This probe study provides a practitioner voice to illustrate the extent to which one aim of New Zealand’s National Education Monitoring Project (NEMP) has influenced classroom teachers’ assessment knowledge and skills relating to designing and using assessment tasks and interpreting the information gained from their use to guide future programme decisions.
Focus group interviews were held with three groups of teachers: (i) classroom teachers who hold formal roles with the NEMP programme as teacher administrators and/or teacher markers; (ii) teachers with no formal role with NEMP; and (iii) teacher with professional development responsibilities as principals, advisors, and teacher education lecturers. Semi-structured interview schedules provided opportunities for the participants to share the ways they had accessed the NEMP information and were using it in their daily work to inform their assessment data decisions.
The participants also made recommendations on how to enhance current dissemination and reporting of the NEMP findings. Their key recommendations to the NEMP office were to extend the roles of teacher administrators and teacher markers to help teachers make connections between the national data trends and individual classroom programmes and work through principals to promote NEMP resources and learning opportunities for teachers.