Curriculum and assessment

Curriculum, assessment and reporting to parents and whānau - findings from the NZCER 2019 National survey of English-medium primary schools

This report presents findings from a case study at Pakuranga Intermediate on their collaboration with a group of performing and visual artists in 2012-2014. It's part of a wider NZCER investigation into successful and sustained collaborations between schools, communities and professional experts.

What are New Zealand secondary students' experiences with money and financial products, and how do they behave towards money? This research report also looks at what schools offer in terms of financial literacy programmes  and any barriers to the implementation of financial literacy teaching.  The research was commissioned by the Commission for Financial Capability (previously the Commission for Financial Literacy and Retirement Income).

This new free "rapid prototype" resource will be of particular use in school staff professional development workshops, and can also be used or adapted for use with students, parents, school Boards of Trustees, and anyone with an interest in what and how young people learn, and how education could be organised in the future. It invites groups to explore their current thinking and to imagine alternatives that provoke new questions about knowledge, and the roles, relationships, and structures that are needed to support future-oriented learning. 

This report documents views and experiences of NCEA from NZCER's 2012 National Survey of Secondary Schools. It shows support for NCEA has remained high among principals and consolidated among teachers, school trustees and parents. It’s the first time parental support has risen above 50 percent in the survey series and it was higher among parents with a child in the senior school.

Schools have generally welcomed the recent changes to NCEA such as endorsement of whole courses with merit or excellence and the increased support provided by best practice workshops for teachers. However the report shows the high teacher workload associated with NCEA remains unresolved. It also explores views on whether NCEA is driving the curriculum and includes responses to the Government’s recently announced policy target that by 2017, 85 percent of students should gain an NCEA Level 2 qualification or its equivalent.

The latest report from the NZCER national survey series looks at how the New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) is being implemented in the country's primary and intermediate schools. The primary school curriculum: Assimilation, adaptation, transformation draws on data from our 2010 survey to explore differences across the sector in terms of progress on curriclum implementation, three years on from the publication of the NZC in 2007. Issues covered in the report include: how confident principals and teachers are with the curriculum, which aspects they view as most important, the professional learning teachers are doing and the challenges of creating a curriculum to meet the learning needs of all students.

This paper describes some of the findings from an evaluation of the Fruit in Schools (FiS) initiative. It outlines how the community development and health promotion approaches used by FiS schools offered students increased leadership opportunities.

This interim research report provides examples of how some schools have approached the revised curriculum and the Key Competencies, and discusses the processes, tensions, and opportunities of leading and managing curriculum change.

This article provides examples of how some schools have approached the revised curriculum and the Key Competencies, and discusses ways of leading and managing curriculum change.

This paper discusses the possible purposes for assessing the Key Competencies, and the assessment approaches that fit with these purposes.