An evaluation of the technical and methodological aspects of the School Entry Assessment Kit Publications
Publication Details
School Entry Assessment (SEA) is an instrument designed to assess schools entrants' skills in early literacy, early numeracy, and oral language. It was first introduced in New Zealand schools in 1997. The primary purpose of SEA is to provide diagnostic data for teachers to use to improve student learning. The Australian Council for Educational Research was contracted by the Ministry of Education in 2001 to evaluate the technical and methodological aspects of SEA. The purpose of the evaluation was to provide information which would enhance the collation and analysis of SEA data. The results from this evaluation are contained in the following report.
Author(s): Prue Anderson, John Lindsey, Wolfram Schultz, Christian Monseur and Marlon Meiers, ACER. Report prepared for the Ministry of Education.
Date Published: 2004
Executive Summary
The School Entry Assessment (SEA) is an instrument designed to assess school entrants' skills in early literacy, early numeracy and oral language. These skills are assessed in three separate components: Concepts about Print, Checkout and Tell Me. The SEA is child centred, places assessment in meaningful contexts and emphasises process as well as product. The primary purpose of the SEA is to provide diagnostic data for teachers to use to improve student learning. The secondary purpose is the use of SEA data at the school level for the purpose of evaluating programs and at the system level to provide a national picture of the literacy and numeracy skills school entrants demonstrate. The purpose of this evaluation is to provide information that will inform the Ministry of Education's intention to enhance the collation and analysis of SEA data at the system level and to encourage a greater number of schools to use the SEA.
Key Findings
The critique and recommendations offered in this evaluation are made in a general context of commendation of the quality of the SEA. We recognise that the SEA was developed in a very short time frame, almost five years ago, and there has been much research in the area of early literacy and numeracy development and the effective use of assessment since. Given the innovative nature of the SEA at the time of its development, we are confident that the Ministry of Education's intention to enhance the collation of SEA data at the system level and increase schools' use of the SEA is best supported by a revision of the SEA that restores its place at the forefront of innovative and useful school entry assessment. A quantitative evaluation of the SEA data schools supply to the Ministry of Education revealed problems of within-school sample bias and problems of whole test reliability for the Tell Me component of the SEA caused by the design of this component. A qualitative evaluation of the individual components of the SEA revealed a number of areas of concern:
- the range of literacy and numeracy skills addressed by the SEA is not as comprehensive as the range of skills that recent research suggests are critical, in the early years of schooling, for the development of proficiency;
- the SEA does not link items to underpinning models of learning development that would provide support to teachers for the effective use of diagnostic data;
- the lack of suitable instruments linked to the SEA reduces schools' capacity to use the SEA to evaluate learning programs; and
- while Concepts about Print provides a model of effective administrative instructions, this model has not been systematically adopted by Checkout and Tell Me. Also the reliability of Tell Me data is possibly compromised by the design of the marking guides.
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