Assessment frameworks for literacy in Mäori medium must take cognisance of all of these factors and respond appropriately to the complexities operating and impacting on teachers, on children and on programmes. The following criteria were devised and used to guide the development of He Ara Angitu, A Pathway To Success.

1. Should be consistent with the New Zealand Curriculum Framework4
2. Must be derived from and be commensurate with a Mäori worldview
3. Should inform and be informed by Mäori pedagogy which is dynamic, still evolving, developmental in nature and multidimensional
4. Should illuminate Mäori achievement and aspirations
5. Should be able to be used with reliability and confidence by the variety of options represented by the term Mäori medium
6. Should be responsive to children from the five differing language backgrounds (described earlier)
7. Should yield useful information for schools and establish a platform for evaluating the effectiveness of programmes
8. Should use assessment procedures validated for Mäori medium and which are preferably used (or likely to be used) by classroom teachers as part of their regular classroom assessment regimen
9. Should not be prescriptive but treated as the start of the development of a range of appropriate responses

HE ARA ANGITU - A PATHWAY TO SUCCESS: THE RESEARCH

Research for He Ara Angitu was carried out under the aegis of a Ministry of Education contract in 2000 - 2001. Data was gathered from literacy testing in Mäori medium classrooms and used to inform expectations about patterns of development and variability during the first year of schooling.

The Participants

One hundred and forty five children from eight schools located in the South Auckland, Northern Waikato and Hamilton areas were tested in this cross sectional study including four Kura Kaupapa Mäori, one Wharekura, one total immersion school and two total immersion units operating within a mainstream school. Data capturing the progress of children aged 5.0 to 6.5 was gathered during four probes conducted either near the end or at the beginning of the school term over ten months from June 2000 until April 2001. For 126 of these children (about 87%), English was their first language. They also had varying degrees of competency in Mäori language upon entry to school. Sixteen children (about 11%) were classified infant bilinguals, the remainder comprising one child with mixed competencies in English, Mäori and Niue and two children who were beginning their Mäori language learning at school.

In all cases Mäori was the sole language of instruction in the literacy programme. Teachers delivering these programmes had varying experience teaching in Mäori medium ranging from one to six years and the majority classified themselves as second language learners of Mäori. The balance comprised native fluent speakers.

Culturally Compatible Methodology

The researchers were determined that the research relationship be of mutual benefit. This is in line with the research protocols for Kaupapa Mäori detailed in the literature. To this end the principle of koha5 or reciprocity was applied. The following pepeha (proverbial saying) encapsulates the association of mutual contribution and benefit between the school, the researchers and the project establishing a relationship of equi-balance.

Ko täu rourou, Your contribution
Ko taku rourou… and my contribution…

In 'exchange' for access to students and relevant information, the participating schools were provided with exclusive professional development in He Mätai Mätatupu6 , the official reconstruction of Marie Clay's Observation Survey of Early Literacy Achievement.

The Assessment Instruments

The standardised assessments comprised authentic tasks i.e. the types of literacy tasks children are likely to engage in during the course of normal classroom instruction. These included reading continuous text, recording a story and oral retelling.

Reading

Pükete Pänui Haere (reconstructed Running Records7) were used to identify children's Ngä Kete Körero reading instructional level8. These involve recording and analysing reading behaviours as a child reads continuous text and calculating rates of accuracy and self -correction. According to McNaughton, Phillips and MacDonald, reading level is arguably the most significant index for judging early progress (2000 p.50).

Decisions about instructional level were based on the titration procedure of finding the highest level a child could read with 90% accuracy and/or based on other information gleaned from the assessment such as the nature of errors made. Additional tasks namely te täutu reta (letter identification) and whakamätautau kupu10 (word recognition test) were also administered with some children.