 Hello and welcome to the third edition of my video log which I've entitled Fanning the Flames of Wonder because I consider it to be the essence of education. In the first two editions I spoke about the significance of the first two words of Akara's name about our national remit covered by the word Australian and also about the important work that we do in curriculum. Now in this third edition I'd like to focus on the third word in our name, assessment. We're going to do this in two parts, but in part one I'd like to set the scene. Assessment is a key part of the educational process and a comprehensive and balanced assessment system will have a variety of types of assessment that serve different purposes and that work together in an integrated way. Generally educationalists make a distinction between assessment of learning or summative assessment and assessment for learning or formative assessment. Summative assessment is the snapshot in time that lets the teacher, students and their parents know how well each student has completed the learning tasks and activities associated with a course of study. It provides information about student achievement. While it provides useful reporting information including for school principals, system authorities and in the case of exams such as HSC and VCE to tertiary education institutions summative assessment often has little effect on learning. Formative assessment on the other hand is an ongoing process that has a diagnostic purpose helping teachers to monitor students on a day-to-day basis and to modify their teaching based on what the students need to be successful. This assessment provides students with timely specific feedback that they need to make adjustments to their learning. Then there is assessment as learning which develops and supports students' metacognitive skills. This form of assessment is crucial in helping students become lifelong learners. As students engage in peer and self-assessment they learn to make sense of information related to prior knowledge and use it for new learning. Students develop a sense of ownership and efficacy when they use teacher, peer and self-assessment feedback to make adjustments, improvements and changes to what they understand. Now it is impossible for any one form of assessment to fulfil all these various purposes. A good example of summative assessment is the Higher School Certificate in New South Wales or the Victorian Certificate of Education which summarise the learning that students have achieved over the course of their time at school. These assessments are used for competitive entry into tertiary education and for that reason they are high stakes for students. Napland on the other hand is less formative and more summative as a type of assessment but without the high stakes for students. It's not diagnostic in the way formative assessment is but it can help schools and system authorities evaluate the effectiveness of the programs they have put in place to improve literacy and numeracy outcomes and to target effort and investment to areas of educational need. It can help parents get a picture of how their children are progressing relative to their previous literacy and numeracy achievement and to that of their peers. One thing Napland definitely does not do and cannot do is measure the overall quality of a school. Napland as a type of summative assessment that is diagnostic at the school and system level can only ever be part of a comprehensive and balanced assessment system. It should not be seen as the be all and end all, the one size fits all measure. It has a useful but limited function and ought not to be criticised for not being what it's not supposed to be. So using Napland for a purpose for which it is not intended or well suited does not make a lot of sense and neither does blaming Napland for not being good is something it wasn't meant to be good at. Napland is often criticised for not being a good indicator of overall school quality. Well, it's not meant to be. It would be like criticising a good rugby front row forward for not also being a very good fullback. It's not a valid criticism. But that's not to say Napland can't be improved. And in part two of this edition on assessment I'll say more about that. Thanks for watching.