Quarterly Progress Report FY 2018: TARMII 3.0 Teacher Assessment Resources for Monitoring and Improving Instruction

The project aims to improve teacher assessment and instruction in South African schools. The project is focused on the Gauteng and North-West Provinces, with a total of 21 pilot schools participating in the initiative. The TARMII 3.0 online system is a key component of the project, providing a platform for teachers to create and administer assessments, as well as track student performance. The system underwent significant modifications during the reporting period, with a focus on user presentation and ease of access. The modifications included finalization of the Item Writing module, User Registration process, TARMII User interface, Item bank/ topic tree, and Assessment builder. The system developer, Roche, completed several key tasks, including developing the Item statistics function, streamlining the Item Writing workflow, developing the Item Retire facility, modifying various function commands, and transitioning the TARMII 3.0 system from Angular to Angular 3.0. These modifications aimed to improve the system's flexibility and stability. Item development was a significant focus of the project during the reporting period. The Foundation Phase (Grades 1, 2, and 3) item development was completed, with the compilation and uploading of Grade 3 English Home Language ready-made/exemplar tests for Terms 2 and 4. The distribution of items for the exemplar tests is indicated in Table 1, which shows a total of 136 items added into the TARMII system. In addition to the Foundation Phase, item development activities for Grades 4 and 6 in English First Additional Language (FAL) were also completed. The service provider developed and submitted several documents, including a work-plan, item development manual, tagging framework, assessment framework, and table of specifications. Item writers were trained by the HSRC team on how to develop items on the TARMII system. The project also focused on school-based teacher support, with a strategy developed to implement school-based teacher support. The strategy aimed to improve teacher capacity to set, administer, and mark online assessments, as well as discuss learner performance reports. The project also conducted a pre-testing study for the Grade 3 English Home Language items, with a sample of 50 schools in Gauteng participating in the study. The project's monitoring and evaluation activities were also ongoing, with continuous monitoring of the implementation of TARMII 3.0 in the 21 pilot schools. The project's next reporting period will focus on reviewing all items recommended for revision in the Grade 3 Pre-test study report, completing the item review technical report, and contributing user presentation and ease of access to the system. The project will also continue to work on comments and requests received from the HSRC TARMII team as they visit and interact with schools and teachers.