NZQA announced further details about the e-MCAT trial last week in an email to its Principals & Nominees network (email on May 7 from Richard Thornton, Deputy Chief Executive, Assessment Division; NZQA granted permission for me to discuss its contents here).

The gist of it:

• the trial will take place in September, alongside the regular MCAT
• It will be a practice assessment that will not earn credits, nor will it count towards NCEA
• up to 20 schools will be involved
• the trial will use an electronic version of the 2013 (modified) MCAT assessment
• it’s still just a trial –

The trial will be used to evaluate the method of assessment delivery and assessment marking, and whether both meet best assessment practice. Feedback from the students and teachers as to the format of the assessment will also inform any future work and development around digital assessment.

For more information, they directed readers to the new area of the NZQA website that I mentioned in my post last week:

If you have any questions or would like any further detail please view the innovation pages (http://www.nzqa.govt.nz/about-us/our-role/what-we-do/where-are-we-going/), recently added to the NZQA website, that outline what we’ve been doing and what we’ve been thinking about in terms of the future and digital assessment.

The specific information about the e-MCAT trial can be found by clicking on the “What we’ve been doing” post-it note at the bottom of the page in the website that the email mentions.

Ask your school’s Principal or Principal’s Nominee to see the email if you want to read the original (I’m not sure if NZQA intended for me to reproduce the email here in its entirety, so to be safe I’ll make you go find it yourself!)

But wait –

hasn’t the Ministry of Education just announced consultation for a proposal to change the MCAT to an Internal assessment?

Yes, on Monday it was announced that the Ministry want to remove the MCAT and change AS91027 (Algebra) into an internal assessment. The very same MCAT that NZQA want to change into a digital external assessment.

I spoke to Sue Chalmers, Manager of Secondary Examinations at NZQA, about this apparent contradiction.

When I first heard about the consultation it appeared that the left hand didn’t know what the right hand was doing, but Sue clarified a couple of things for me. She explained that regardless of what happens to the MCAT in the future, with regard to trialling a digital external assessment this year the MCAT is still the most convenient one to trial, because it’s not in the external assessment system with the rest of the November exams.

Whatever NZQA learn about running digital assessments from this trial will still be relevant and useful for other externals whether the MCAT remains an external or not. At the same time, whatever NZQA learn about assessing the MCAT specifically through running the trial will still be relevant and useful for the AS91027 standard whether it remains an external or not. The MCAT may or may not be administered by NZQA in future (depending on the outcome of the Ministry of Education’s consultation) but it could still be set up as a digital assessment which schools could administer as an internal assessment whenever their students were ready (as with other internals currently). It would just be a different organisation that designs this digital internal assessment, for example NZAMT or some other interested group.

I’m encouraged that the word is starting to get out about the coming changes, and I’m glad that my initial fears that NZQA & MoE weren’t aware of each others’ plans for the MCAT were unfounded. I’m still a little concerned though that the whole notion of assessing digitally hasn’t really penetrated the collective consciousness of the secondary education sector.

We need to be teaching with ICT and e-learning tools. It’s no longer optional. Digital assessment is coming very soon, and our students need to be familiar with the tools.

I’ll keep you posted with updates as I learn more. In the meantime, be sure to check out the NZ Maths & Statistics ICT Community to share your ideas and use others’ resources.

bit.ly/NZmathsICT

Have your say in the Ministry of Education’s consultation about whether AS91027 should remain an externally assessed standard (the MCAT) or become an internal. Visit the TKI website for details and to download the consultation forms. Consultation ends on Friday 20 June 2014.

In April last year Dr Karen Poutasi, the Chief Executive of New Zealand Qualification Authority, announced in her 2013 SPANZ presentation that NZQA were planning to run “on-demand, online assessments” for NCEA* external assessments. She gave the move to online assessment an 8-year timeframe:

A lot more investigative work needs to be undertaken before our actual plans and timelines are finalised but we are reasonably confident that we can reach a position within 8 years where most students will be sitting examinations using a digital device.  Moving to on demand assessment is then only one step away and making that next step will depend upon the sector and how all the steps up to that point have been received.

Dr Poutasi went on to say that the MCAT assessment (Mathematics Common Assessment Task) for Algebra will likely be the first assessment to move online:

The Mathematics CAT will be in its third iteration in 2013 and is now established within the senior secondary school landscape. Our thinking is the Maths CAT provides a very good platform to trial and pilot some of the digital assessment elements.

Whilst the move to online assessment is exciting, the choice of standard for the pilot struck me as odd, given that currently the MCAT is the most locked-down of all Maths standards with regard to technology. At present, not a single calculator is allowed in the assessment; and yet this will be the first standard across the entire curriculum to make the move to online external assessment.

Students will finally be allowed to bring in their calculators for the Algebra assessment.

What I found more concerning, however, was that this announcement went relatively unnoticed at the coalface. Most classroom teachers that I spoke to over the next twelve months had not heard this news.

This worries me.

In order to adequately prepare students for digital assessment in the MCAT, we need to be integrating e-learning activities into our Mathematics teaching programmes and assessment preparation. Across the entire country, for every student. Teachers need to hear this. Do spread the word!

And it turns out we don’t have 4-6 years as one might imagine from the 8-year full rollout timeframe. The first pilot is going ahead this September. This announcement was posted in a hidden corner of the NZQA website recently, as well as emailed out to teachers who are enrolled with Language Perfect:

Computer Based Assessment: e-MCAT

Many NZ schools use “Language Perfect” (a computer based tool for learning languages)

Using the same base technology, NZQA is partnering with Language Perfect to pilot a computer based assessment for maths – e-MCAT. This pilot will happen in 8-10 schools from September 2014.

Hear from Craig Smith, one of the founders of Education Perfect.

In April this year, Dr Poutasi discussed the changes in her 2014 SPANZ presentation. She didn’t specifically mention the MCAT, but spoke more to the big-picture changes that NZQA are making and planning.

Students will be able to sit their examinations on computer or on paper with the same questions being offered in both media. We are confident that we can begin to roll this out in some levels or some subjects for the 2016 examination round.

It is important to note that dual assessment will be an interim measure as schools grapple with their own challenges regarding the provision and use of technology in their classrooms. The objective is to reach a point where paper examinations become a thing of the past and all students who undertake external standards will complete the assessment using technology.

I think this is fantastic. On-demand, online assessment will be a massive leap closer to bringing formal national assessment into line with what is known about effective assessment for learning, not to mention the administrative benefit to those marking and moderating the scripts.

But this is scary. It’s scary because teachers need to be integrating e-learning into their programmes. Now. In every school. Which means they need training, they need to be shown tools to try, they need to be given time to play and become familiar with the  tools themselves, they need to talk to each other and share ideas.

If only there was some network set up where maths teachers could easily find and share resources, and discuss issues as they grapple with this monumental change…

Enter the Maths & Statistics ICT Community. Please spread the word about this group where Maths teachers can share ideas, download resources, discuss issues, and network with other Maths teachers who are on this journey.

The journey is no longer optional.

bit.ly/NZmathsICT

*NCEA is the National Certificate of Educational Achievement, NZ’s  formal secondary school qualification for Years 11-13 (15 to 18 year old students).