Blog

A recent essay in Changing Schools discusses the impact of social media on education policy. It got me thinking – what is Twitter good for? What is it bad for? How can it help us – not just in educati…

Back in 2013 I wrote a lengthy review of Measuring Up by Daniel Koretz. This book has had a huge influence on how I think about assessment. Last year I read Principled Assessment Design by Dylan Wilia…

In my most recent blogs about assessment, I’ve looked at some of the practical problems with assessment criteria.  I think these practical problems are related to two theoretical issues: the natu…

This psychological experiment asked participants to judge the following actions. (1) Stealing a towel from a hotel (2) Keeping a dime you find on the ground (3) Poisoning a barking dog They had to giv…

On Thursday and Friday I went to Wellington Education Festival for the fifth year in a row. It’s an amazing event and I’ve come back from every one feeling inspired and excited.  Back in 2011 the fest…

In my last few blog posts, I’ve looked at the problems with performance descriptors such as national curriculum levels. I’ve suggested two alternatives: defining these performance descriptors in terms…

In many blog posts over the last couple of years, I’ve talked about the problems with prose descriptors such as national curriculum levels and grade descriptors. It’s often said that national curricul…

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 r…

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…