Artefact 2

This assessment piece was a formative task completed during the same yearthree science unit on living things. Students were required to research a
chosen animal to find information for a report, including features such as
habitat, diet, if it lays eggs or has live young, and so on. Students used the
schools Chrome Books to individually research their animal and write out any
information relevant to their report. The student in the class whose literacy
skills were poor would not have been able to complete this task independently
as is, and therefore required modifications to be made (ACARA, 2015d). The
teacher set up a text-to-talk feature on this students Chrome Book, enabling
the student to highlight a section of text online and have it read aloud to him.
The student could then copy and paste relevant sentences or sections of
information into a document, which also had the text-to-talk feature enabled,
allowing the student to monitor the progress of his report as he was creating
it. In addition to this, the teacher had written out specific questions that the
student could copy and paste into a search engine, and she also provided
guidance towards particular sites that were most suited to the students
reading ability (C. Mellor, personal communication, October 12, 2016). The
teacher reports that this required a fair amount of work on her part before the
lesson, but was invaluable to ensure the student was able to complete the
task as independently as possible.
This was a very comprehensive assessment task and allowed the teacher to,
once again, assess her students understandings of the content without their
literacy skills creating a barrier. The teacher was able to assess, interpret and
make judgements of all her students fairly, and in turn, ensure that her
feedback and reporting was fair and based on students ability to understand
the content, rather than their ability to read and write about it. This
demonstrates the teachers performance and competence in all sub-strands of
Standard 5 of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers (AITSL,
2014).