Leadership Articles
Rethinking school exams: our skewed 'sorting mechanism' defines winners and losers
Such has been the unquestioning acceptance of the procedure, sitting exams at the end of school is much like alighting from a train when we reach our destination: a necessary station before we go on to the next stage of our lives.
There is a growing sense that rather than exams being a measure of what has been learned, students are now only being taught what can be measured.
Yet many educators are now beginning to dig down into what has been considered for over a century to be the core role of schools: preparing students for examination.
Current thinking questions this method of finding out about what our young people have learned, why they have been asked to learn it, what we do with this information when we have collated it and, finally but no less importantly, what happens to those who fail.
The act of questioning the questioners has gained prominence in the United Kingdom, which for the second year in a row won’t have any formal exams due to the pandemic. If school systems from Indonesia, Pakistan, India, France and Belgium can all survive this spell without formal high stakes assessment, they argue maybe it is time to rethink the whole examination process. In a recent interview, Sammy Wright, Lead Social Mobility Commissioner for Schools in England, said that while still believing in the process, the exam system was reduced to a sorting mechanism.
This inevitably leads to inequalities, forcing a large proportion of people to take a different life path because they haven't passed an arbitrarily set marking threshold.
“When you sort, you always have winners and losers. We are saying to young people, ‘work hard and two thirds of you will get ahead’, lying to a third of our young people and leaving that one third with a sense of failure.”
Wright, who is also vice principal of Southmoor Academy in Sunderland, believes the current system is weighted in favour of children from middle-class backgrounds whose parents have already succeeded when going through the same process and know how to play the system.
“We test children to check their ability, but we test them not on abstract capacity but in a set of topics and texts that are, certainly in the arts and humanities, fundamentally middle-class.
“We say it’s a level playing field but it’s like testing people on very different things, like testing one student who is a native speaker of German against another who has done German for one hour a week. It’s not the same,” he adds.
There is a growing sense that rather than exams being a measure of what has been learned, students are now only being taught what can be measured. Contrast this with Finland, the country that has been continuously held up as a model for academic excellence for over a decade but has no mandated standardised tests until students are ready to leave school, when they sit one exam.
Crucially, these students are not ranked on their performance, emphasising that knowing something is more important than the knowing something ‘better’ than someone else. Perhaps unsurprisingly, this Scandinavian country has the smallest gap between the weakest and strongest students in the world.
In the United States, psychologist and author Robert J. Sternberg of Cornell University Ithaca in New York, not only questions the exam system but also what is commonly defined as intelligence.
In a recent article in New Scientist magazine the author of Adaptive Intelligence writes: “The lesson of research by myself and many others over decades is that, through historical accident, we have developed a conception of intelligence that is narrow, questionably scientific, self-serving and ultimately self-defeating".
He adds that the first intelligence tests published in France at the turn of the last century measured memory skills and a narrow range of analytical skills and since then little has changed in what we choose to measure as intelligence.
“School tests and assessments measure that same narrow range of recall and analytical skills. Rather than being primarily tools to help individuals realise their full potential … their function was to restrict people’s opportunities in the service of employers, colleges, universities and other institutions.”
Sternberg argues that education should focus on adaptive intelligence to equip our future adults to deal with the new post-pandemic world of climate change they will live in.
Broadly speaking, this intelligence consists of four skill sets; creative, analytical, practical and wisdom-based. To put in context how far education systems are from this ideal, in the United Kingdom, only one in ten young people over the age of 14 study the creative subjects of music, art or drama at school.
Sternberg’s approach moves beyond theory to offer practical real-world methods of testing adaptive intelligence in a school setting.
“Instead of teaching and testing students on arcane problems, the emphasis needs to be on realistic problems,” he explains.
“So, rather than an appropriate test question in mathematics being to recall the formula for an exponential curve and calculate quantities from a given exponential curve, it might be to describe what an exponential curve looks like, and sketch out the problems that can arise from an exponential growth curve in a given context.”
Where adaptive intelligence has been used in a test setting the results have been shown to be more precise than more traditional approaches. Using creative, practical and wisdom-based skills to university admissions tests increases the accuracy of predictions of academic success, predicting first year grades in some US universities almost twice as accurately as standardised admission tests.
After 12 months of educational turmoil across the world, it would be understandable if educational leaders offer a deaf ear to those suggesting transformative change.
Furthermore, to undertake an exam overhaul - as recommended by Sternberg - would require persuading those that have reached their position through the current system to abandon what has brought them success and to replace it with something more egalitarian.
Yet the end of the pandemic might be the ideal time to introduce a recalibration of how we do exams in an education year zero. We can only wait and see.
Source: EducationHQ.com
Melbourne Catholic schools provide pathway to HALT certification
Melbourne Archdiocese Catholic Schools (MACS) has launched a pilot certification program for Highly Accomplished and Lead Teachers (HALTs).
The pilot group of 12 HALTs were awarded their certificates yesterday.
The program, which MACS said is a first for a Victorian education jurisdiction, is an explicit strategy to support teachers to progress their careers while remaining in the classroom.
The Victorian Institute of Teaching has not adopted the Highly Accomplished and Lead career stages, but individual jurisdictions are free to use them as guide within their schools.
Executive Director Jim Miles said MACS is seeking to recognise and empower its lead classroom teachers.
“The program provides opportunities for senior teachers to reflect on their practice and, through rigorous judgment, provides a reliable indication of quality teaching that can be used to acknowledge teachers at the Highly Accomplished and Lead career stages of the Australian Professional Standards for Teachers.
“HALTs will lead from the classroom to improve student outcomes and impact the practice of colleagues. Their role is pivotal to helping build a culture of professional learning and growth in schools, where expertise is developed and shared, creating the best conditions for all teachers and students to flourish.”
The pilot group of 12 HALTs were awarded their certificates recently.
Source: EducationHQ.com