Literacy Achievements

3 Literacy Achievements

This chapter describes the English literacy achievements of Australian Year 3 and Year 5 students as assessed in the 1996 National School English Literacy Survey.

Students' performances are reported in five areas of literacy achievement:writing (including spelling), reading, viewing, speaking, and listening. This chapter describes performances in each of these areas in turn, with each section having the same basic structure:

	brief summary of what was assessed;
	a brief summary of howthe assessments were made;
	a description of the scaleon which students' achievements are measured;
	a set of examplesillustrating levels of achievement on each scale;
	a comparison of subgroupperformances; and
	estimates of the percentages of students at each Level of the English profile.

The literacy achievements reported in this chapter are based on responses to sets of common tasks developed for all five aspects of literacy, and on samples of classroom work in writing and speaking. Different sets of common tasks were developed for Year 3 and Year 5 students. Details of the common tasks and classroom 'best work' samples are provided on pages 263-268.

Performances on the common tasks and classroom work samples have been used to estimate each student's level of attainment on each of five reporting scales: for writing (including spelling), reading, viewing, speaking, and listening. These scales have been constructed from an analysis of students' Survey performances (ie they are empirically based). The sequencing of literacy indicators along each scale reflects students' success rates: the most commonly demonstrated behaviours are located towards the bottom of each scale; the least commonly demonstrated, towards the top (see pages 287-296 for details of the scale construction).

Each of the reporting scales is described and illustrated using examples of assessment tasks and samples of student work. The distributions of student achievement measures on each scale are then reported, for the entire Year 3 and Year 5 samples, and for various subgroups of the student population.

For each area of literacy, an attempt has been made to show the correspondence between locations along each scale and the levels of the English curriculum profile. A difference between each scale and the levels of the profile is that the Survey literacy indicators and their estimated locations on each scale are based on a statistical analysis of students' performances on a set of real literacy tasks. A second difference is that these indicators are less comprehensive than the outcomes of the English profile because they are based only on tasks used in the Survey. This mapping of profile levels on to each scale is used to estimate the percentages of Year 3 and Year 5 students working in each profile Level.

3.1 Writing
3.2 Reading
3.3 Viewing
3.4 Speaking
3.5 Listening
3.6 Comparing Literacy Achievements