Developing senior internal assessments

Intention:

In previous years, assessments had often been stand alone tasks which often seemed devoid of context or relative to students’ interests.   In discussion with a Digital Technology teacher at Tikipunga, Excellere College and reflecting on the assessment options suggested at the technology day in Whangarei I have decided to incorporate the Concept Design assessments from the Generic Technology curriculum.  This should hopefully give students the opportunity to work on a project for the whole year.  

Utilising guidelines from NZQA, Tikipunga High School and Tamaki College assessment exemplars I wrote the concept design assessments for Level 1, 2 and 3.   Hinerau Anderson (Head of Digital Technology) from Tamaki College was a great help too, she shared with me some excellent assessments that were rich with embedded learning resources which linked back to the marking criteria.    

Setting up all the assessments with hyperlinks to learning resources and marking criteria was a lot of work initially but hopefully going forward into 2018 it is robust enough to be carried over without too much modification.   Here is a link to the Level 2 Brief Assessment.    

Outcome

I do feel I have achieved this goal, the senior internal assessments have been developed to include a comprehensive design course starting with the brief, then the concept design, prototype and potentially the digital outcome.  In my opinion this is an improvement on the stand alone assessments which happened in previous years and often seemed devoid of context or relative to students’ interests.