Moving the goalposts

Listening to the Welsh Minister for Education and Skills speak yesterday at the iNet Conference in Cardiff made me question once more the reasons for school exams. What Leighton Andrews AM had to say in his speech made me also question the sanity of those behind the recent GCSE exams fiasco in England. Schools are now resorting to legal action to challenge the UK Government's decision to downgrade the results of an entire national cohort of students.

Earlier this year, without any consultation or warning, grade boundaries were changed on the order of the UK Government exam watchdog Ofqual. Teachers who had prepared students for a particular grade expectation had the carpet pulled out from under their feet. Many students were disappointed by their downgraded results. Schools, students, teachers and parents all feel betrayed. And there is no comeback it seems. And yet the Welsh Assembly, which was devolved several years ago from Central Westminster control, took the bold and intelligent step to say 'no' to the results. As far as Leighton Andrews is concerned, the students who took the exams under one condition, should be marked under that same condition, and their grades upheld. He ordered the WJEC (Welsh examinations board) to regrade all the downgraded results so that students received the original grades they deserved. Andrews deserves a medal for his stand. He is one of very few who actually have the backbone to stand up and be counted on this issue. In his speech, Andrews asked how we could possibly expect school improvement, when devaluing examination results militates against their position in the school league tables? It's as if all schools are now being punished for simply following the rules.

The bottom line is this: In the UK, exams are used by Government more to provide indicators of school effectiveness than they are for providing students with qualifications. The GCSE qualifications are political footballs that are kicked around by both sides of the House, and ultimately, the metrics generated by each year's results are crunched together to produce school league tables. This disgraceful state of affairs has been happening for some time. Exams are no longer about giving students the opportunity to shine, to show what they have learnt. It is now purely a mechanism for data gathering. Yet according to some commentators, the current fiasco will render school league tables invalid, for this year at least.

Now we also have a politically motivated and grossly unfair assessment regime. Imagine Olympic athletes sprinting for the line, only to discover half way through the race that the finishing tape had been moved another few hundred metres down the track. Imagine if they had trained for 400 metres and then had to run 800 instead. Unfair? Yes it would be. Grossly unfair. And yet this is exactly the same trick that has been perpetrated upon an entire year of students. We cannot prepare children for examinations using one set of standards, and then impose a new set without warning. We don't move the goalposts halfway through a football game. Why did the UK Government sanction grade boundary changes right in the middle of an academic year? What message does this send to an entire generation of young people? I remarked in my speech at iNet that it was a real shame that the English could not devolve from Westminster as the Welsh have done. It raised a few smiles, but it was a serious remark.  Not only have the Welsh stood up against Westminster and refused to play the moving goal post game, they also banned standardised testing for under 16s throughout their school system. And for good reason.

Back in 2007, the General Teaching Council argued that school exams should be banned for children under 16 because the stress caused to young children was 'poisoniong attitudes toward education'. The GTC also called for a review of all standardised testing practices because there is no evidence that exams are improving school standards. The GTC was disbanded by the Government in 2010, as a part of its 'austerity' cutbacks. If exams are causing students unnecessary stress, and testing is not contributing toward school improvement, then why are we still persisting? One definition of madness is trying the same thing over and over again, in the hope that a different result might be obtained. There are many better methods of tracking student progress than exams.  Many assessment methods are substantially more effective in assessing for learning. Isn't it about time we had that review the GTC called for?

Photo by Walter Baxter


Moving the goalposts by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 Unported License. Based on a work at steve-wheeler.blogspot.com.

Never mind the quality

While waiting for my flight home from Cyprus last week, I did an impromptu interview for some colleagues from Pakistan in the departure lounge. They quizzed me about my views on quality in education, and recorded my responses on video. They intend to share the video online once all the airport public address announcements have been edited out. In the meantime, here's the essence of the interview:

My view on quality in primary education is that it cannot solely be measured through standardised testing or other performance related metrics. These are used by governments as measures of whole school compliance to policies rather than as measures of how individual children are learning. Standardised testing is a device to control schools and systems. It has never been about learning. The quality of personal learning gain can only be measured through authentic forms of assessment, and the more individualised these are, the better. I suggest ipsative assessment which involves measuring a student's learning against their own previous achievements. This is a much fairer method, and has the potential to inspire learners rather than show them how big a failure they are. The Assessing Pupil Progress (APP) schemes already practiced in some UK schools are exploiting this potential, and it's a more equitable method of assessment than the old norm or criterion referenced forms that are still being used by many schools throughout the world.

