Demonstrate understanding of assessment moderation and its application to support consistent and comparable judgements of student learning.
Standard 5.3
Standard 5.3
“When teachers work together to consider the work students have produced, or listen to their presentations or analyse their electronic projects and so on, they bring the collective wisdom of all the people in the group to the exercise. More eyes (and consequently more brains) result in more reliable determinations of what students
understand.” ␣ Earl, 2004, p. 41
What is moderation?
Moderation occurs when teachers engage in partnerships and teams to discuss and develop concensus about student work. It confirms teacher judgements and allows them to be confident about their judgements. Moderation assures others about consistency against the standards. Key considerations include; standards, evidence and agreement.
Moderation is a quality assurance process that ensures appropriate standards.
It is a process for ensuring that marks or grades are awarded appropriately and consistently.
It is a form of feedback to assessors to help them align their marking standards with those of other markers.
What are the benefits of moderation?
Source: Queensland Studies Authority
Some moderation procedures
A suggested process
Before
During
As a school:
Source: adapted from New Zealand Ministry of Education
understand.” ␣ Earl, 2004, p. 41
What is moderation?
Moderation occurs when teachers engage in partnerships and teams to discuss and develop concensus about student work. It confirms teacher judgements and allows them to be confident about their judgements. Moderation assures others about consistency against the standards. Key considerations include; standards, evidence and agreement.
Moderation is a quality assurance process that ensures appropriate standards.
It is a process for ensuring that marks or grades are awarded appropriately and consistently.
It is a form of feedback to assessors to help them align their marking standards with those of other markers.
What are the benefits of moderation?
- Students have confidence that learning demonstrating similar achievement is judge at a similar standard.
- Teachers refine practice and develop insights into the learning needs of students .
- Schools have confidence that their standards are comparable with other schools across the state.
- Parents have confidence in the information provided by schools about the achievement and learning needs of students.
- Systems can identify learner trends and communicate information to schools; support public confidence in the system.
Source: Queensland Studies Authority
Some moderation procedures
- Creating transparency - assessment criteria should be made explicit.
- Self-moderation - markers can be inconsistent within themselves.
- Expert moderation - sometimes an independent viewpoint is needed.
- Peer moderation - markers meet to review their marking.
- Blind re-marking - the moderator (expert or peer) is not informed of the previous marker's judgement of a script.
- Confirmatory review - the moderator (expert or peer) is completely informed of the previous marker's judgement of a script.
- Resolving differences - sometimes arbitrators are needed.
- Follow through - agreements about the standards applied to the sample scripts need to be applied to all other scripts.
A suggested process
Before
- begin and end on time
- bring student work to the teacher moderation session
- listen to each other with respect and trust
- be open and willing to share new ideas
- make decisions based on improving student learning
During
- Each teacher discusses a range of evidence from one student. This could be for a student’s work which seems to clearly fit into a curriculum level, or work for which there is a level of uncertainty about the overall teacher judgement (e.g., should this student be ‘at’ standard for that year or ‘below’?)
- The evidence for that student is examined independently by each teacher in the team and an independent judgement made.
- The independent judgements by each teacher for each student’s work is recorded in a log. Therefore the team, and the school, are able to keep track of whether independent decisions are becoming more consistent over time.
- Having made independent judgements for each student, the team then discusses or debates any discrepancies, and comes to an agreed judgement for each student.
As a school:
- The team will then select one student’s work to take to whole-school moderation. The above process will be repeated.
Source: adapted from New Zealand Ministry of Education
