Shaping the New Language of Assessment-face the future with confidence!

South West AAIA Day Conference 2014 Engineers’ House, Bristol BS8 3NB

Thursday 6th March 2014

Association for Achievement and Improvement through Assessment

John Abbott, DirectorThe 21st Century Learning Initiative

• Knowledge• Understanding• Transferability

Education: A question of democracy?

Long ago in 1927 Mercedes Benz produced 1400 magnificent cars....

.... With amazing long term vision the directors called for a Report on the Company’s growth potential over the next 50 years. Back came the Consultants' Report...so quick would be the growth in technological knowledge that within fifty years the Company could be producing 40,000 cars a year. The directors were appalled at the consultant’s naivety...for self-obviously it would be totally impossible for the schools ever to train 40,000 chauffeurs a year!

“Headmaster, I have been insulted by a fourteen year old who, going into this new Computer Centre (I could almost feel her antagonism to such a mechanistic invention), has typed up what he says is his first draft of an answer to the question I set the class to be done over the weekend . He had the audacity to ask me to mark this so that he could incorporate my corrections into a redrafted piece which he would eventually hand-in, alongside the others in the class, for final grading.” “Which one, Headmaster, do I grade...the original draft, or the one he ‘cheated on’ by incorporating my suggestions?”

“It’s an interesting question because as a University we have made a good living over the past five centuries by, in effect, examining students’ first drafts. Now you are suggesting that this new technology, by replacing pen and ink with a device that seems to some of us to ‘artificially’ enhance a student’s performance in ways which often seems like cheating. This poses very serious questions for the entire examinations ‘industry’”.

“I think we will have to wait for the Government to instruct us”.

Chairman of the Cambridge University Examinations Board

And here is the crunch...it is far easier to measure what has been learnt than it is to assess how effective are the learners skills when they have to be applied outside the domain in which they were originally developed, in other words proof that you have learnt something under certain circumstances is no true indicator that you will be able to perform as well somewhere else on a different kind of problem.

Mark Twain understood that perfectly when he remarked “Education is what remains when you have forgotten everything you ever learnt in school".

“Traditionally schools have been concerned with the transfer of culture, and the development in pupils of a range of skills, habits and attitudes, evolved from the experience of earlier generations. The pace of change is now so great that this is no longer adequate; young people have to be equipped to ‘go where none of us have been before’.

“Schools therefore have an additional task; they have to start a dynamic process through which pupils are progressively weaned from their dependence on teachers and institutions and given the confidence to manage their own learning, cooperating with colleagues as appropriate, and using a range of resources and learning situations.”

The Central Thesis (1995)

Upside Down and Inside Out...

“To achieve this, the formal schools system, and its use of resources, has to be completely reappraised, and probably turned upside-down. Early years learning matters enormously; so does a generous provision of learning resources. If the youngest children are progressively shown that a lesson about learning something can also be made into a lesson in how to know how they ‘learn to learn’ and remember something, then the child, as he or she becomes older, starts to become his or her own teacher.

“In highly industrial terms, therefore, the child ceases to be totally dependent on the teacher as an external force, and progressively becomes part of ‘the learning productivity process’. In this model the older the child becomes, the more the child as a learner becomes a resource that the school has to manage, additional to that of the teacher.”

The Central Thesis (1995)

The Key Pedagogic Change

“We can’t fault your theory. You are probably educationally correct and certainly ethically correct. But the system you’re arguing for would require very good teachers. We don’t think there will ever be enough good teachers, and so we’re going for a teacher-proof way of organising schools. That way you get a uniform standard.”

Downing Street Policy Unit, March 1997

The Political Dilemma

If you continue to apply the wrong model of learning, for the very best of reasons, you will never get the results you seek...

As Einstein once remarked, “you will never solve a problem by using the same thinking that created that problem in the first place”.

Please click here to view animation one: Born to Learn

or visit www.vimeo.com/20924263

Just what are we all about?I would like to set you two questions – not to be answered today – but perhaps to be sent to me alter by email, not in any sense for correction, far from it, but to get all of us thinking together about what needs to happen

My first question is about purpose:

“Are you preparing your pupils to be pilgrims (as in John Bunyan’s meaning in Pilgrim's Progress), or customers?”

My second question is about process:

“What kind of education for what kind of world? Are our children battery-hens or free-range chickens?”

www.battlingforthesoulofeducation.org

johnabbott@21learn.org

“There is a tide in the affairs of men which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune...”

“...But omitted, and the voyage of their life is bound in shallows and miseries...”

“... On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we must take the current when it serves -- or lose the ventures before us.”

William Shakespeare, Julius Caesar, Act 4, Scene 3

Upon this gifted age, in its dark hour, Rains from the sky a meteoric shower Of facts....They lie unquestioned, uncombined.Wisdom enough to leech us of our ill Is daily spun, but there exists no loom To weave it into fabric.

Edna St. Vincent Millay "Huntsman, What Quarry"