The Nazarene

Learning Assistant Principal's Report

Interim Reports and Student Progress Interviews

As noted in our previous newsletter, formal Interim Reports will be emailed to parents in the week beginning 27 March. During this same week, parents will receive emailed instructions for booking Student Progress interviews for Wednesday 19 April and Thursday 20 April.  We encourage all parents to attend these interviews to speak directly with your child’s teachers to expand upon the Interim Report and consider the best way forward for sustained (or increased!) academic success.

Parent-teacher cycle
Parent-teacher cycle

We again ask all parents to please ensure that email addresses are kept up-to-date to ensure smooth communication between the College and home.  This can be by contacting the college via phone, or directly through the ‘Parent eForms’ > ‘Change of Details’ section of the Nazareth College App, available by clicking the links here:

For parents with no email address provided to the college, reports will be mailed home, but please note there may be a 5 – 7 business day delay from the day other parents will receive the emailed reports.

NAPLAN - May 9, 10 & 11

On May 9, 10 & 11, our Year 7 and 9 students will be sitting the series of Literacy and Numeracy tests, collectively referred to as NAPLAN (National Assessment Program for Literacy and Numeracy).  The results of these assessments will not be available to the college nor to parents until September.  These tests provide a snapshot of student skills as measured on the day of the testing.  This information can be useful to staff to assist in corroborating their own assessment and monitoring of student skills as displayed by students in the classroom.

 

Student improvement can be reliably measured when the same students sit the same type of test in different years.  The Year 9 ‘Student Gain’ is the most useful of the NAPLAN data available on the MySchool website as this takes place after more than two years of Nazareth College education.  For our 2016 Year 9 students, Nazareth College student improvement was above the national mean in measured areas of Reading, Writing, Spelling, and Numeracy (Mathematics), with Writing indicating the greatest positive differential.

Whilst it is pleasing to have an external measure of the progress of our students, the feedback parents receive via our formal reports at the end of each semester and through Student Progress Meetings are easily the best ways to gauge your child’s progress in their learning at Nazareth College.  All parents are encouraged to contact staff for feedback on their child’s progress at any time: email is often the most reliable and convenient as teachers spend most of their day in class and other related teaching and learning duties.

Examinations Preparation - the Long View

While the mid-year examination period for Years 9, 10 and 11 students takes place in mid-June, students who will be most successful in these examinations will already have started their study routine (and for those who have not, the upcoming mid-Semester break provides the perfect time to begin this habit!).  Moving knowledge from short-term to long-term memory and maintaining skills require repetition and re-processing.

As this diagram based on the research of psychologist Ebbinghaus indicates, information and skills re-visited frequently can be retained and reproduced readily.  However, when it is not studied again, little of the learning and skill remains.  It’s never too early to start studying or create better study habits!

 

For more details about Ebbinghaus’s “forgetting curve” and some tips to improve memory please visit www.flashcardlearner.com/articles/the-forgetting-curve/ 

 

Mr David Broadbent

Assistant Principal - Learning