How do we ensure quality learning in education? The best way I know how to do this is to provide space for children to express themselves creatively. Children need to be given licence to ask questions, no matter how ridiculous or bizarre they are, to explore outrageous possibilities, to exercise their imagination and to create something they can be proud of. The lack of expressive subjects such as art and music in the English Baccalaureate (EBAC) subjects is a travesty, and should be redressed as quickly as possible.

Children also need to be given space to make mistakes without any condemnation. Alvin Toffler once declared: “The illiterate of the 21st century will not be those who cannot read and write, but those who cannot learn, unlearn, and relearn.” Too often 'success' culture has been so deeply ingrained within the fabric of school life, that there is no room for failure from which we can learn.

If children are able to control what they learn and create things, their interest will grow, and if they are interested in the subject they will learn. They don't always have to be happy or comfortable for quality learning to occur. Sometimes discomfort, dissatisfaction or a lack of closure will spur them on to achieve even more in learning. Children need to be given tools to help them to learn, and then they need to be left alone to use the tools in the best ways they can find toward deeper learning. Better still, allow them to use the tools they are already familiar with.

Standardised curricula are bad news for schools. More trust needs to be invested in young people to be responsible for their own choices. Too often when teachers are pressured, they tend to revert to methods they are most familiar with. Often, these methods bear no resemblence to the needs of contemporary society, because it has moved on from the time they were themselves in school. Often we forget that teaching today is about the children, not the teachers. It's not our learning, it's theirs, because as the Indian poet Rabindranath Tagore once warned: 'Do not limit a child to your own learning, for he was born in a different time'.

Image source


Never mind the quality by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

A dangerous game

There's a dangerous game they play in Cyprus. It's called Meze, and it's far more brutal than the Spanish Tapas equivalent. The game goes like this: There are two teams: the eating team and the waiter team. The waiter team tries to beat the eating team into submission by delivering a constant supply of small dishes, containing far more food than they are ever likely to need in a full calendar month. It begins innocuously, with a few plates of pitta bread, humus and tzatziki. The eating team is lulled into a false sense of security. This is nice, they think, we can do this. Then more dishes begin to arrive at an alarming rate.

As the eating team finishes one dish, it is removed and three more replace it. The goal of the waiter team is to fill the table up so completely with food that there is no room left, and the eating team has no choice but to eat their way out to safety. But the game is a fix. No matter how much the eating team consume, there are always more dishes arriving. Kebabs, eggplants, grilled cheese, prawns, skewered meat, fried octopus - you name it, it all arrives far too quickly. There is a sadistic streak in the waiter team. Even when the eating team has had enough, the waiting team continue to deliver knockout blows, placing even more food directly on to their plates. Eventually, and inevitably, the eating team are writhing in extreme agony on the floor clutching their stomachs and yelling 'Enough! We surrender!' The end of the game is signalled by the waving of a white napkin, and then you can observe the smug grins on the faces of the waiter team, who look at each other and nod knowingly. Yes, we have defeated yet another group of tourists with our clever food manoeuvres. Our job is done.

This got me thinking that many of the world's education systems are a little like the eating game of Meze. We pile the students plates high with content. Content of every kind is presented to be consumed, and the poor students don't stand a chance. Many are overwhelmed by the amount of content they need to learn, and the pace at which they have to learn it. Even while they are struggling their way through an overburdened 'just in case' curriculum, still more content continues to arrive at an alarming pace. Some learners cry out for mercy, but they are still compelled to consume the content, because later, they are required to regurgitate it in an examination to obtain their grades. The examinations bear no resemblance to that which will be required of them in the real world. No wonder so many wish to leave the table early. What can teachers do to obviate this problem? Some are making a difference, reinterpreting the curriculum they are given by enabling activities and creating resources that facilitate student centred learning. Learning at one's own pace, and in a manner that suits the individual will overcome some of the problems of overload, but more needs to be done. Things are changing, but they are changing slowly, too slowly for many people's tastes. It's a dangerous game we are playing in education. Isn't it about time we stopped?

Image source


A dangerous game by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Learning and performance

Learning is performance. No matter what we learn, our knowledge, skills (and also our attitudes) are usually externalised in some kind of outward expression. Some are obvious: Learning a language will lead to conversation. Acquiring dexterity in art results in the production of artifacts. Learning to play an instrument ultimately results in some form of musical performance. Such performances don't have to be public, but often they are. Some are less obvious - learning complex mathematical formulae will result in applying these to mathematical problems. Learning engineering will result in the construction of engines, bridges, walls, buildings, etc. The image above, taken in Melbourne, Australia, is a performance of learning that includes several disciplines, including engineering, design, construction and mathematics. We talk about 'becoming'. Becoming a nurse, carpenter, doctor, lawyer, technician, accountant, teacher. On our journey of becoming, we engage in a great deal of performance.

