Strengthening English Assessment: Balancing Seen and Unseen Texts to Reflect True Learning

In English, the focus of assessment should never be the text itself, but rather the skills and understandings embedded in the curriculum. Essential Assessment adopts this principle by treating the text as a vehicle for assessing comprehension, not as the goal of the assessment. Whether seen or unseen, the role of the text is to help students demonstrate their ability to interpret, analyse, and evaluate meaning, in alignment with the Victorian Curriculum v2.0.

Texts as Vehicles, Not Endpoints

Under Victorian Curriculum v2.0, each content description outlines the comprehension skills students should develop. Essential Assessment ensures that every assessment item, regardless of the text stimulus, is directly aligned to these descriptors. The text becomes a means through which understanding is demonstrated, not the object of understanding itself. This distinction supports equity, clarity, and focus in assessment design.

A Deliberate Balance of Seen and Unseen Texts

The design of Essential Assessment’s English assessments deliberately includes both seen and unseen texts across the assessment cycle:

Pre-assessment always uses an unseen text to capture a student’s starting point. This allows teachers to gather authentic, unbiased data on what a student can independently comprehend without prior exposure.
Mid and Post-assessment may use either:
- The same text as the pre-assessment (now a seen text) with new questions. This creates a meaningful opportunity for retrieval practice, reinforcing learning and prompting deeper engagement.
- A new unseen text, allowing students to transfer their comprehension skills to a fresh context and apply strategies flexibly.

This dual approach ensures students are not over-assessed on novelty or over-rewarded for familiarity. Instead, they’re measured on their ability to consolidate and extend their understanding in authentic ways.

Why This Balance Matters

Too many unseen texts across a short period can skew data by over-emphasising novelty and surface decoding. Too many seen texts may inflate results due to familiarity and memory, not deeper understanding.

A carefully balanced approach, unseen for baseline, and seen or unseen for growth, offers a richer, more trustworthy data set. This helps educators make accurate, fair judgements about both student progress and mastery of skills.

Meeting the Needs of Diverse Learners

Essential Assessment’s ranged assessments ensure all students engage with materials at a level appropriate to their Zone of Proximal Development (ZPD). Given the diversity of reading levels within any class, the presence of both seen and unseen texts is not just beneficial - it’s inevitable. This range ensures assessments are accessible, appropriately challenging, and genuinely reflective of individual learning progress.

Always Anchored in the Curriculum

No matter the text, every assessment item is tightly mapped to a content description from the Victorian Curriculum v2.0. This ensures:

Content validity: Assessment tasks measure what the curriculum expects.
Construct validity: Tasks assess comprehension and analysis, not text recall.
Instructional validity: Teachers can trust the data to inform next steps in learning.

In summary, Essential Assessment’s thoughtful use of texts, whether seen or unseen, enhances the validity, reliability, and usefulness of English assessment data. The text is the vehicle. The curriculum is the map. The goal is transferable comprehension, measured fairly and consistently.