with the National Government in power for another three years. I don’t particularly agree with the saying “If you can’t beat ’em, join ’em”, but in this case, it would seem pointless fighting. Teachers, Parents, Principals,  Educators, Educationalists and Professors have been fighting them since their release in 2010. Despite this, the National Standards continued to be rolled out, and the government continues to roll out other policies in the face of adversity. Most of the initial hatred towards them was the way they were rolled out, without any duty of care shown around their trialing on our kids. But it is now almost 5 years on. Let’s also make clear, that while the opposition would scrap them, they also suggest that they would still continue to monitor student’s progress, but align them to the curriculum. This seems like a complete waste of time, money, and resources, as if you read anything on the development of the National Standards, you’ll find that they are already aligned with the curriculum.

    “In doing this New Zealand has taken a different approach to the rest of the world. We have used our national curriculum to determine the standard of achievement that needs to be reached at the end of each year.” – Education Gazette, 11 October, 2010.

    Despite what the scare mongers say, I think it’d be worth every school investigating signing up to use the PaCT Tool.
    That’s my personal opinion.
    Personally, I know some of the developers of the tool, and I have been assured on more than one occasion that from their side of things (the developers) the PaCT tool has not been designed with the capacity to link student data with teacher pay. This seems to be the main concern with the doubters beyond that of trying to make the ‘flawed’ National Standards more reliable (rather than scrapping them and developing a more robust assessment).

    I think that if the government wanted to align student achievement with teacher salaries (i.e. performance pay), that they would already be able to do so without using the PaCT tool anyway. Therefore, if that’s the case, then any school using the PaCT tool will not make a difference for the government; but it has the potential to be very worthwhile for us as teachers and as a school to better get to grips with assessments for the National Standards, and might even go some way into making them more robust – which is what we’re asking for anyway.

    There has been many a classroom I’ve seen, where a student has stepped out of line and done things on their own terms. For example, entering the classroom (their own terms) instead of lining up like the rest of the class (teachers terms). The teacher might scold them and then send them out to the principal, if the student hasn’t already become defiant and stormed out of the class for the scolding. When you boil down the behaviour and the problem, and take a step back; the actions taken by the ‘professional’ have in fact caused that child to no longer be in class, and no longer learning. If a quiet word was had, a little pride (on the teacher’s behalf) dropped, and the student allowed to still remain in class before everyone else, then that student might still be in class learning and hopefully engaged. The end product is what we really wanted, which is the troublesome child in the class.

    Instead of fighting for fighting sake, why don’t we take a step back, work out what it is we want, and drop our pride of having things done on our (teachers) terms. Rather than missing the point and ending up with nothing, we should be thinking about the end product.

    The end product is we want a robust system of measuring our children on a national level, without using a one off national test (that students could fail if they had an off day). We want to be able to use our professional judgement as teachers, and our knowledge of each child as individuals, and use that subjective information in order to fit students against our curriculum. We want it to be a robust and moderated system so that the data can be trusted from school to school, from city to city, right across the country.

    If we want National Standards to be more robust, then lets see if using PaCT will in fact make them more reliable, rather than scrapping National Standards and making all line up outside before bringing them into the classroom again.