The MESHA project

Assessing the curriculum

You give your Year 8 students a mathematics assessment and on question 5, they score an average of 50%. Is this area one to target in your subsequent teaching? It may be a significant weakness and one that is easy to fix.

So, you remind yourself of the question. You agree that the concept being assessed is important. Is it a particularly hard question? Maybe. However, it’s difficult to determine exactly what’s going on.

What if you knew that the assessment was aligned with key mathematical principles, that a range of schools across the state had given the same assessment to Year 8 students in the same time window as you, and the average across these schools was 80% on the same question? Now you know it is low-hanging fruit. It is a gap in your curriculum that should be quite easy to fix. Perhaps you might also learn that the students in one of the classes in your school did really well on the question. If so, happy days! You need to find out what that teacher did and ask all your teachers to do the same.

One question is not a revolution, but go through this process a few times and the effect on your mathematics curriculum will be revolutionary.

Welcome to the MESHA project. Paid subscribers have heard about this before, but recently, the team presented some initial findings from the pilot MESHA project at researchED Ballarat. They recorded this presentation and that is the clip at the top of this post that I thought was worth sharing more widely.

MESHA stands for Mathematics, English, Science and History Assessment. I am partnering with Edrolo, a well-known online assessment platform, on this project. I had the initial idea and they have applied their technical skills to it. Students answer on a laptop, similar to the state-run NAPLAN standardised assessment system. So far, we have piloted a Year 8 mathematics assessment. Mathematics will now expand across many schools in Victoria, with assessments in Years 7-10 taking place in the next window that opens from 23 April to 6 May.

I have also just delivered Edrolo the materials for the trial Year 8 science assessment that will take place later this year, along with a trial mathematics assessment in New South Wales.

How is MESHA different from other assessments available commercially in Australia? It is not trying to assess and categorise children. There are no percentiles, rankings, distinctions and merits. The purpose is quite different—it is to assess the curriculum. What are we teaching? Is it effective? Can we teach it better? Who might be able to help? It is a form of long-cycle formative assessment.

Designing an assessment of this kind in Australia is a challenge. How do we know what content to assess? In theory, all schools teach the Australian Curriculum, but there are two problems with this. States such as Victoria and New South Wales have their own state curricula that are supposedly based on the Australian Curriculum but, in practice, take a few liberties. Even if they were faithful to the federal version, that would not solve the problem of the Australian Curriculum being appallingly unambitious.

So, MESHA is based on the Australian Curriculum—because it’s all we have—but makes a few different choices to NAPLAN. Number and algebra are prioritised in the mathematics assessment and there is more ‘pure’ mathematics. Half of the questions are calculator free, representing another significant difference in emphasis. Although we have plans to expand into short answer questions, the mathematics assessments and the trial science assessment make use of multiple choice, with the distractors—the wrong options—targeting key misconceptions. This then provides even more data to feed back into curriculum design.

Obviously, I believe in the MESHA idea, but I would because I have an interest in its success. However, it comes from a genuine place and from what I would argue is a genuine need. When Edrolo came to present some of their VCE question data at researchED last year, I found myself chatting to them about comparative assessment of this kind and how I had tried, and failed, to set up a system like it before. I did not realise I was pitching an idea, but they then took it on with great energy.

If you happen to be a Victorian school leader who would like to be involved, there are a limited number of supported places available. Follow this link and when you fill in the form, select the option that states you heard about MESHA via my blog.

If you’re not interested, that’s fine. If you are outside of Victoria then maybe something like this will come your way, soon. I may mention any interesting findings that come from the project.