Interim Reports
On Friday 11 March, our Secondary Interim Reports opened to parents in the Parent Centre of myTintern. These reports indicated to parents and students progress to date in each subject prior to recent Student Progress Meetings. The achievement levels indicated by teachers reflect a student’s performance in assessment tasks completed this semester.
Student Progress Meetings
This past Monday saw the second of three online Secondary School Student Progress Meeting sessions. Next week another Secondary School evening will be held online on Monday 28 March. Bookings for Monday afternoon will close at 10am on Monday.
We were very pleased to see many of our secondary students, from Years 7 to 12, attending the online meetings last week, to be part of a three-way conversation about their own learning. We find this is a great opportunity for students to feel a part of the reflection – goal setting – self-evaluation feedback loop and to ask questions about how they are progressing and how they can improve. This is a good way to build our students’ confidence, help them to accept responsibility for their learning and for students, parents and teachers to engage in open and honest dialogue.
Ongoing Reporting on our School Portal for Middle School students
For the past three years we have provided graded reporting on Assessment Tasks to our Year 7-11 students with staff progressively entering grades for major assessment tasks across the semester. These are published at regular intervals on the portal in the same place as our Interim and Semester Reporting and show the letter grade awarded for those tasks.
Last year we trialled a more detailed ongoing reporting system for our Year 7s through the Tintern Portal. Key tasks were marked and made visible to parents, as per our previous practice. Additionally, feedback and commentary on the tasks also was visible to parents and provided more detailed information for parents on their child’s progress in all subjects throughout the semester. These key tasks then became the main commentary which appeared on the end-of-semester report in June, along with summative grades for each subject. We now have expanded this progressive approach to reporting across all Middle School classes (Years 7 to 9) and trust that this will become a more valuable ongoing communication tool, ensuring parents are more fully aware of their child/ren’s progress without having to wait until the end-of semester for a complete picture of their progress.
Year 10 and 11 students will continue to have progressive grades lodged and updated via the reporting tab on the portal. The publication dates for Year 10 to 11 Progressive Grade Reports for Semester 1, 2022 are:
Friday 25 March at 4pm
Friday 8 April at 4pm (this date corresponds with the end of Term 1)
Friday 6 May at 4pm
Friday 20 May at 4pm
Friday 3 June at 4pm
Tuesday 21 June – with the publication of Semester Reports
The Middle School Ongoing Reporting System will be fully visible and updated as a ‘live’ communication tool for parents throughout the semester.
I trust that our reporting process and Student Progress Meeting evenings are proving useful in understanding your child’s progress to date and will assist in strengthening the partnership between family, school and student that is so crucial to effective learning and growth.
Tintern preparing for Online NAPLAN Delivery
In 2018, the National Assessment Program – Literacy and Numeracy (NAPLAN) commenced the transition from a paper-based to an online assessment system. Tintern Grammar made the transition in 2019 which exposed our students to an improvement to the system as a result of the NAPLAN Online platform using an adaptive test design. This enables the system to present questions which better match student achievement levels and provide more precise results for teachers and schools.
As you may be aware, NAPLAN testing in 2020 was cancelled due to COVID-19.
In order to re-familiarise our students with the online format, there was a mandated nation-wide Co-ordinated Practice Trial scheduled to be conducted at the school on Thursday 24 March. All of our Year 3 and 5 students will participate in the trial this Thursday. Due to the unexpected move to remote learning for our secondary school students this week, VCAA has approved that our Year 7 and 9 students will experience the trial sessions next Thursday 31 March. They will not, therefore, miss out on the opportunity to become familiar with the online interface prior to the actual testing in May.
These trials in March will not be graded or marked, and no data from them is being collected or supplied to us. This is purely a familiarisation process and an exercise in ICT readiness. As such, this is a low-key event, and there will be ICT and teacher support in the room during the trials to ensure the students receive assistance if there were any technical ‘glitches’ during the process.
Further information will be sent to parents of students in Years 3, 5, 7 and 9 regarding NAPLAN testing in the weeks leading up to the online testing period in May.
