Archived material
Some aspects of the documents in this section no longer apply, however they have been archived for reference.
Office of the Board of Studies NSW
Stage 6 English Forum
held at Trinity College, Auburn, NSW Australia
7-8 March 1998
extracts from
Securing Their Future: The New South Wales Government's reforms
for the Higher School Certificate
p.2
Strengthening English
In view of the urgent need for a new English curriculum, the Government authorises the development of a new structure for English, including:
* a 2 Unit Advanced course and a 2 Unit Standard course with overlapping content;
* a new 2 Unit Literature course, set at a demanding level, to enable students for the first time to undertake 4 units of English in the Higher School Certificate;
* a new 2 Unit English as a Second Language course, with strict entry criteria, for students recently arrived in Australia; and
* a new course in Fundamentals of English available only in Year 11, for those students who require additional help with literacy.
(This is explained in full on pages 12 - 13.)
pp.12-13
English
The Government recognises the urgent need to redevelop the Higher School Certificate English curriculum.
The experience with English in the Higher School Certificate over recent years has been one of dramatic decline in enrolments in 3 Unit and 2 Unit Related courses. This is the archetypal example of differentiated courses within a subject without a common reporting scale, leading to a lowering of expectations and outcomes of students. Attempts to remedy this problem have been piecemeal and ineffective. There is now an urgent need to proceed with a structure for English - the only compulsory subject- which avoids the pitfalls identified by the Review. Preliminary modelling of the new structure for the subject of English indicates a significant increase in students' stated intentions to study more advanced English courses.
The Government will ask the Board of Studies to commence work on the development of new courses, as outlined below.
The Board of Studies will draw on the outcomes of its recent developmental work for the Stage 6 (Years 11 and 12) English syllabus to develop standard and advanced courses in English. These 2 Unit courses will have overlapping content and will be marked on a single scale, as described above.
The study of literature will be a component of both the standard and advanced English courses. This will allow for an increased emphasis on literature within the Higher School Certificate. A new 2 Unit Literature course will also be established to provide the opportunity for some students to focus more intensively on literature in English. The Government will require the new Literature course to be taken in conjunction with another 2 Unit English course. The study of the Literature course alone will not meet the mandatory requirement that English be included within the Higher School Certificate program for all students. While the Literature course will be set at a demanding standard, students will have the option of studying it in conjunction with either the standard or the advanced course in English.
For the first time in the history of the Higher School Certificate, these arrangements will allow students to study four units of English.
The Government recognises the need to support students with a history of low achievement in English to meet the requirements for the Higher School Certificate in English, not only because it is the sole compulsory subject, but because literacy in English underpins success for students across the curriculum. The Government's strategy is based on a desire to raise the achievement level of students to Higher School Certificate standard rather than to lower the standard that the Higher School Certificate should demand of them. Accordingly, the Government will authorise the development of further strategies for students of low achievement in English, including a Fundamentals of English course in Year 11, to be studied in addition to and complementary with the Year 11 English course. This Board-developed course will enable students to spend more time on, and receive more intensive tuition in, the Preliminary course (Year 11 ) in English. It will equip them to participate in more satisfying learning and to achieve more successful outcomes across all subject areas in both Years 11 and 12.
The Government will establish a 2 Unit English as a Second Language course, as recommended by Professor McGaw. The Government wants to ensure that students who genuinely need English as a Second Language assistance can receive it.
ENGLISH
The Government will authorise the development of the following structure for English:
- two differentiated courses for the Higher School Certificate, with some common curriculum content and reporting on a single scale - 2 Unit Standard English and 2 Unit Advanced English;
- a new 2 Unit Literature course for the Higher School Certificate, set at a demanding level, providing students for the first time with the opportunity to study four units of English;
- a new 2 Unit Fundamentals of English course available only in the Preliminary Year (Year 11 ) to assist students needing additional support to reach the level of literacy in English required for the Higher School Certificate Year;
- a new 2 Unit English as a Second Language course, available in both Year 11 and Year 12. It will have strict eligibility requirements. If undertaken in Year 12, it would meet Higher School Certificate requirements for the study of English.
