Reporting Student Achievement and Progress Foundation to 10

7. Continuous reporting

Reporting achievement and progress outside of reports

The following examples reflect common practices in schools that support the ongoing communication of achievement and progress, without significant additional burden:

• routines for sending home completed work
  • these might include sharing work reflective of important projects or which illustrate learning progress
• classroom and corridor displays
  • these can have a dual purpose: celebrating student achievement and also providing parents/carers with a window into current learning focuses and the standards being achieved
• incidental conversations at school (particularly in primary/specialist contexts)
  • this is an opportunity to share brief updates about student progress, particularly when celebrating achievements or flagging early concerns
• school websites or newsletters to share curriculum area overviews (what is being taught) and learning highlights (in a specific curriculum area).

Continuous online reporting

Continuous online reporting is an approach to communicating student learning progress where students, parents and carers are provided with access to assessment information throughout the semester. This is typically delivered via online portals to the school’s learning management system. It is predominantly used in secondary schools but can be implemented in other settings.

Continuous online reporting can complement but does not replace semester reports. It communicates achievement on specific tasks, not an overall picture of achievement and progress against the curriculum achievement standard. An overall teacher judgement against the curriculum standard must only be made once per semester.

Schools implementing continuous online reporting should configure their assessment and reporting platforms so that formative feedback and summative grades already provided directly to students are simultaneously visible to parents and carers. Importantly, continuous online reporting offers a window into existing assessment practices. It must not involve creating additional reporting obligations or processes.

Where a school implements continuous online reporting they are recommended to:

• use digital versions of developmental rubrics that communicate achievement and next steps without individual written feedback
• ensure that where existing processes capture student self-reflection, this is also visible to parents/carers
• limit written formative feedback by considering both a maximum number of tasks that require written feedback each term and a maximum word length (for example, limiting written feedback to 75 words on one formative task in each curriculum area each term)
• provide structured time for students to read, reflect upon, and respond to that feedback, noting that this dialogic element increases the effectiveness of feedback in supporting learning.

The department recommends against expecting teachers to:

• document the spontaneous, responsive feedback that naturally occurs during classroom instruction
• rewrite existing feedback for different audiences, or provide additional feedback for parents/carers
• upload paper-based feedback (for example, handwritten comments or physical rubrics) to digital platforms.

The department acknowledges that assessment task data shared with parents and carers throughout a semester can also be automatically collated in semester reports without any additional action required of teachers.