Testing for all skews My School
Author: Tanya Chilcott
Publisher: News Ltd
Publication: Courier Mail, Page 26 (Fri 12 Mar 2010)
AUTHORITIES in charge of the controversial My School website have acknowledged that schools have been disadvantaged on the site if they allowed students with learning disabilities to sit the national tests.
In an interview with The Courier-Mail, the Australian Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Authority also revealed a new national curriculum could soon be set for special education students.
Authority chairman Barry McGaw said that under the current My School set-up, the true performance of some schools that allowed students with learning disabilities to sit the national exams was not being accurately reflected.
Students can be exempted from the national tests on the basis of intellectual disability.
''There are students with learning difficulties who take the NAPLAN (National Assessment Program - Literacy And Numeracy) test because their schools want them to, their parents want them to, but then the school doesn't look so good as a consequence of that,'' Professor McGaw said.
''That is why we think we need to adjust (it).''
He said a plan to track individual students for the first time this year using the 2008 and 2010 results would help because it would allow schools to be compared not just on socio-economic factors, but also on student improvement. ''We can get where they were and where they are and get measures of change, then you can more fairly deal with them,'' he said.
Authority CEO Peter Hill said another exciting development was a national curriculum for students with special needs.
''What we are doing, in a forward-looking way, is to look at curriculum for these students,'' Dr Hill said.
''For some of them - for example, (those) with very severe disabilities - it is a great achievement just to tie up a shoe lace . . . and there is some great work that is being done around the nation into how you can set sequences of outcomes for these kids and report against achievement objectives.
''So we want to build on that work, particularly work done at the University of Melbourne, and ensure that we can provide a way of talking about content for those sorts of kids and achievement standards for those kids.''
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