Some of our earliest performances, particularly in formal learning contexts (school, college, university), are under the scrutiny of subject experts who award grades, and ultimately, some form of accreditation. This kind of performance is commonly referred to as formal assessment. Sadly, it is often the case that the measure of performance is not fit for purpose, as we have all witnessed recently in the universal failure of standardised testing, or the exam paper fiascos that continually assail our senses via the media. Some forms of assessment are ill suited because they are not designed to measure important aspects of learning, or more commonly, are too narrow to consider the entire performance. Inappropriate assessment methods can be a disaster.

'Everyone is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing it is stupid.' - Albert Einstein

Yet the externalisation of learning - knowledge performance - is a vitally important part of the learning process, not only for the student, but also for the entire community they live within. It is important for the student's motivation and also, if done properly, will provide the student with feedback on how to improve the performance next time. It is important for the community, because the community needs skilled and knowledgeable members, and some form of check is required to ensure that the skill or knowledge is up to date, safe to use, and is relevant for the needs of society. If we get assessment wrong, we fail the student, and ultimately we fail society.

But what of those who have already become? Do they stop becoming? The answer of course, is no - we continue to become, because we do not stop learning and we continue to perform our knowledge. For performers, there have never been more channels, stages and platforms upon which we can perform our knowledge than there are in today's media rich and internet aware society. More and more people are performing their knowledge online to a potentially worldwide audience, through blogs, through YouTube and on other popular social media channels such as Twitter, Facebook, Flickr. Blogging and other user generated content practices enable us to focus our performance of knowledge and project it toward relevant peer groups. These are powerful practices because of their immediacy and accessibility; and having an audience raises your game. Some performances provoke comments from the community - a form of peer review that works as a professional assessment of thoughts and ideas, invention, ways of articulating, strength of argument, contribution to debate, illustration of points and reflective criticality. This represents the conversation as curriculum I wrote about in a recent post. But this curriculum extends beyond conversation into community. Knowledge performance is at the centre of community as curriculum.  From the sharing of knowledge comes the discourse that adds to everyone's collective knowledge within the community of practice, and extends its boundaries. It is this sharing of experience, new ideas, contention and support that advances the community of practice exponentially. The tools are here to achieve it. Performance of knowledge through social media will be one of the vital components of education and training in the coming years.


Learning and performance by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Who put the 'ass' in assessment?

This week's eAssessment Scotland Conference was an interesting and thought provoking event. Hosted by the University of Dundee, the conference attracted almost 300 delegates from all over the UK, and farther afield and as could be expected, saw a number of papers presented on all aspects of technology enhanced learning and assessment. These included presentations on the use of blogs, peer collaboration, mobile assessment, serious games, Google forms, Mahara and other e-portfolio applications, audio feedback and personal learning environments.

I was very pleased to have been invited to give the opening keynote, which I entitled: Assessment in the Digital Age: Fair Measures? The slideshow is below:

Assessment in the Digital Age: Fair Measures?

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I started off with some horseplay on accents and language (I do an impressive Shetland accent, but my French accent sounds more like Inspector Clouseau gargling). Although we had a good laugh, there was a serious point to the funny accents. I made a remark that is still crystallising in my own mind, that accents tend to divide people - they are not only an indication of where we may have spent our time growing up, they are also a cultural marker and a statement of our identity. As such, there can be problems of comprehension and confusion if the accent is strong. On the subject of assessment, might it be fair to claim that the accent used by those who are assessing may be confusing or alienating to those who are being assessed? I can't recall how many times I sat down for an exam and turned the paper over, only to be confronted with what seemed to me like a foreign language. Throughout the day, both Donald Clark (another eAS11 keynote) and I showed some hilarious examples of misinterpreted exam answers. The responses given to the answers may have seemed funny, but in fact they were generally correct. The point we both made was that the students weren't wrong, the exam questions were wrong. They were either impenetrable, ambiguous, or simply poorly worded.

