These Conditions provide guidelines for assessment against internally assessed Achievement Standards. Guidance is provided on:

• specific requirements for all assessments against this Standard
• appropriate ways of, and conditions for, gathering evidence
• ensuring that evidence is authentic.

Assessors must be familiar with guidance on assessment practice in learning centres, including enforcing timeframes and deadlines. The NZQA website offers resources that would be useful to read in conjunction with these Conditions of Assessment.

The learning centre’s Assessment Policy and Conditions of Assessment must be consistent with NZQA’s Assessment Rules for Schools with Consent to Assess. This link includes guidance for managing internal moderation and the collection of evidence. 

Standard-specific Requirements

The evidence submitted for this Achievement Standard may not also be submitted for AS 91957 (1.2) Communicate in Japanese for a chosen purpose.

The evidence for this Achievement Standard will be collected over one or more interactions. Any interactions must take place in real time and show that the student can use spoken Japanese to share and respond to information, ideas, and opinions.

Students may work in pairs or a group. If students are working in a group, it is essential that each student contributes enough appropriate language to meet the requirements of this Standard. Assessors may assist students in selecting a suitable partner or partners.

Each interaction submitted as evidence must:

• be a single video recording without any edits
• be clearly audible and allow for each student to be identified clearly.

Assessors may:

• provide images or objects which can be used to prompt conversation, as long as they do not include Japanese text.

Assessors may not:

• provide students with scaffolding, instruction, teaching, or other forms of guidance, except for prompts such as images or objects, during any interaction opportunities
• provide feedback to students related to language use in any interaction opportunities or contexts recorded for assessment. Assessor involvement is limited to support on the technical aspects of recordings, for example, audio and visual quality.

Students may not:

• practise the exact task with their partner(s) prior to the assessment
• rote-learn or script role plays
• use Japanese notes, language learning resources, or dictionaries during the assessment. 

Gathering Evidence

Internal assessment provides considerable flexibility in the collection of evidence. Evidence can be collected in different ways to suit a range of teaching and learning styles, and a range of contexts of teaching and learning. Care needs to be taken to allow students opportunities to present their best evidence against the Standard(s) that are free from unnecessary constraints.

It is recommended that the design of assessment reflects and reinforces the ways students have been learning. Collection of evidence for the internally assessed Standards could include, but is not restricted to, an extended task, an investigation, digital evidence (such as recorded interviews, blogs, photographs, or film), or a portfolio of evidence.

Effective assessment should suit the nature of the learning being assessed, provide opportunities to meet the diverse needs of all students, and be valid and fair. 

Ensuring Authenticity of Evidence

Authenticity of student evidence needs to be assured regardless of the method of collecting evidence. This must be in line with the learning centre’s policy and NZQA’s Assessment Rules for Schools with Consent to Assess.

Ensure that the student’s evidence is individually identifiable and represents the student’s own work. This includes evidence submitted as part of a group assessment and evidence produced outside of class time or assessor supervision. For example, an investigation carried out over several sessions could include assessor observations, meeting with the student at a set milestone, or student’s use of a journal or photographic entries to record progress.

The evidence submitted for this Standard may not also be assessed for AS 91956 (1.1) Interact in spoken Japanese to share and respond to information, ideas, and opinions.

Submissions should consist of one piece of work. The submission may be in written, spoken, or a combination of spoken and written Japanese. If a combination of both is chosen, the spoken and written language content must be complementary to each other, and students should not only be reading out what has been written.

The submission may consist of evidence involving one or more people, but students will be assessed individually. Where a collaborative approach to collecting evidence is used, assessors must ensure that each student has met the requirements of the Standard individually.

Assessor involvement during the assessment event is limited to providing students with feedback on the technical aspects of their work only, for example, formatting, design, or audio, visual, and image quality. Assessors must not provide feedback on student language be it written or spoken.

Assessors must ensure that students are only assessed based on the quality of language.

Students may not:

• copy whole sentences or passages from any source without significant modification
• use any digital language tools (for example, translators) other than dictionaries
• have anyone else point out errors, edit, or correct their work before handing it in for assessment.