ASSESSMENT STANDARDS

    HONORING CULTURE

    Quality assessment incorporates and honors culture and includes the rich mathematics and science found in the Pacific islands.

    Quality assessment enables students to value the knowledge they bring from home and their culture, build on what they know, feel confident about their ability to become mathematically and scientifically literate, and create detailed portraits of their learning. This is accomplished by providing opportunities for students to communicate about their learning in their most fluent language, ensuring that tasks reflect contexts familiar to the students, and by endorsing a variety of ways of demonstrating learning.

    The interaction of culture and assessment offers opportunities for rich portraits of student learning. Effective teachers use in their classrooms, assessments that are designed to incorporate students' cultural background to enrich the resulting portrait of learning. When designing assessments, teachers ensure that mismatches of language, mores, and other cultural attributes that can mask learning are avoided.

    To inspire learning and build toward success for all, quality assessment:

    • builds on and honors culture,
    • minimizes cultural biases that hide learning,
    • demands intellectual quality,
    • does not limit the challenge of the tasks,
    • encourages diversity in the ways that learners can show what they know, are able to do, and care about.

    Clearer portraits of learning result when assessments build on and honor the culture of learners. The assessment process honors and incorporates culture when:

    • assessment includes the mathematics and science found in Pacific cultures,
    • the ways of knowing and showing learning within Pacific cultures are acknowledged and valued,
    • assessment measures learning across multiple intelligences, including the body-kinesthetic, spatial, and musical intelligences which are prominent in many Pacific cultures,
    • cultural implications of questioning by young people are recognized and distinctions are made between questioning to learn and questioning to challenge authority.

    Questioning is a central part of assessment, and teachers encourage students to ask questions as part of developing mathematical and scientific literacy. However, the meaning of questioning within cultures is very significant. Questioning elders, especially by young people, is inappropriate in some cultures. In the Pacific, effective teachers lead students and families to understand the value of appropriate questioning and to make careful distinctions between questioning to learn and questioning to challenge.

    To gather accurate portraits of student learning while honoring Pacific cultures, quality assessment:

    • enables students to use the language in which they are most fluent to express their learning,
    • includes group as well as individual performance tasks,
    • recognizes that brief responses that synthesize the heart of a mathematical or scientific concept can be as excellent as elaborated oral or written responses.

    When assessment builds on the life experiences of the students­mathematics, science and culture­learning is enhanced and enriched. These quality assessments:

    • provide clear, detailed images of student learning in the areas valued within and across cultures,
    • include tasks in which students can see their own culture(s), their environment, and the important mathematics and science therein,
    • provide opportunities for students to discover examples of the essential knowledge, capabilities and caring identified by the Pacific standards in their own cultures,
    • provide students with opportunities to express learning in the language of their choice.