Standards Review Questions & Answers

Why was the standards review initiated?
To improve programme and pathway coherence for learners; to improve the design of all standards; to align standards with the NZC; to enhance support for assessors’ professional practice; and to improve the credibility of the NCEA and the NQF.

What’s the Subject Matrix?
It provides an overview of a subject’s NQF assessment structure for the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) standards. The matrix indicates the outcomes to be assessed (the titles), the number of standards and credits available at each level, for each subject, and whether they should be internally or externally assessed.

What’s Curriculum-derived and Non Curriculum–derived?
NZC-derived standards have become achievement standards and any current unit standards which is curriculum-derived has been rewritten as an achievement standard (or incorporated into an achievement standard) unless it is below curriculum Level 6 or if it duplicates another standard. Non-curriculum-derived unit standards and all ITO standards will continue to be available for the NCEA at all levels, but these will not show on the matrix because the matrix focuses on the NZC only.

What’s the definition of a standard?
It describes what a student must know or do in order to gain the credits for that standard. All will describe content (concepts/skills/knowledge being assessed). Currently there are standards that contain reference to suitable contexts or content for any assessment against the standard. There is a need to be more precise with their terminology because there has been some confusion with respect to standards that ought not to be too prescriptive with regard to context. The appropriate relationship between content and context varies between subjects. The NZC is intended to be enabling so standards should be written in such a way as to provide schools and teachers with opportunity to select contexts which are best suited for their students at that school, to deliver the outcomes described in the curriculum.

What about literacy & numeracy?
As part of the consultation the Ministry and NZQA were seeking responses to the introduction of unit standards in literacy and numeracy.

Reference Memorandum to All Principals; from Bali Haque, NZQA & Mary Chamberlain, MofE; dated 29 May

  General

• Assessment will be by what are known as Standards, ie there will not be separate achievement standards and unit standards
• Teaching and Learning Guides linked to The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) have been/are being developed for each subject and are intended to assist with programme planning. Most are now available on TKI.
• All subjects will have Achievement Objectives as either identified in the NZC or developed, eg Accounting
• and Business they are stated in the Teaching and Learning Guides and will be the beginning of the standards matrix
• There are two tiers of subjects – first tier are those that are identified in the learning areas of NZC and second tier are the many subjects that are not stated in NZC but well established as school subjects and assessed with Achievement Standards/Unit Standards
• Accounting is a second tier subject
• Business is a new second tier subject which is having standards written
• Economics is under Social Sciences in NZC
• Digital Technologies has assessment under several “subjects” and there is to be work done in these areas
• The matrix and standards alignment development has been contract by the Ministry of Education to subject associations. In February this year a comprehensive 2-day meeting was held to discuss progress and ‘the way ahead’ as it would be true to say that the process has been a maturing one where there have been changes in requirements from time to time that have resulted in rewriting and refining.
• CETA has been involved in the development of Accounting, Economics and Business.
• The Ministry of Education and NZQA are committed to ensuring the quality of the standards and assessment; that clearly indicate the difference of achieved, merit and excellence; and intend to development of exemplars that accurately reflect the requirements of the standards and the assessment. They have acknowledged that introduction of first Achievement Standards and the
  related exemplars could have been much better
• Level 1 of NCEA will be introduced in 2011, Level 2 2012 and Level 3 2013, with Years 9/10 in 2010 with the exception of Business Studies Level 1 will be introduced in 2010, Level 3 in 2011 and Level 3 in 2012.

NZCETA was guided in the alignment process by a number of directives from the Ministry of Education and NZQA. The most significant of these were: