Integrated Assessment for Māori Youth Learners- Central Hub Recently Completed RHFP

Integrated Assessment for Māori Youth Learners

One of the unintended consequences of teaching to unit standards can sometimes be that complex and continuous tasks get disaggregated and atomised into discrete competencies for the purposes of a checklist approach to assessment. In the extreme the effect can be to turn teachers into testers and students into an assessment commodity.

Hannah Hohapata (pictured right), the Chief Executive of the Matapuna Training Centre in Gisborne has recently completed a hub funded project that aimed to trial a more integrated approach to student assessment. The students at her private training enterprise are typically Māori youth for whom educational attainment has been largely unsuccessful. As Matapuna’s academic leader, Hannah thought there must be a better process for the assessment of her students, and one that at least improved their chances of successful learning.

Hannah and her team relooked at many of the learning activities her students experienced to document what naturally occurring evidence of unit standard attainment would be possible during those activities. That approach allowed a partial move away from many of the “workbooks” which had previously been used by students as evidence of attainment.

Key to the success of the trial was to involve mentors for the students, design new teaching and assessment resources, reorient the teaching practices of staff and reassure students that an integrated assessment system was a good replacement for some of the workbooks.

The project report describes the journey the Matapuna staff undertook, outlines the issues involved, and discusses the students’ responses and achievements. It makes recommendations about the work and concludes with some example resources which were used during the trials.

This will be a very useful report for those who are looking to have an integrated approach to the assessment of unit standards based courses.
 

The full report is available from the Ako Aotearoa website from the following link http://akoaotearoa.ac.nz/ako-hub/ako-aotearoa-central-hub/resources/pages/integrated-assessment-m%C4%81ori-youth-learners-entering