New school-based assessment requirements for all Stage 6 Board Developed Courses (including PDHPE and CAFS) were announced by NESA and will commence in Term 1 2018 for Year 11 and Term 4 2018 for Year 12.
You can view the new Assessment and Reporting in PDHPE Stage 6 document on the NESA website.
What are the changes to the school-based assessment requirements?
Year 11 formal school-based assessment program requirements
- three assessment tasks
- the minimum weighting for an individual task is 20%
- the maximum weighting for an individual task is 40%
- only one task may be a formal written examination.
Year 12 formal school-based assessment program requirements
- a maximum of four assessment tasks
- the minimum weighting for an individual task is 10%
- the maximum weighting for an individual task is 40%
- only one task may be a formal written examination with a maximum weighting of 30%.
Components and weightings for Year 11 and Year 12
- Knowledge and understanding of course content to have a weighting of 40% of total formal assessment mark and
- Skills in critical thinking, research, analysis and communicating to make up 60% of the total school-based assessment mark.
What constitutes formal school-based assessment?
Formal school-based assessment provides opportunities to gather evidence about student achievement of syllabus outcomes in different ways to the HSC examinations. Formal assessment tasks are those which students undertake as part of the school-based assessment program, reflecting specific course requirements, components and weightings.
A formal assessment task may contain more than one part. The task notification should detail the requirements for each part, including that all parts are to be submitted and/or completed together.
Tests of limited scope (ie include a small number of content areas or topics or modules) will continue to be relevant and appropriate methods of formal assessment. These types of tasks are not considered as formal written examinations.
A formal written examination is defined as a task such as a Half Yearly, Yearly or Trial HSC Examination completed during a designated examination period. It is undertaken individually, under supervised examination conditions and includes one or more unseen questions or items.
(Taken directly from the Assessment and Reporting in PDHPE Stage 6 document)
What might the new requirements look like in an assessment schedule?
Download the sample assessment schedules that have been developed by NESA from the NESA website.
Work through individually or as a group each of the four sample assessment schedules and use the following template to record STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES and THREATS for each sample.
Discussion points:
Strengths could include that the sample still includes a trial HSC or that the early task has a lower mark value.
Weaknesses could include the timing of tasks e.g. not much time between tasks or the number of outcomes to be covered before the first task. Another weakness could be the types of tasks and how well they assess the skills of critical thinking, research, analysis and communicating.
Opportunities could include providing an impetus to review scheduling of cores and options to make combining tasks possible across Core and Options.
Threats could include the reduction in formal examination style tasks might disadvantage those students that thrive in exam conditions.
Unpacking what this means for your faculty assessment program
SWOT Analysis
Take the time to reflect on your current assessment schedules for the preliminary and HSC courses.
What are the STRENGTHS, WEAKNESSES, OPPORTUNITIES and THREATS for your assessment program? Use the SWOT analysis template from the previous activity to record your thoughts.
Discussion points:
Your STRENGTHS might include the timing of tasks in relation to other faculties, the types of tasks are highly engaging for students.
Your WEAKNESSES might include having a Half-Yearly and Trial HSC exam that have a 50% weighting, timing of trial HSC does not allow full coverage of all outcomes as some content has not been taught.
Your OPPORTUNITIES might include reviewing which options are taught to make combining tasks possible across Core and Options.
Your THREATS might include having to change the Options taught in order to allow full coverage of components and outcomes in three tasks in Preliminary.
Planning tasks and components and outcomes coverage
The new assessment policy requires changes in the weightings of components within your assessment schedule so that 60% of the total mark comes from assessment of Skills in critical thinking, research, analysis and communicating. Essentially this means that 60% of marks should be derived from Outcomes 15-17 in the Preliminary Course and Outcomes 14-17 in the HSC Course. This will mean a major change from your previous assessment programs which would have had a 30% weighting on Skills in critical thinking, research, analysis and communicating.
To explore what the new requirements could look like for your school:
- Download the following outcomes cards for Preliminary and HSC. Each outcome card includes mapping of where it links to the Core modules and Option modules e.g. C1, C2, O1, O2 etc.
- Print out the cards so that the Knowledge and understanding outcomes are in one colour and the Skills in critical thinking … are in a different colour. You can discard the outcomes cards that are related to Options that you are not teaching.
- Sort the cards, as individuals or as a faculty, into 3 groups (for Preliminary) and 4 groups (for HSC) of Knowledge and understanding outcomes that could be assessed through a single task.
- For each group of cards look at which Core and Option modules are linked to the outcomes in that group. Is there potential for combining a task across a Core and Option module?
- Now identify which of the Skills for critical thinking etc outcomes best link to each group of cards. Remember that 60% weighting comes from these outcomes so there will need to be at least two of these cards matched to each group.
- Transfer the outcomes for each of these card groups into the following template.
- For each group, identify the content that could be addressed while assessing these outcomes. Remember to look at Core and Option content if the outcomes cover more than one module.
- Brainstorm the types of tasks that you could use to assess the outcomes and content identified for each group. Remember to ensure that critical thinking, research, analysis and/or communicating will need to be a focus in each task.
- As a faculty discuss the merits of including a Yearly (prelim) or Trial HSC within your assessment schedule.
- If you are going to include a formal examination in your plan you will need to allocate one of your card groups to the exam task.
- For all tasks that are not a formal exam, discuss and decide on the best timing for each of the tasks given the content being addressed and your scope and sequence. Do you need to think about changing the order of your scope and sequence to accomodate the tasks?
- Download the BLANK assessment schedule templates for Prelim and HSC from below.
- Complete a DRAFT of your assessment schedule based on your discussions.