Mind the Gap: Searching for Clarity in NCEA

ABSTRACTThe introduction of programming into secondary schools in New Zealand (NZ) has meant that many teachers are preparing programming students at senior level for the New Zealand Certificate of Educational Achievement (NCEA). A recent study showed that many teachers struggle with providing feedback to students on code quality, and indicated a possible issue with the available resources. In this paper, we describe a study to help us understand this phenomenon. We first analysed the data from the earlier study concerning teachers' viewpoints on the available resources. We then analysed the defining curriculum and assessment documents for NCEA, extracting quality-relating terms. We found that all teachers interviewed reported issues with the resources and that there was no clear mapping for quality concepts between the two sets of resources. Our contribution is to expose gaps in the online resources that are problematic from the perspective of teacher and student outcomes.