Australian assessment in literacy and numeracy
Marion Meiers

Marion Meiers, senior research fellow at the Australian Council for Educational Research, provides an update on a longitudinal study investigating literacy and numeracy in primary schools and the kinds of assessment tasks being used.

Since 1999, the Longitudinal Literacy and Numeracy Study (LLANS) has traced the growth in literacy and numeracy of a single cohort of students in primary school. One thousand children from a random Australia-wide sample of 100 schools formed the cohort for this study.

Many assessment programs focus on a particular stage of schooling. In Australia, for example, state and territory testing programmes collect achievement data for all students at Years 3, 5 and 7. The National School English Literacy Survey, conducted in 1996 by the Australian Council for Educational Research (ACER), provided a picture of the literacy achievements of a national sample of students in Years 3 and 5 . The LLANS seeks to provide data that tracks a sample of individual pupils in literacy and numeracy across the years of schooling. This will lead to better understanding of the nature of growth in literacy and numeracy amongst Australian students.

The starting age for schooling varies across Australia, from 4.5 years to 5.11 years. The cohort in this study, therefore, included students between the ages of 4.6 and 6 at the time of the initial LLANS assessment. The children who commenced school in 1999 are, in 2004, in their sixth year at school.

Since 1999, students have completed assessment tasks in literacy and numeracy, which will help to define achievement scales. In the first two years of school, assessments took place at the beginning and end of the school year, to take account of the amount of learning that occurs in those years. Since then, students have been assessed in the second term of the school year. In the first five surveys, the assessments were conducted as interviews, with the teacher scoring the student's responses on a marking guide. From 2002, when the students were in their fourth year, the assessments took the form of pen and paper tasks, which were assessed by ACER.

Teachers who administered the tasks reported that they found them useful, and have been able to adapt them for classroom use. The marking guides used by teachers in the early years provided clear and explicit ways for teachers to judge and record students' responses during the course of the assessment interview.

The series of literacy and numeracy tasks included many hands-on activities and authentic texts, for example, high-quality children's picture storybooks. The tasks were built around contexts familiar to students, and within the curriculums of the different states and territories. They included photos of print in the environment, such as signs at a petrol station, and cereal packet, and these were used in student assessments in their first weeks at school.

In the first three years, the literacy tasks assessed students' capacity to understand a picture storybook read aloud to them, as well as their own fluency in reading from an early reading book. Concepts about print, phonemic awareness and writing were also assessed in these years. In the fourth year, students were given reading assessments that focused on their ability to recognise information directly stated in the text, to make connections between different parts of a text and to infer meaning.

The study included items of varying difficulty in the assessments. At the end of the first year at school, students were asked to write about what was happening in an illustration selected from a picture storybook that had been read to them. The marking guide used by teachers to assess this writing showed that 70 per cent of students could relate an event relevant to the selected part of the story. Fifty-five per cent of students wrote one or more generally recognisable sentences, 22 per cent wrote some recognisable words, nine per cent wrote groups of letters and word-like spaces, while the remainder wrote a continuous string of letters, or scribble.

The assessments revealed that some students find the tasks easy, while others at the same stage of schooling find the same tasks difficult. As they are developed, the achievement scales will reflect this: the tasks that most students find easy are located at the early levels of the scale and the tasks that most students find difficult are located at the higher levels of the scales.

The LLANS scales, when completed, will provide progress maps for literacy and numeracy. They will be useful for further research, and have already been used in other longitudinal studies and for teachers. The final LLANS assessments will be conducted in term 2 in 2005 and the LLANS scales will then be finalised. A full report of the first year of the study will be completed by the end of 2004, and reports on subsequent years will be available in 2005 and 2006. Details of these reports will be available on the ACER website, www.acer.edu.au.

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