Both Sides Archive

The release in January of the first ever NCEA results created huge public and professional interest. More than 60,000 students received the most detailed nationally-benchmarked profile of their performance that this country, or probably any other, has ever seen.

The results told us a great deal about how Year 11 students around the country performed. They also gave us data to use in our evaluation and review teaching approaches and resources, the curriculum and the assessment system itself.

I hope the whole community, teachers, academics, parents and employers included, take time to consider all of the factors that lie behind the national statistics. To leap to superficial conclusions would be to undervalue the immense amount of information NCEA provides.

We must remember that achievement standards are incredibly detailed. They were set by subject specialists, mainly practising teachers, to reflect levels of performance that New Zealand students can reasonably be expected to achieve at this stage of their education. For achievement standards, there were results for over 1.6 million individual standard entries. Students received results for an average of 27.3 standards each, some receiving up to 48 results.

Even at this early stage of NCEA implementation in schools, entry numbers for various standards vary greatly. Many schools did not offer all standards in some subject groups and many students did not enter all standards in a subject group. This is especially apparent in sciences, health and technology.

This means schools are already taking advantage of the immense programming flexibility provided in this new environment.

Across subject groups, there is the expected variation in the distribution or results. It is clear, for example, that subjects like English and Mathematics draw high numbers of entries and reflect the full range of student abilities.

On the other hand, many languages, arts and specialised sciences cater for students who are already specialising, or who have highly developed individual skills.

Not surprisingly, these standards tend to have higher proportions of students achieving Merit and Excellence.

The distribution of results for various achievement standards within a subject varies greatly. This is to be expected for a variety of reasons.

• Within traditional "subjects", different "topics" have always had varying levels of difficulty. This is inherent in curriculum statements but has been obscured in previous examination results by the totaling of marks across all questions or sections of a paper.
  
   
• Individual students have always performed better in some areas of a subject than others. This is to be expected and is simply confirmed by national qualifications.
  
   
• There may be a relationship between standards. One skill might be dependent on another. There may be a distinction in terms of the degree of abstract or conceptual thinking and more practical concrete demands.
  
   
• Some skills and knowledge have not been assessed at a national level in the past. For example, in subjects where there was no or limited internal assessment for School Certificate, research, speaking or performance skills have not been assessed nationally. It is known that where an aspect of a subject is not formally assessed, it is more likely to be neglected, or expectations less well understood by teachers and students.
  
   
• Analysis of recent School Certificate examinations has demonstrated that high level conceptual thinking was often not required for high marks. This could explain the relatively small proportion of Excellence results in some standards.
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If you compare NCEA results across all standards with the range of School Certificate grades, the similarities are interesting.

Overall, the standard was achieved in 71 per cent of all achievement standard results. This figure suggests that standards overall were set at appropriate levels of difficulty, as one of the broad aims of NCEA was to set standards that were attainable by about 70 per cent of the cohort.

It is clear that excellence grades are not easy to achieve. As we have predicted, able students have been challenged by achievement standards. The speculation that a standards based system leads to "dumbing down" looks even more forlorn.

While it is possible to make broad comparisons between results from internally and externally assessed standards, it's probably more interesting to look at skills that run across subjects.

For example, in standards requiring performance, production, research or investigation (generally internally assessed), achievement rates tend to be higher and there are more Merit and Excellence grades than average. This may reflect the opportunity for students to improve during the year and be assessed at their best in familiar contexts, and withdrawals where students do not complete projects.

Schools will be looking closely at standards where there were relatively low achievement rates.

Some of these results will be no surprise to teachers (and to students) who know that in each curriculum area some skills and knowledge are more demanding than others. Answers to School Certificate papers have always reflected that.

I hope the analysis of school and national statistics is a considered and open process. It is an exciting opportunity for sector-wide discussion and debate that can lead to rapid improvements in teaching and learning. I know that many schools are already well into doing just that.