Teacher indexes of year 5 writing performance

This paper takes as its starting point an awareness of the diversity of literacy and its assessment in everyday educational and cultural practice; its complexity as a set of specific practices to be acquired; and the necessity faced by literacy educators to crystallise their understanding of their students' diverse literacy achievements into summative judgements such as ratings and scores. Against this backdrop, our interest in this paper is with exploring the factors that experienced teachers take to influence the writing performance of Year 5 students. To situate our discussion, we first offer some comment made about the context in which our investigation occurred. In short, the data drawn on in this paper were collected as part of a current Australian Research Council-funded two-year study that aims to provide a quantitative and qualitative picture of the role of human judgement in educational assessment. In the study, teachers' judgements of literacy achievement are used as an instance of human judgement. So, the intersection of teacher assessment with human judgement is a key concern of the study. The evidence base used by teachers in their judgements of literacy capabilities (termed 'indexes') is being detailed using qualitative and quantitative techniques for mapping the interrelationships among the various operative facets of students' performance. This approach makes it possible to examine and directly gauge the impact of evaluative frameworks that constitute the official, publicly available assessment agenda as well as the contribution of otherwise implicit but nonetheless significant determinants of teachers' judgements. To date, thirty-nine teachers from twenty-one schools have participated in the study. The teachers represent a range of approximately two to twenty-five years teaching experience in state primary schooling. The selection of schools includes cohorts representing a range of socioeconomic as well as cultural and linguistic backgrounds and has been drawn mostly from metropolitan and surrounding areas of a large Queensland city. To date, only one rural school has been involved in the study due to difficulties associated with distance. We are currently in Phase Two of the study. Twenty-one teachers from eleven schools have been involved to date, and in this phase, the focus is on identifying and examining the actual processes that teachers rely on in arriving at judgements of students' writing performance. In all, forty-eight teachers will 11 HIH lm 118334