Assessment of key competencies literacy and numeracy: Can these be combined?

Abstract

This article begins with a question about the assessment of key competencies in a primary school classroom. It was one of the questions that was interesting to us as we participated in a Teaching and Learning Research Initiative (TLRI) project entitled Key Learning Competencies across Place and Time: Kimihia te ara totika, hei oranga mo to ao. This TLRI project was designed to explore research questions to do with an alignment between the curriculum strands of Te Whariki (the national early childhood curriculum: Ministry of Education, 1996) and the five key competencies in a new school curriculum (Ministry of Education, 2007, p. 42), with a focus on the early years. The discussion here is based on a working paper for the TLRI project, written before National Standards for literacy and numeracy were introduced from Year 1 in primary schools (Ministry of Education, 2009a, 2009b). The question has become especially relevant now. This was an action research project in which teachers at five sites chose their own research questions and were supported by local research associates. In this site, Yvonne's classrooms at Parkview Primary School, the research co-ordinators were Keryn Davis and Sue Molloy. The directors of the TLRI project, Margaret Carr and Sally Peters, also met regularly with the researchers to discuss the data and its analysis. These discussions and group meetings (with researchers and teachers from the other sites three times a year) were a central aspect of the action research. It was at these meetings that we theorised, collaboratively developed the units of analysis and suggested ways forward. At the time that the TLRI research began, Yvonne was the new entrant teacher at Parkview Primary School, a Years 0-8, decile 4 school in Parklands, Christchurch. She had been teaching for over 25 years and was also the leader of the junior (Years 0-2) syndicate at the school. In the first year of the project she was mostly teaching new entrants; during the second year of the project she taught a Year 1 class. This article begins with Yvonne's commentary on her research journey and the research question that she developed for her school classroom. A research question and a research journey: A commentary from Yvonne Before the final curriculum document (The New Zealand Curriculum: Ministry of Education, 2007) was published, I had already been interested and involved (in a small way) in the development of the Ministry of Education's draft key competencies. I had been experimenting with them to see how they would look in my classroom, and how they could be successfully assessed. During the year before the TLRI project began, I had also been experimenting with Learning Stories as a form of assessment that captures the learning that I feel passionate about for young children, with support from Sue Molloy (at the time an Assess to Learn (A to L) adviser) and Keryn Davis (at the time an early childhood education adviser). I had found that Margaret Carr's form of narrative assessment, Learning Stories (Carr, 2001), was a simple and effective tool to use. A feature of Learning Stories, which originate from the early childhood education sector, is a dispositional framework based on Te Whariki (Ministry of Education, 1996). I had developed a format for the writing of these Learning Stories and had explored a set of indicators for each competency. When I shared the news of the curriculum review and my understandings of the draft key competencies with my colleagues, their reaction was not positive. Their comments included: What next! and How are we going to fit that [key competencies] in? Their reaction was hardly surprising when you remember that the pre-2007 curriculum documents came thick and fast and teachers had struggled to come to terms with them. At Parkview School we had also just completed an A to L professional development programme and were still in the process of bedding in our assessment programme. …