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 »
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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 »
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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 »
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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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I think technology has great potential to transform education, but I am frustrated by how ineffective so much educational technology really is. For more on this, see my Guardian article here. Recently, I read a fascinating book about how big data could transform education, which described a lot of what I think are the more… Read more »
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Nicky Morgan’s comments today have started a debate over whether pupils really do need to have to learn their times tables by the end of primary. I think they should and I’m not going to rehearse the arguments here. What I do want to do is to ask what other maths facts it’s useful for… Read more »
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In modern discussions of education, the value of education is quite often defined in economic terms. We saw this very recently with Nicky Morgan’s comment that we could link subjects to later earnings to determine their ‘true worth’. The idea that public spending on education is justified by its impact on GDP is shared by… Read more »
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Today the Sutton Trust and the University of Durham have published a fascinating new report called What Makes Great Teaching? It sets out to answer that title question, as well as looking at ways we can measure great teaching, and how that could be used to promote better learning. Here is my short summary of… Read more »
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Today I was on the Daily Politics soapbox talking about why facts are vital for learning. Click on the image below to see the video on the BBC website. For more information about the research I refer to, see my book, Seven Myths about Education, available here. The short video was filmed at the Ragged School… Read more »
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A couple of weeks ago Ofqual published their consultation on new GCSE grades. A lot of the media debate has focussed on the new 1-9 grading structure, but tucked away in the consultation document there is a lot of very interesting information about how examiners make judgments. I’ve written before on this blog about the… Read more »
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