Innovative Online Assessment of Early Years Literacy and Numeracy

In 2012, Danielle Anzai led the design and trial of an early years online assessment that was to be completed independently by students without teacher intervention. At the time of development, no formal assessment had been created with these parameters. Furthermore, these six year olds were scattered in schools throughout one of the more diverse environments in the world – the Northern Territory of Australia. Whilst the urban areas offered easy access to technology, some students lived in extremely remote areas where the school building was the only large structure for hundreds of kilometres. Other students belonged to the School of the Air and communicated through CB radios with their teachers and classmates. The design and delivery had to take all of this into account as well as the cultural and linguistic background, as around a third of the students were Indigenous Australians or new arrivals. The presentation will focus on how all of these factors influenced the design of an assessment that trial data showed was successful in its ability to measure student achievement.