p.18
English - the compulsory subject
The Government notes widespread support for English to be the only compulsory subject in the Higher School Certificate. The Government agrees. The primary, perhaps pre-eminent, means of acquiring and enhancing proficiency in the English language is through reading, writing, reflecting over, critically analysing, and communicating about, the wide range of literary texts, media and other forms of personal and everyday communication. Future opportunities in further education and training, employment and other aspects of economic and social life in Australia are enhanced by mastery of English.
p.22-25
Assessing against standards
The overwhelming message about assessment that was constantly repeated in the submissions to the Higher School Certificate Review was that it must measure (and reporting must indicate) what students 'know, understand and can do'. Many saw merit in abandoning the current methodology, arguing that norm-referenced scaling procedures arbitrarily allocated students' scores according to a predetermined distribution of scores.
Professor McGaw noted that Higher School Certificate syllabuses set out the outcomes students are expected to achieve and that the Higher School Certificate examinations assess the extent to which they have done so. Currently, once the examinations are marked and the school-based assessment recorded, that information is ignored and the ultimate marks awarded show only how students compare with one another - without any serious explanation of what the assessment instruments have measured or what they show about individual student achievement.
The Government has decided to adopt a standards-referenced approach to assessment and reporting. This will provide specific criteria against which to judge what students know, understand and can do that is, the standards students have attained for their Higher School Certificate. Standards-referenced assessment and reporting also enables comparisons to be made over time in the standards achieved in the Higher School Certificate.
Although this approach is a break-through in providing real information about students' achievements in the Higher School Certificate, it is based on similar assessment and reporting systems that have been successfully used in Australia and overseas. For example, the approach has been used in the Third International Mathematics and Science Study (TIMSS), the New South Wales Basic Skills Test and similar tests in other Australian states and territories, and the New South Wales Year 7 English Language and Literacy Assessment (ELLA) program.
The development of standards-referenced assessment and reporting in the Higher School Certificate will build on these experiences. It will first be tested in the reporting formats for the new School Certificate, as outlined on pages 31-33 below. This will inform the way in which students' achievements will be reported in the Higher School Certificate, and will help provide consistency in reporting between the School Certificate and the Higher School Certificate.
This approach does not rely on unmoderated internal teacher-based assessment; nor does it encourage a watering down of the curriculum into vague and nebulous outcome statements. Instead, it relies on external examinations. The Government strongly believes that external examinations are necessary for the rigorous, independent and equitable evaluation of secondary school students' performance.
Focusing on standards in curriculum, assessment and reporting enhances teaching and learning. Teachers and students will develop a shared understanding of what is to be learned and the standards expected. Being explicit about standards also provides criteria for evaluating the effectiveness of the learning process and related assessment strategies.
The standards will be based on the educational outcomes expected of students as defined by the content of each Higher School Certificate syllabus. They will be objectively established by using examination 'scripts' (answers by students) to establish a hierarchy of task difficulty.
The Higher School Certificate will now measure not only the relative performance achieved. It will also measure the standards achieved against benchmarks of clearly defined curriculum outcomes established by performance in the external examination.
Standards-referenced assessment avoids the need to scale marks according to a predetermined distribution before they are presented on a credential. It avoids all of the perceived or real distortions of a scaling process that can demand students' marks be set below a score, or even limit the number of students scoring high scores, regardless of their performance.
It restores the incentive to attempt more demanding courses because there will be a reward in marks for the attainment of better or more difficult performance standards.
The first task, in developing a scale of achievement in a subject, is to analyse students' performances on individual questions in the examination. Differences in the difficulty of the questions will provide the basis for interpreting the scale from less to more difficult questions and from low to high student performance. The second task is to develop descriptors to give meaning to different levels of achievement on the scale. These descriptors, arising from the analysis of scores on individual questions, will be developed from examiners' reports on the students' answers and consideration of the examination and the syllabus. Applying this process to examinations from several years will enable a stable interpretation of the standards for the subject to be developed. This, in turn, will support the refinement of the syllabus outcomes.
Matching the tasks to their objectively measured degree of difficulty can establish a scale or map of achievement that grades the examination tasks or outcomes across a continuum from the easiest to the hardest. Over time, views as to what is hard or easy for students to know, understand, or do will become increasingly refined. In turn, this will better inform curriculum development.
