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In my presentation at the ARK Summit on Monday I compared the English 2007 National Curriculum in Chemistry to grade 7 (that’s year 8) of E.D. Hirsch’s Core Knowledge Curriculum. Chemistry content in…

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 no…

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 fr…

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 t…

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…

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 Philanthropis…

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 kn…

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 totalitari…

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…