• Learning Languages Community
• Te Reo Māori

Te Reo Māori in the New Zealand Curriculum: Draft

Assessment

Assessment should be ongoing, and teachers should give students immediate, frequent, and regular feedback to enable them to develop their learning skills. Assessment should include teachers’ ongoing monitoring of student learning (formative assessment) as well as end-of-unit tasks designed to measure and record their language acquisition and language skills (summative assessment).

Assessment by students should be treated as an important aspect of learning.¹ Teachers should encourage students to engage in ongoing monitoring of their own progress (self-assessment). Students could, for example, check that they are following task instructions as they work through a writing task as well as checking the material they have produced at the end of the task. They could record their progress on checklists that reflect the achievement objectives at their level. They could compile portfolios of their work and use these to reflect on their progress and to set clear and appropriate goals for future learning. They could also be encouraged to provide constructive feedback to one another (peer assessment).

Assessment should be based on activities that measure performance in communicative contexts. It should target procedural knowledge (knowledge of how to use the language), not just declarative knowledge (knowing something about the language). All forms of teacher assessment² should have a diagnostic function, providing students with an understanding of their current stage of language learning and helping teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of their Māori language programmes. Teachers should discuss the assessment procedures with their students and explain them clearly in ways that the students can understand.

Assessment is a continuing process that measures the development of students’ knowledge and skills against the stated achievement objectives. It should relate to the purposes for which te reo Māori and tikanga Māori are used and should measure all aspects of communicative capacity, including Māori language appropriateness, complexity, fluency, and accuracy. Wherever possible, assessment strategies should allow for a range of responses rather than anticipating strictly predetermined content in terms of te reo Māori and tikanga Māori.

In assessing students’ progress and achievement in te reo Māori, the emphasis on listening, speaking, reading, writing, viewing, and presenting should reflect the balance of class activities. For example, programmes designed for younger learners may focus more on listening and speaking in the early stages, and assessment at these stages should reflect this focus.

Assessment should:

• motivate students;
• enable teachers to evaluate the effectiveness of both learning and teaching;
• diagnose and monitor students’ strengths and needs, providing information for future programme development;
• provide relevant information for students, parents, school administrators, and the wider community.

Teachers are advised to:

• communicate regularly and informally with students about their progress and their needs, including the kinds of help they require and what their next learning steps might be;

• help students develop peer-assessment and self-assessment strategies;

• observe and record the progress of individual students (for example, by preparing individual learning profiles and/or by compiling portfolios of student work).

Students should be encouraged to:

• measure and record their own progress, using checklists that show
  achievement in terms of what they can do with the Māori language;

• reflect on what and how they learn, so that they can understand the learning process better and work more effectively towards their language learning objectives;

• maintain portfolios of their work, including samples of written Māori, audio recordings of their progress in oral Māori, and any te reo- and tikangarelated projects. (They can also be encouraged to keep learner diaries.)

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