Reporting Student Achievement and Progress Foundation to 10

Making teacher judgements and assigning scores for student reporting

Teacher judgements

Teachers make on-balance, holistic, evidence-based and defensible judgements against the achievement standards and determine scores that accurately reflect where the student is located on a learning continuum for all curriculum areas taught during the reporting period. These judgements form the basis of information presented in student reports.

Teacher judgements are made through an ongoing process of:

• gathering data over a period of time from a variety of formal and informal tasks and learning experiences
• analysing and interpreting this data
• moderating initial judgements with colleagues – against achievement standards and school defined and disseminated frames of reference, such as scoring guidelines and assessment criteria.

Scores

All students’ achievement can be recorded using a score. Using scores supports the monitoring of the student’s progress along the learning continuum. Scores are recorded using a value within the scoring range for the curriculum area being reported:

• the scoring range for the Victorian Curriculum F-10 is A -11.0
• the Towards Foundation Level A to D curriculum is used for students who are progressing towards achieving the Foundation level achievement standards
• the Victorian Curriculum F-10 EAL scoring range is from:
  • A1.1 to A2.3 for students on the A pathway
  • BL.1 to B3.3 for students on the B pathway
  • CL.1 to C4.3 for students on the C pathway.

When more than one teacher teaches the same curriculum area (learning area and/or capability) to a student during the reporting period, each teacher will make a judgement about where the student is located on the learning continuum.

The school’s moderation process should be used to determine the level of achievement to be reported and the score to be recorded or each teacher could record a score for the student’s level of achievement in the school’s reporting software.

A single score will be created by the software. This final score should be confirmed by the relevant teachers.

A ‘did not participate’ or ‘DNP’ is used when students are not being assessed in a curriculum area/strand/mode for the reporting period. Teachers would use a ‘DNP’ entry when they do not have a suitable amount of evidence of a student’s level of achievement, due to special circumstances, to make a defensible and on-balance judgement against the standards. Refer to:

• Special circumstances (DOCX 29.89kB)
• Special circumstances (PDF 60.62kB)

Scores are recorded in the school’s student reporting software package or directly into CASES21, refer to Reporting to the department chapter of these Guidelines.

Student progress and curriculum planning

Student progress will be influenced by each school’s individual teaching and learning plan, and by factors such as time allocation and frequency of tasks. The school’s teaching and learning plan will identify what is taught, assessed and reported.

Curriculum planning should align to and be supported by assessment planning. Considering opportunities for assessment and embedding assessments, such as formative assessments and pre/post-tests, is an important aspect of curriculum planning. Information from these assessments help teachers monitor student progress to inform their planning and provide learning evidence to support reporting.

For information and guidance about curriculum programs and assessment in schools, visit:

• Curriculum Programs Foundation to 10
• Assessment of Student Achievement and Progress Foundation to 10.

Teachers may consider co-developing indicative progress descriptions with students to assist with setting learning expectations of students and to assess and report student achievement.

An important aspect of curriculum planning is being able to articulate what student progress looks like, using the achievement standards in the curriculum continuum.

Visit VCAA curriculum area advice for:

• indicative progress templates
• annotated indicative progress examples
• student work samples for specific curriculum areas.

For information about whole-school curriculum planning, visit VCAA curriculum planning resource.

Mathematics Version 2.0

The revised Mathematics curriculum includes changes to the achievement standards used by teachers to assess and report student learning across Levels Foundation to 10.

Schools must implement reporting against Mathematics Version 2.0 when they commence teaching the Mathematics Version 2.0, either in Semester 1 2024 or Semester 1 2025.

Schools are required to report across Levels Foundation to 10 with an overarching teacher judgement each semester, providing a single, aggregated score to parents/carers (in the student’s report) and the department (submitted via CASES21).

The content descriptions of the Mathematics Version 2.0 are structured in 5 strands at Levels Foundation to 2 and 6 strands at Levels 3 to 10. Schools can determine how the 5 to 6 strands are implemented across each year (for example, for Year 4, a school may cover Statistics in semester 1 or in semester 2 or in both semester 1 and 2). The Mathematics Version 2.0 achievement standards do not separate the strands of mathematics.

How schools choose to aggregate assessments each semester will be dependent upon how the curriculum has been delivered in individual schools and links made between content from different strands. Using the learning evidence against the strands taught across the reporting cycle each semester, teachers make an on-balance, holistic and defensible judgement with reference to the achievement standards that accurately reflects where the student is along the learning continuum for Mathematics Version 2.0.

Teacher judgements must also align to the school’s local Mathematics curriculum program and there are factors for individual schools to consider at each reporting cycle for Mathematics Version 2.0. These considerations include:

• which of the 6 strands were taught
• the quantity and weighting of the strand in the curriculum (for example, Level 1 has more Number content than Algebra and Level 10 has more Algebra content than Number)
• how much of each strand was covered.

While this is not a requirement of the department, schools can continue recording and using information on each of the 6 strands delivered in Mathematics Version 2.0 if they find it useful for their internal purposes – for example, if it helps with providing feedback on or insight into how their students are progressing. This additional information may also be included in student reporting to parents/carers, as long as an overarching teacher judgement against Mathematics Version 2.0 is also provided. If the school decides to include strand level achievement data in the report, schools should provide guidance for students, parents and carers about how the overarching teacher judgement was made.