This is a follow-up to my blog from last week about performance descriptors. In that blog, I made three basic points: 1) that we have conflated assessment and prose performance descriptors, with the result that people assume the latter basically is the former; 2) that prose performance descriptors are very unhelpful because they can be… Read more »
Read moreMonth: May 2015
Problems with performance descriptors
A primary teacher friend recently told me of some games she and her colleagues used to play with national curriculum levels. They would take a Michael Morpurgo novel and mark it using an APP grid, or they would take a pupil’s work and see how many different levels they could justify it receiving. These are… Read more »
Read moreWhat do exams and opinion polls have in common?
A lot. Daniel Koretz, Professor of Education at Harvard University, uses polls as an analogy to explain to people how exams actually work. Opinion polls sample the views of a small number of people in order to try and work out the views of a much larger population. Exams are analogous, in that they feature… Read more »
Read moreResearch Ed, Riverdale School, New York
Every single research ED conference I’ve been to has been amazing, but this one, for me, was the best yet. Mainly that’s because I got to hear new voices – either people who were completely new to me, or people I’ve read and heard a lot about, but never met before. I love the research… Read more »
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