Assistant Manager at Fairview Education Services. Quite a varied role for me. We facilitate pre apprenticeship Automotive training to some 60 students on site at Fairview Motors and deliver long distance learning to around 180 High Schools throughout New Zealand. Apart from the day to day running of a training provider, my role involves tutoring  High School "gateway" classes, relief tutoring, as well as designing and updating workbooks and assessments. 

Qualifications: level 5 National certificate in adult education and training . I am also a qualified "workplace assessor" which means I can assess The Fairview Motors automotive apprentices through the qualifications of their apprenticeships. 

About the tertiary teacher - Case Study 9: Gathering evidence of competence from a range of sources - Ako Aotearoa 

Case Study 9: Gathering evidence of competence from a range of sources - Ako Aotearoa 

Researcher: Rosanne Matheson

Dave Sheely is a tutor at Fairview Educational Services, a PTE which offers specialist training in automotive engineering and panel beating. Dave is currently teaching on the Youth funded and Skill Enhancement courses.

Dave has completed assessment courses such as Workplace Assessment and Design Assessments. He has also completed the Certificate in Adult Teaching as well as the Level 5 qualification in Adult teaching and learning. Although Dave did not design the courses, he is involved in updating and developing the assessments.

He has found that participating in the Learning for Living project which has aimed to build an infrastructure to support good quality literacy, numeracy and language teaching has been an extremely useful professional development opportunity.

Dave believes that assessment strategies should be driven by the needs of the students, giving them a chance to achieve success and demonstrate their skills and understanding. This means they need to be given lots of opportunities to apply their learning and evidence of their competence should be collected from a range of sources.

One of the important aspects of the teaching and assessment at Fairview Educational Services is the emphasis on developing students' literacy skills. However it is a fine balance because students should not be required to have high levels of literacy to succeed. Written assessments use a range of strategies such as short answers, tick boxes, gap fills, key word tables, diagrams in order to make them achievable for the students.

One of the reasons that Fairview staff are developing new assessments is because they think that the theory assessments from the ITO had become outdated, inflexible and unrealistic and they were 'not very user friendly'. Fairview Educational Services have tried to change the style of assessment 'to test what students know rather than what they can remember which typically was what the old test papers did'.

Case Study 9: Gathering evidence of competence from a range of sources - Ako Aotearoa 

'In our assessment, we try to use as many angles and evidence sources as we can... and gather the evidence that already exists so we can reduce the number of formal assessments.'

This assessment strategy has been driven by the need for students' success and retention. Over assessment and a lot of written and formal assessments have been what 'students have run away from at school ...we want to test what students know rather than how well they can write'.

One of the goals was to reduce the number of assessment items through gathering evidence from a range of sources rather than using a lot formal assessments when students have already been observed demonstrating the required skills and knowledge.

Observations in the workshops, completion of workbooks, job sheets and job cards from work experience placements where a particular skill has been done consistently and been signed off by the supervisor are all used to assess students' knowledge and skills in automotive servicing.

Feedback from students about the old theory assessments was that they were a 'marathon with a pen and tested what students could remember and how well they could write rather than what they knew and could understand. This new assessment strategy works much better for them.