Indicators of Progression in Technology
The Indicators of Progression, as presented in the matrices below, provide support for teachers to interpret the Achievement Objectives for each strand of the technology curriculum within The New Zealand Curriculum (NZC) (2007). There are three matrices, each focused on one of the three strands of the technology curriculum, describing the eight levels of the NZC. Each matrix:
- restates the Achievement Objectives for each level
- provides guidance to teachers on what they could do to support student learning at each level
- provides suggestions indicative of what student achievement a particular level might look like.
The teacher guidance highlights the importance of the teacher's role in supporting student learning. It also acknowledges how the nature of teaching needs to change to ensure students are able to take more responsibility for their learning as they progress from levels 1-8 of the NZC. This has been emphasised by using the following terms to denote this shift in responsibilities from teacher to student.
Provide is used when the teacher takes full responsibility for introducing and explicitly teaching new knowledge/skill or practices.
Guide is used when the teacher assumes students will have some level of understanding/competency to draw from but continues to take the majority of the responsibility for developing these further.
Support is used when the balance shifts towards the student taking more responsibility for their learning, drawing from their past learning to consolidate and extend their understandings. In this case the teacher plays a more supportive role through questioning and challenging students to support them in their learning.
The teacher guidance also uses the term ensure to denote when the teacher plays a monitoring role to check that conditions critical for learning are met. For example, in 'planning for practice' and 'outcome development and evaluation' the teacher must ensure an appropriate brief is available to guide student work.
The indicators of achievement do not define specific knowledge and skills, but rather focus on generic understandings and capabilities that students should demonstrate across a range of different contexts. It is expected that teachers should be able to contextualise the indicators by re-phrasing them into appropriate language for the unit being studied, and the students they are teaching. By doing this the indicators can be used as targeted assessment tools inside the classroom with students.
The teacher guidance and indicators of progression for the technological practice strand have been developed through classroom research and refined through subsequent trialling. These indicators are therefore ready to be used to guide formative and summative assessment practices, planning decisions and the development of effective and efficient reporting mechanisms for multiple audiences, including the students, their caregivers, and future teachers both within and across schools.
The teacher guidance and indicators of progression for the technological knowledge and the nature of technology strands are currently in draft form as they are still in their development stage. These indicators are therefore NOT ready to be used for summative assessment practices or reporting purposes. They are being made available for teachers to use as discussion tools to increase understandings of the two new strands; they also provide support for formative interactions between teachers and students when developing knowledge and skills inherent in the two new strands, for the purpose of enhancing student technological practice. These will be reviewed again prior to the requirement for teachers to report on these two strands.
You can use the navigation table below to quickly jump to a particular indicator:
