Recent Developments in National Assessment Policy in Education

This paper focuses on national developments in assessment policy during 1998 and early 1999. It describes current curriculum and assessment policy in New Zealand for the compulsory education sector, including requirements for schools, and assessment programmes which provide information on the achievement of individual students, whole cohorts of students, and samples of students for system-wide overviews. Three different kinds of monitoring of school effectiveness are also considered. The second half of the article focuses on the Government’s recent Green Paper, Assessment for Success in Primary Schools, which proposed a package of four kinds of assessment activities to fill identified information gaps. After discussing some of the issues raised by the primary education sector about the Green Paper, some unresolved policy issues and possible future directions for a comprehensive national assessment policy are outlined