I have just reviewed a new book for the Times Higher Ed. It's called Now You See It, and is authored by a well known American academic and brain behaviour scientist called Cathy N. Davidson. In it, she recounts a story of a time she sat a multiple choice question paper. She got very low marks, because she spent most of the time on the reverse of the answer sheet correcting all the errors and ambiguities in the questions. She pointed out that some of the questions could not be answered because none of the options were correct. Surely she should have been given very high marks for demonstrating her creativity and intelligence? No, she didn't answer the questions, and therefore scored a low grade. There were no points for critical thinking or creative solutions. The only reward you can receive in this system is if you play by the rules and regurgitate the facts that were drilled into you.

One of the conclusions of the eAssessment Scotland conference, which very few people argued against, was that examination authorities really need to get their act together if they are to continue to administer exams that shape the future of young people. It's an absolute disgrace and entirely unforgivable when exam boards such as AQA, OCR and Edexcel cannot find the expertise within their organisations to create examination papers that are error free. Let's face it, that's all they are meant to do. Yes, we struggle with understanding people when they have strong accents, but it's more than a struggle when children are penalised because it's impossible to answer exam questions.


Who put the 'ass' in assessment? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Uncertainty principles

In the lead up to eAssessment Scotland where I will be speaking later this week, I offer some thoughts on assessment. There are some things you just can't assess. One is creativity. Another is character. Yet another is how tenacious or resilient a student is - do they persist in their learning despite the odds? Attempting to measure such things actually makes a nonsense of assessment. It's a bit like over-analysing a joke. What makes a joke funny? Is there a formula involved? Look at it too closely and it's no longer funny. It begins to disappear in front of you as you stare at it.

In 1927 Werner Heisenberg proposed a theory of quantum mechanics that became known as the Uncertainty Principle. In essence says Heisenberg, you can measure the position of a particle, or you can measure the future momentum of the particle. What you can't do is measure both at the same time. The more precisely one property is measured, (say the Wikipedia article) the less precisely the other can be controlled, determined, or known. Applying this outside of particle physics could be problematic, but let's try (because we're all made up of particles).

So you want to assess creativity? What are you actually trying to measure? A child's natural imagination? The creative outputs that are a result of that imagination? The value of their creativity in relation to that of the rest of the group? Against your own creativity? Against the standardised norms of the creative expectations of the entire society perhaps? Oh dear. You can identify that a child is talented in a particular area and their art is easy on the eye. They are good at painting. They have a propensity to be able to play a musical instrument pleasingly. Can you attach a value to it though? So what about Pablo Picasso? Or Karlheinz Stockhausen? Picasso wasn't particularly pleasing on the eye, Stockhausen was not easy to listen to. Although not everyone agrees with that last statement - even if they don't understand the art of the music - few would dare to suggest that Picasso and Stockhausen lacked creativity. Creativity is a very subjective thing, so should we attempt to assess it?

If you try to measure the current state - the effects of creativity on your emotions, the atmosphere, the ambiance of the experience, you will not discover where the creativity is leading - the message, the genre (sometimes) the theme. What are we doing with assessment of learning in our schools? Are we measuring the worth of the learning, or (as is inevitably the case) the worth of the individual? If we do the latter, we are betraying the trust of the child, because they will own that grade for the rest of their lives, citing it on every CV and job application form they complete. Is this fair? Is it fair that the grades they are awarded do not reflect their personality, their creativity, their tenacity, their resilience, their uniqueness? Standardised Testing and end of term examinations are absolutely unfit for this purpose. They are great for testing the recall skills of students, but useless in finding out more meaningful information about the knowledge and skills of the individual.  And yet we measure children's worth in exactly this way. Unfortunately, in this society that is what seems to count the most. Unless we value creativity, character and resilience (and resist measuring them), we will only create uncertainty in the minds of the young people who are in our charge.

"The person who scored well on an SAT will not necessarily be the best doctor or the best lawyer or the best businessman. These tests do not measure character, leadership, creativity, perseverance." - William J. Wilson


Uncertainty principles by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

Product or process?

Picture the scene. You walk into the reception area of your local primary school and you see the wonderful displays of artwork created by the children. There are paintings and drawings, and there are mobiles and models made from cardboard, silver paper and other materials, all resplendent in their vibrant colours. It is a bright celebration of learning and it showcases the creative talents of the children. Or does it? What about the children who are not as good at expressing themselves through painting or sculpture? Where are their pieces of artwork?

Sophie's painting of a cow is excellent and it takes pride of place in the centre of the display. But what you don't see is all the learning, thinking and the skills development that went into the mix leading up to Sophie's production of such a wonderful piece of art. What you don't see is the learning process, all the mistakes and corrections. All the learning. What you don't see is all of Sophie's previous rubbish cow paintings. Perhaps they should be on display as well? They would certainly demonstrate to anyone observing that this little girl has come a long way in the last few weeks, and has developed greater skills than she had before.

