This is an excellent article by Tim Oates which looks at the different ways of awarding grades in national exams. In particular, it looks at norm-referencing and criterion-referencing. As Tim Oates notes, there seems something intrinsically unfair about norm-referencing, which is where you allocate a fixed percentage of grades each year. Each year, the top… Read more »
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Since my last posts on multiple choice questions (here and here), Kris Boulton and Joe Kirby have pointed me in the direction of Robert Bjork’s work on remembering and forgetting. Here’s an extract from a paper titled ‘Multiple-Choice Tests Exonerated, at Least of Some Charges: Fostering Test-Induced Learning and Avoiding Test-Induced Forgetting’. The authors accept… Read more »
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A couple of months ago my mother bought her first iPhone. I was showing her how various bits and pieces on it worked, and I thought I’d show her how Siri worked. Much as I love the iPhone, I tend to think Siri is a bit of a gimmick. The one thing I do use… Read more »
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For words, like nature, half reveal And half conceal the soul within Alfred Tennyson, In Memoriam A lot of the time, I hear people say that the tired old ‘knowledge-skills’ debate is a false dichotomy. This is of course true. Knowledge and skills are not polar opposites. But a lot of people who say that… Read more »
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As well as being the new Shadow Secretary of State for Education, Tristram Hunt is also the author of an excellent introduction to Penguin Modern Classics edition of The Ragged-Trousered Philanthropists. Hunt has also written elsewhere about this novel and its author, Robert Tressell – in an article here for the Guardian and another one here on… Read more »
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I recently read this in a blog post by Doug Lemov. One of the challenges of Hirsch or Christodoulou if you’re a teacher is that many of the requisite actions–a curriculum that prizes and emphasizes knowledge development in a systematic way, are beyond the purview of the individual teacher. Those tend to be school- or… Read more »
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In my previous blog post I gave an example of what I thought was an excellent multiple choice question, taken from the British Columbia leaving exam. It’s as follows: 15. How did the Soviet totalitarian system under Stalin differ from that of Hitler and Mussolini? A. It built up armed forces. B. It took away… Read more »
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I know that Andrew Old often writes about the way that open questions are often, wrongly, seen as superior to closed questions – ie, it’s seen as being better to ask pupils questions that have lengthy answers and many possible answers rather than those that only have one straightforward right answer. I think one of… Read more »
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A couple of weeks ago there was a controversy about when pupils should start school. A group of academics sent a letter to the Telegraph arguing that ‘an ever-earlier start to formal learning’ could only cause ‘profound damage to the self-image and learning dispositions of a generation of children.’ In the Telegraph, Peter Tait, the… Read more »
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The title of my speech was ‘Statistical significance and theoretical frameworks: how can we discover the root causes of successful teaching and learning?’, which is a bit of a mouthful, I know. Here’s a (relatively) quick summary. The first half of my speech leant very heavily on this ED Hirsch article. I really recommend you… Read more »
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