Assessment

Formative

Formative assessment takes place during the learning process – to assist teachers to ‘form’ the future direction of student learning. It is a cycle of continuous feedback that allows a teacher to evaluate their impact and move student learning forward. It works alongside a clearly defined set of challenging learning intentions. Formative assessment reflects Assessment Principle 1 (assessment should be an integral part of teaching and learning), and Assessment Principle 2 (assessment should be educative).

Formative assessment can take many forms. It can be informal (eg. a discussion), formal (eg. a written test), immediate (eg. thumbs up/thumbs down feedback from students), or planned in advance (eg. a diagnostic text).

At WLPS, teachers value the use of multiple forms of formative assessment in their classrooms. Such assessment provides them with information about what is to be learned, how learning is progressing and what students need to learn next. This information can be used to define learning intentions, to identify gaps or misconceptions and to design targeted lessons or units of work. Ultimately, engaging in a constant formative assessment cycle empowers them to provide quality differentiated teaching practice.

Teachers also use system and school-based assessment data formatively – to develop intensive teaching and learning emphases to target identified areas for development. Examples of such assessments include, but are not limited to:

• NAPLAN
• Progressive Achievement Tests (PAT) in maths, English (reading and vocabulary skills), science and social & emotional learning
• Words Their Way Inventories (to diagnose individual student needs), and
• ‘Cold Tasks and Hot tasks’ in Talk 4 Writing

‘Datahub’ is the cloud-based platform used by the school to store and analyse assessment data and to track student progression.

Summative Assessment and Moderation

Summative assessment is used to determine students’ learning at a particular point in time, for example, when reporting against the achievement standards at the end of a semester.

At WLPS, staff administer summative assessment tasks, including common assessment tasks (CATs). The moderation of these tasks assists them to make consistent judgements regarding student performance in comparison to the achievement standard. The staff also participates in moderation sessions with colleagues from other schools within its network.

In 2019, the school began using ‘Brightpath’. Brightpath allows teachers to compare their students’ work to calibrated exemplars, place the students on the Brightpath scale, and arrive at a scaled score. This promotes reliable teacher judgements which are comparable across teachers, schools and over time. The Brightpath software was locally developed and based on substantial research and software development undertaken at The University of Western Australia.

Intervention

Kindergarten Speech Screen

West Leederville Primary School employ a team of qualified speech pathologists to assess our kindergarten students in March of each year. We fund this program to inform our teachers and parents of any areas for intervention and monitoring as part of our early intervention processes. A speech pathology team come to our kindergarten and work with the teachers to assess the students in range of fun and age-appropriate activities.

The screen covers language concepts, phonological awareness (rhyme and syllable), semantics, comprehension, positional language and narrative concepts such as: who, what, when, why, sequencing of events, and story retelling.  It also assesses general articulation.

Each class teacher is provided with a summary of performance and identifies strengths and areas of need amongst the kindergarten students.  The pathologists ‘flag’ students requiring early intervention, such as a speech / language disorder or delay and notify parents if a referral is required.