When did we ever get the idea that children's work must be perfect before it can be displayed, and that some kids' work is not good enough? I visit a lot of schools as a part of my role as a teacher educator, and it always strikes me when I enter a school reception area, that only the best children's paintings, photos and other artwork are on display. To see the less perfect ones you need to go into the classrooms, or into the kids art portfolios. Why is that? We are not running a production line, and we don't need quality control. Why shouldn't the kids express themselves in their own ways? If you are a teacher stand back and watch - you will find that they have extraordinary imagination, and their creative work doesn't have to be perfect to be good. They can express themselves creatively in more ways than you can ever imagine. All you have to do it create the conditions in which it can happen. Do so, and they will astound you.

Unfortunately, the practice of only allowing the display of perfect art work is symptomatic of a deeper underlying problem in many state funded schools. It is the age old question of product versus process, and it influences the delivery of the curriculum. It also dictates how assessment is conducted. If we are only interested in production of knowledge, then we will apply summative forms of assessment - exams and essays designed to test what students have remembered. If on the other hand we are more interested in the process of learning, we will design assessment methods that feed forward as well as back, showing students what they have done well and what they need to improve upon in their next pieces of work. Standardised testing does not prepare learners for the real world, nor does it provide teachers with anything more than a snapshot of where the student is at that point in time. On the other hand, process based assessment represents a long term plan, which supports learning over a period of time, a lot more effective than simply taking superficial and ultimately, meaningless measurements.

"We are now living in an age where the recipe is more important than the cake". - Charles Leadbetter

Image by Dietmut Teijgeman-Hansen


Product or process? by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.

2020 Curriculum

When I talk to teachers about the school curriculum, whether primary or secondary, guess what they want to discuss the most? Correct - assessment. When I crowdsourced for material for this series of blog posts on #learning2020, a lot of the comments I received back were about assessment. It's no surprise that Teachers hate it (marking is time consuming and not particularly useful, given the effort involved) just as much as children hate it (threatening, stressful, not very helpful for their learning). Just about the only people who love assessment are the government and the organisations who ... er, organise assessment. I have ranted several times recently on this blog about the difficulties of standardised assessment, and we have had interesting and thought provoking discussions here on alternative assessment methods. What kinds of assessment will there be in 2020? Will they be different from today, or will we (perish the thought) be lumbered with useless, discriminatory and impractical testing for years to come? Here's what you said:

Madeleine Brookes, technology integrator and ITGS teacher in Beijing, China, predicted that we will move from handwritten exams to online submission, which I think is a reasonable position to take. Regardless of the issues of verifiability of students and technical issues, online submission seems to be an advance on current exam systems. Others, including Ollie Bray, Scotland's National Advisor for emerging technologies, and Adrian Bradshaw, and ICT subject leader in Plymouth, England, made suggestions that assessment as we know it will be completely obsolete by 2020. Whilst I can't second guess their reasoning behind this, I assume it's because assessment in its current form does not prepare learners for the future, and it certainly doesn't add much to their experience of learning in school. Adrian went as far as to suggest that the National Curriculum as we currently know it will face the axe - because again, it is inadequate for the needs of learners. David Truss (an educator based in Dalian, China) agreed, arguing that curricula are overload and should be changed, but admitted that it will probably take a long time.

I agree, school curricula are overloaded with too many subjects and too much content which places too much pressure on the teacher to cover everything in the available time. This tends to militate against time and space available for learners to play, experiment, and ask the 'what if...' questions. Creativity can be stifled, particularly if the teacher slips into an instruction mode as a strategy to simply 'get through' all the content. Julian Wood, a primary educator in Sheffield, England, has a solution to this problem - He suggests we should adopt 'child led learning where the curriculum is dominated by skills needed for future employment.' Too much over-reliance on grades is another problem. Why do we force children to jump through so many hoops? We're not all Physical Education teachers are we? (That was a joke, btw - some of my best friends are PE teachers). Children should not be misled into thinking that getting high grades assures them a good job. It doesn't. So who are the grades for? They certainly help the government to obtain a clear picture of 'how a school is performing'... Go figure.

I will leave the last word to Adrian Bradshaw: 'I hope in future [the] curriculum will focus on creativity and thinking and not destroy divergent thinking'. Amen to that.

Image source Exam tables in sports hall, Epsom College by David Hawgood


2020 Curriculum by Steve Wheeler is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-ShareAlike 3.0 Unported License.