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Within the Asia-Pacific community, the New Zealand Ministry of Education has been one of few educational authorities to adopt an Assessment for Learning (AfL) framework and actively promote formative uses of assessment. This paper reports the results of a qualitative study in which eleven New Zealand secondary teachers in two focus groups discussed their conceptions of assessment and feedback. These data were examined to see how teachers defined and understood assessment and feedback processes to identify how these conceptions related to AfL perspectives on assessment. Categorical analysis of these data found teachers identified three types of assessment (formative, classroom teacher-controlled summative and external summative) with three distinct purposes (improvement, reporting and compliance, irrelevance). Feedback was seen as being about learning, grades and marks, or behaviour and effort; these types served the same purposes as assessment with the addition of an encouragement purpose. This study showed that although these New Zealand teachers appeared committed to AfL, there was still disagreement amongst teachers as to what practices could be deemed formative and how to best implement these types of assessment. Additionally, even in this relatively low-stakes environment, they noted tension between improvement and accountability purposes for assessment.

The study reported in this paper assesses the impact of a mentoring programme on the achievement of high ability students in their final year at high school in New Zealand. The school concerned had introduced the programme to``remove the barriers to success'' for these students, and expected there to be a positive effect on their academic results in the end-of-year national examination. This paper explores issues surrounding mentoring as a concept, the programme that the school implemented and the outcomes after a period of three years.Mentoring is an old concept, purportedly dating back to Homer's epic tale The Odyssey. Tradition says that as Odysseus set off to fight in the Trojan Wars, he asked his loyal friend Mentor to care for and educate his son Telemachus ± an early version of the familiar teacher's common law status of in loco parentis. This relationship covered all aspects of Telemachus' upbringing, preparing him for adult life (Edlind and Haensly, 1985;Merriam, 1983).General consensus describes mentoring as a one-to-one relationship between a caring adult (mentor) and a young person (prote Âge Â). The mentor is concerned with guiding, supporting, tutoring, challenging, sponsoring and advising the prote Âge  from a state of dependence to independence (Gray and Gray, 1986). This process may occur quite naturally and informally when a senior person in an organisation``takes some one under their wing''. Formal programmes attempt to artificially create for children what might be lacking in a more naturalistic way but it is difficult to capture the``magic'' of natural settings through more formal programmes (Brown, 1995).A theory of mentoring or even an agreed definition is rather elusive. Tentoni (1995) described it as a``concept in search of a paradigm'', and development and testing as a theoretical model have been advanced only slowly. Mentoring comes in many guises, and this diversity lies at the root of the difficulties experienced in research. Different mentoring programmes have little in common and this has hampered the development of a coherent, theoretically integrated body of research. The reason for this, Hawkey (1997) concludes,