Assessment in the Digital Technologies curriculum

With the implementation of the new Digital Technologies curriculum, teachers are really looking for guidance and support to assess student learning in this area.

Assessment is the process of gathering and interpreting evidence to make judgements about student learning, and is the link between learning outcomes, content, and teaching and learning activities.

When assessing students, it is important to focus on what students know and understand, and what they need to know in order to progress. Assessment should align with the achievement standards and content descriptions in the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies, and with what is taught and learnt in the classroom.

Teachers in states and territories where curriculum authorities have modified the Australian Curriculum: Digital Technologies, should follow a similar process, referring to their own relevant guidelines.

For more information about approaches for assessment to support the Digital Technologies curriculum, you can view the report developed by the CSER University of Adelaide.

Read the report

Assessment resources

This is a new area of work we are undertaking at the Digital Technologies Hub, so we thought we would share some of the resources we have made available so far.

As work progresses further, assessment ideas for more areas of the Digital Technologies curriculum will be covered on our website.

Years 3–10

Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge
This resource describes how the Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge can be used for formative assessment. The free Bebras Computational Thinking Challenge is a set of short questions, called Bebras tasks. These tasks can be answered without prior knowledge about computational thinking.

Years 4–6

Dr Scratch
This assessment resource provides advice about how to use the program Dr Scratch to analyse your student's Scratch projects, and use the results to assist in their learning.

Years 4–8

Scratch Creative Computing Guide
The Scratch Creative Computing Guide includes a teacher guide and a learner workbook. There is also a series of units comprising learning activities paired with assessment activities and templates that can be used to support the use of the Scratch (MIT) platform. The Scratch Creative Computing Guide supports assessment activities with visual programming environments.

Years 5–10

Assessing students’ work in robotics
This short video provides guidance on assessing robotics projects. Dr Ethan Danahy talks through his assessment approach for a unit where teams of students design and create a robotic animal. This could be useful for teachers who are seeking ideas for designing assessment around robotics projects, including assessment characteristics.

Years 7–10

Assessment and reporting advice and guidelines
The Assessment and reporting advice and guidelines document supports secondary teachers to implement and assess the Technologies learning area. The document unpacks both Design and Technologies and Digital Technologies, and provides guidance around planning for learning and assessment. It has been provided by the Queensland Curriculum and Assessment Authority.

Webinars

Approaches to support assessment of the Digital Technologies curriculum

Presented by: Rebecca Vivian
30 August 2017, 4.30–5.30pm AEST
Rebecca and her team have developed a framework to help teachers with the interpretation of the ACARA achievement strands. In this webinar Rebecca will share some resources to support assessment of the Digital Technologies curriculum. She will discuss some approaches that can be used to design assessment tasks, and will also provide attendees with some assessment guides.

Register now!

Cyber security: Why cyber is part of STEM

Presented by: Steve Morrill
Steve introduced the topic of cyber science and explained why it is part of STEM. This is a practical discussion of tools and tactics that can be implemented in the classroom today.

The recording for this, and all of our previous webinars can be found on our webinars page.

Upcoming events

Find out what competitions, conferences and professional learning opportunities are on offer in 2017 through our events calendar.

NCSS Challenge; 31 July–3 September
K–12 Digital Classroom Practice Conference; 1–2 September, VIC
Understanding the Digital Technologies Curriculum 7–10; 6–8 September, TAS
Girls Programming Network September; 10 September, ACT
Technology in the Tropics conference; 16 October, QLD
STELR Professional Learning Session; 16 October, QLD

Digital Technologies making news

Fantastic, fast formative assessment tools, Edutopia
Take three! 55 digital tools and apps for formative assessment success, Northwest Evaluation Association™ (NWEA™)
15 must follow teaching strategies for the digital classroom, LiveTiles

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