History - moderator's newsletter
November 2011
Contents
Assessment using the realigned level one Achievement Standards
Issues arising through moderation of the new aligned standards are being collated and a Clarification document concerning these Standards will be added to the Clarification of Standards section of the History page of the NZQA web site in 2012.
In the meantime, specific issues which need to be addressed more quickly will be raised in the Moderator Newsletters.
Achievement Standard 91001
Explanatory Notes
Please refer to the August Moderator Newsletter for discussion of the role of the Explanatory Notes.
‘Step-ups’
One matter that has arisen is the extent to which there are ‘step-ups’ across the three performance levels (Achievement/Merit/Excellence) in 91001. Explanatory Note 2 of this Achievement Standard has five bullet points that are the Achievement-level indicators, two that are Merit-level indicators and a further three that are Excellence-level indicators. When making judgements, or when constructing assessment tasks and the accompanying assessment schedule, teachers should include step-ups only for those particular bullet pointed items. For example, recording the details of the sources of selected evidence is an Achievement-level indicator and it is not mentioned again at Merit or Excellence levels in the Explanatory Notes. That means that task instructions and the assessment schedule should not indicate an increasing level of expectation for recording source details. An Excellence-level student may, therefore, have a few imperfections in the recording of those details and still be eligible for an overall Excellence judgement.
Please note reference, in the paragraph above, to ‘indicators’. Teachers are reminded that they must make an overall holistic judgement for each student. The Explanatory Note lists for each performance level are not prescriptive – they are only indicators (see the August newsletter). It could be possible for a student to provide very poor evidence or even omit evidence for one or more of the indicators in each list, but still reach the level one standard. Poor evidence for one or two indicators could be outweighed by very good evidence for other indicators. This is particularly likely to be the case when, for example, a student records source details poorly (an Achievement-level indicator) but then provides some good evaluative comments (a Merit or Excellence level indicator). Teachers need to weigh all of a student’s evidence in this way in order to reach a final judgement. This is what is meant whenever there is reference to the need to make a ‘holistic’ judgement.
Annotations
This new requirement in 91001 is being addressed in a variety of ways by teachers and students.
Most commonly students are being taught either:
(a) to write brief comments in the margin beside a piece of evidence that has been selected or
(b) they are writing a sentence or two (or more) beneath the selected evidence.
Either of these methods is acceptable. The first method seems to work best when a page contains a number of different selections, especially if the selections are relevant to different focusing questions. In that case a global annotation at the bottom is difficult. With this type of annotation there would normally be room for only a brief comment - of the sort, “Relevant to Focusing Question 2 because it provides numbers killed” or, for Excellence’s ‘thorough’ annotation, it could become “Relevant to Focusing Question 2 - provides stats on German infantry deaths 1914-18”. More able students may provide more than is really expected at level one, such as, “Relevant to Focusing Question 2 – provides stats on German infantry deaths 1914-18; beware German source of stats” – the latter, of course, being a higher-level annotation. Should they wish to go beyond expectations students should not, of course, be discouraged from doing so. Instead, the extra thought and skill demonstrated should be taken into account when the holistic judgement is being made.
Experience so far shows that when students make annotations of the second sort (in a paragraph at the foot of the evidence), they tend to be writing much more than is required by the Standard. While students should not be discouraged from going into depth and detail in the annotations, evidence may end up being considerably above the standard at this curriculum level. If the summary at the bottom style is adopted, a brief sentence or two is likely to be sufficient to reach the national standard if they are consistently completed and are relevant.
Another important point to consider with regard to annotations is that more able students may provide annotations that contain comments that until now have been expected to be found in the formal evaluation that students write at the completion of their research. This is particularly the case when they write ‘higher level’ annotations which comment on matters such as validity and reliability of evidence. If a student provides evaluative comments in the annotations the teacher needs to take those into account when making a judgement on the student’s formal evaluation at the end of the research. Frequently, the evaluative type of annotation that accompanies a piece of selected evidence may also be providing the sort of detail that is otherwise missing from the formal evaluation.
A final question that can arise with the creation of annotations is how many are expected? – especially in the case where students are writing annotations in the margins beside selections of evidence. In the case where a student makes many short selections on a page of evidence (a word or two, or half a line, for example), it would not be realistic to expect an annotation for every such selection. It may be feasible, however, for a student to make an annotation when three or four or more lines of evidence have been selected. On a typical page printed out from a web site, for example, a student may make three or four selections that are three of four lines in length, and that could generate three or four annotations (see above for examples).