Blog
Marking essays and poisoning dogs
Posted on June 28, 2015
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…
Wellington Festival of Education 2015 – review
Posted on June 20, 2015
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…
Assessment alternatives 2: using pupil work instead of criteria
Posted on June 13, 2015
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…
Assessment alternatives 1: using questions instead of criteria
Posted on June 7, 2015
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…
Assessment is difficult, but it is not mysterious
Posted on May 31, 2015
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…
Problems with performance descriptors
Posted on May 22, 2015
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…
What do exams and opinion polls have in common?
Posted on May 17, 2015
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…
Research Ed, Riverdale School, New York
Posted on May 7, 2015
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,…
Will big data transform education?
Posted on April 18, 2015
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…