In addition to developing descriptions of student performance derived from examination texts, work will be undertaken to complement these with descriptions derived from school assessments.
DEVELOPING ASSESSMENT STANDARDS
The Government will adopt a standards-referenced approach to assessment for the Higher School Certificate by developing achievement scales for each subject through:
- an analysis of the Higher School Certificate examination results in all courses to
- clarify the performance scales on which student achievements and question or task difficulties can be represented within the course or, where courses are linked by a component of common assessment, across those courses within the subject,
- develop descriptors of what the scales measure in broad bands across the range from low to high performance, and
- identify examination questions and tasks located in the various bands to amplify the meaning of the bands;
- provision of these scales and the sample questions and tasks to schools, together with information about the distribution of student achievements on the scale, to give teachers an indication of the learning outcomes currently being achieved in each subject; and
- revision of curriculum documents to reflect the course structure to be developed and to incorporate the achievement scales.
REPORTING ACHIEVEMENT
Achievement for the Higher School Certificate in the past has been reported as a mark that compares each student's performance only with that of other students completing that course.
This practice has denied any meaningful or valid comparison between students undertaking different courses within the same subject. In some subjects this has led to concerns that students undertaking harder courses have been penalised by the marking scale. This view is apparent in the recent debate about the inadequate benefit in scaling for the 2 Unit Related English course which has been seen as the reason for the rapid decline in the number of students attempting this more demanding course.
The Higher School Certificate Review has recommended a comprehensive package for reporting students' achievements in the Higher School Certificate. This will see results in each course for a subject reported on a single scale.
Students' results will be derived from the achievement scales (discussed above). These scales represent both student achievement and the difficulty of examination questions and tasks. Students undertaking standard courses will have the opportunity to perform well up the scale, but they will be less likely to do so than those successfully undertaking more advanced work. Students undertaking more demanding studies, therefore, will be rewarded for their hard work and performance. The rewards, however, will not be automatic: they will depend upon success in meeting the standards.
The methodology is similar to the present practice of statistically aligning the distribution of 2 Unit and 3 Unit courses marks on the same scale: but these new scales will have more meaning.
Professor McGaw has advanced an argument for using a scale different from that of 0-100 which is currently used, towards others such as 20-70 or 50-120. While there are some arguments in favour of moving away from the current scale, it is clear that the community would prefer a scale that measures Higher School Certificate results over the range 0-100. The Government will retain a 0-100 scale for reporting Higher School Certificate marks, and will link these clearly to achievement bands.
The Government recognises the cogency of the Review's proposal to report in ways that describe the knowledge, skills and understanding that students are able to demonstrate. The experience gained from analysis of several successive examinations, coupled with the judgment of the examiners, will lead to the refinement of these initial reports and the formulation of more stable scales that are able to be applied in the Higher School Certificate.
The Government will also trial this form of reporting in statewide tests for the School Certificate prior to its adoption in the Higher School Certificate.
The Government's strategies are designed to report student achievement as fairly and as accurately as possible. How the achievements of individual students are evaluated will be determined by the purposes of that evaluation.
The report will indicate the minimum standard expected of Higher School Certificate students in that subject. This will be set at a mark of 50 on a 100 point scale.
The Board of Studies will report on students' achievement as set out below, and as illustrated in the sample reporting portfolio in Appendix A.
REPORTING STUDENTS' RESULTS
In the reporting of students' results:
- each student will receive a comprehensive package including
- the Higher School Certificate testamur,
- a summary of results, and
- a course result sheet, providing additional information for each course completed;
- the course result sheet for each subject will indicate
- an examination mark with a numerical value in the range 0 to 100; the marks for a subject will represent a gradation of student achievement along the scales on which student achievement levels and the difficulty levels of examination questions and tasks are represented in that subject,
- a school-based assessment (having first been statistically moderated against the external examination marks),
- a graphical representation of where students lie on the performance scale for the subject (see example in Appendix A) showing the location of the student's Higher School Certificate Mark (obtained from a 50:50 combination of the examination result and school-based assessment)
- descriptors for the bands in which students' achievement lies to provide a summary indication of what they know and are able to do in the subject, and
- an indication of the minimum standard expected of Higher School Certificate students in the subject.