Moderation

National Standards Key Information - Fact Sheet 5

Moderation is the process of teachers sharing their expectations and understanding of standards with each other in order to improve the consistency of their decisions about student learning.

The moderation process helps teachers make dependable decisions about student progress and achievement.

 It improves decisions at one point in time, as well as over time.

Schools use moderation processes to increase assessment dependability.

The moderation process

• The moderation process begins with the planning of teaching, learning and assessment.
• Moderation involves a group of teachers discussing evidence of student learning.
• Assessments of the evidence are made using specific shared criteria.
• The criteria may be exemplified through annotated examples and other national resources (for example the Running Record DVD/booklet, the Diagnostic Interview and Getting Started Numeracy Development Project Books and New Zealand Curriculum Exemplars).
• Moderation may involve teachers;
• Between classes
• Syndicate moderation meetings
• School Moderation meetings
• UH Cluster moderation meetings

Why is moderation important?

Making reliable, valid, evidence-based decisions

Moderation helps teachers to increase the dependability of the assessment information they gather. This improves the decisions they make about student learning.

Teacher-guided moderation between students helps them to develop their skills of self and peer-assessment. Moderation has a direct, positive impact on teaching and learning as both teacher and student develop shared expectations and understanding of what quality work looks like and what criteria define it. Both students’ and teachers’ assessment capability can be enhanced.

This information can also encourage the development of teachers’ self-review skills and inform professional development decision-making.

• Deconstructing what the evidence tells us and what the difficulty is
• What is the data telling us?
• What is it saying to me? What do you notice?
• What is the issue/difficulty?

Moderation will involve professional discussions amongst staff within a school and, where appropriate, across a cluster of schools. Teachers can justify their OTJ in terms of the dependability of the evidence and the process used to determine the OTJ.

Moderation supports assessment for learning

The moderation process engages teachers and students with the principles of assessment for learning.

 Learning conversations

• Teachers and students discuss their interpretations of achievement criteria using evidence.
• Teachers and students compare samples of work with exemplars.
• Teachers and students clarify current skills, knowledge and understanding, past improvements, and future learning goals.
• Students receive dependable achievement information to act on.

 Teaching conversations

• Teachers learn from each other so curriculum and pedagogical content knowledge improves.
• Professional learning needs can be identified when analysing the achievement data or through the moderation.
• Classroom teaching and learning programmes can be adjusted to meet student learning needs.
• Individual and collective student achievement trends become clearer.

Partnership conversations

• Evidence of learning can be confidently shared.
• Reliable information is used to make teaching and learning decisions, which helps when communicating with other professional agencies.
• Dependable information can be discussed with parents, families, and whanau.
• Dependable achievement information influences strategic directions, including budget allocation and professional development planning.

 Assessment practice improves

• Systemic and individual teacher decisions are made with increased confidence.
• Reliability, validity, and fairness within the process are enhanced, so achievement decisions are defensible.
• Dependable information is recorded and used for a variety of teaching, learning, and reporting purposes.

 Making consistent decisions over time

Making consistent, reliable, and valid decisions across different points in time is important when schools report student progress or compare cohort data with historical information.

Assessment judgments can change over time. This is called ‘assessment creep’. All schools experience variables that challenge the consistency of practice such as staff changes, changes in student numbers, or changing education demands.

 Consistent moderation over time can prevent this in a number of ways:

• Always applying the same standardised criteria ensures consistency over time.
• Where nationally standardised criteria or exemplars are available, these become the same external reference used each year or each time. These exemplars would be used within the practice phase of the moderation process.
• Moderators will change over time but the same criteria and associated references will remain and continue to guide decisions.
• To augment this approach schools add their own school-based student samples to incorporate local flavour, contexts or cultural richness to the exemplar collection.