A Policy Model for Implementing Online Social Moderation to Develop Professional Learning Standards

Social moderation is critical to ensuring shared understandings of student performance or product quality, assessment standards and consistent results of teacher qualitative judgments. Traditionally, social moderation meetings were conducted face to face. Communication technologies and online scoring systems enable teachers, in any location, to engage in online social moderation (OSM). Reliability data from analytical marking and comparative judgement online scoring systems can inform teachers' understanding of what constitutes quality, and OSM serves to develop communities of judgement. The purpose of this study was to investigate if these systems support OSM outcomes, and if this approach was advantageous. In this paper, a model is presented that can be used by education policymakers to implement OSM. The model is an outcome of the third phase of a study that involved teachers from rural schools who used online scoring systems to assess senior secondary students' digitized portfolios and used communication technologies for the purpose of OSM. The results of their judgements showed that online scoring systems and communication technologies can successfully support OSM.