About us
About the initiative
The Online Formative Assessment Initiative is a project of all Australian state and territory education ministers. The Initiative is governed by a board with representative from all jurisdictions and sectors and reports to education ministers.
Newsletters
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Opinion piece
In May 2021, an opinion piece was published on ACEL’s newsletter written by the former Board Chair of the Initiative, Deb Efthymiades. The piece, entitled How teachers are helping to design an online network for formative assessment, outlines the work of the Initiative.
You can read it on our website here.
Background
Through Growth to Achievement: Report of the Review to Achieve Excellence in Australian Schools (Excellence Review) found that structured and individually focused learning progressions can help teachers to better support students’ success and growth. The Excellence Review proposed that student progress may be best achieved when teachers have the appropriate tools, resources and expertise to use formative assessments to help them understand how their individual students are learning.
At the end of 2018 all states, territories and the Commonwealth signed the National School Reform Agreement and agreed to progress a ‘learning progressions and online formative assessment national initiative’ (the initiative) to investigate how best to implement this knowledge.
In March 2019, ESA, ACARA and AITSL, under the governance of the Education Council, were asked to undertake an initial ‘discovery’ phase to consider how this initiative could work. The discovery phase began in May 2019, and findings were reported to education ministers in December 2019. The ministers agreed to proceed to an alpha phase that started in 2020.
Key partnerships
The project has collaborators in all jurisdictions and sectors all of whom are committed to exploring key advances in the appropriate technologies, software, processes, tools and training that are crucial to the realisation of the vision.