Journal article

Printouts of students’ ethnicities can help remind teachers that they are responsible for educating, and responding to the needs of, students with a range of ethnicities. However, such bare-bones information is very unlikely to fully represent students’ identities. This is especially so for students with multiple ethnicities. A simple list cannot begin to convey the complex and ever-changing nature of students’ ethnic identities.

In this edition of Assessment News we take a close look at the new Supplementary Tests of Achievement in Reading (STAR). In particular, we consider how confident teachers can be in comparing their students’ test scores against the national norms that have been published by the New Zealand Council for Educational Research (NZCER).

In this article Cathy Wylie, a chief researcher at the New Zealand Council for Educational Research, provides an account of New Zealand’s education system from the introduction of self-managing schools under Tomorrow’s Schools through to the present day. Dr Wylie draws on her recent book Vital Connections to critically examine the assumptions and structures that have underpinned self-managing schools. Her book describes the many ways in which schools are disconnected from the Ministry of Education and from one another.

It is estimated that the World Wide Web contains more than 7.8 billion pages. As a consequence, how children understand how to find and use information on the Web is becoming increasingly important. This article details a study that investigated the strategies that a small group of Year 6 children used in accessing information from the Web. The authors consider the implications of these findings for the ways in which teachers approach information literacy and the changing role of the Internet in schools.