News and Media
Why do I find my child’s school report so hard to understand?
Article Source: https://theconversation.com/why-do-i-find-my-childs-school-report-so-hard-to-understand
It’s that time of the year when reports on student learning come home. Anxiety for students and their parents and caregivers often tags along.
Long gone are the days when a school report was handwritten page, with wisdom like “tried hard, but needs to try harder”, along with percentages or letter grades.
Now students get multi-page reports, with a dazzling array of verbal and sometimes graphical data. Most require significant time to digest and interpret.
But despite all the effort schools make to produce these documents, parents can finish a report and have little idea whether their child is doing OK.
How did we get here?
A major part of the problem is Commonwealth regulation on education. This requires schools to provide a report to “each person responsible” for a student “at least twice a year”. It must also be “readily understandable” to a parent or caregiver.
For students from Years 1 to 10, the report must give “accurate and objective assessment” of the student’s progress and achievement, including an assessment of the student’s achievement:
