james-greenwood.com » reforms

Assessing Pupil Progress

James — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 16:15:41 +0000

One of my department’s big focuses this year has been Assessing Pupil Progress, the new supplementary levelling structure for Key Stage 3. We didn’t have any idea what it was until our LA advisor, Pauline Hargreaves, gave us an excellent introduction to it in the Autumn term.

Key competencies

For those who haven’t yet got to grips with it, APP divides the curriculum into three distinct fields called Assessment Focuses. AF1 is planning, developing and evaluating, AF2 is handling data, sequencing instructions and modelling, and AF3 is finding, using and communicating information. Doing this allows departments to assess students’ ability across a wider range of skill sets, as well as enabling them to review their curriculum to identify any potential weak spots. Without covering each of these fundamental areas in ICT, how can we give a realistic level by the end of the first term of year 7?

The real draw, here, is that it offers a far more robust system of assessment than the old (or, indeed, the new) level descriptors. I always felt slightly uncomfortable when explaining the use of these to new year sevens: “If you do some of these things you’re a level 4c, if you do most you’re a 4b, if you do all of them you’re a 4a.” The sea of blank faces was always more than a little disheartening, especially when we did all we could think of to ensure they were as accessible as possible - 16 foot posters up in each ICT room with the descriptors in as close to pupil speak as we could get them, etc.

The real point of the division of key competencies hit home when I thought back to teaching a mildly autistic boy in a previous school who was a marvel with anything logical. He could intuitively work his way through some fairly complex spreadsheet work (goal seek, pivot tables) on his own, yet when asked to explain it, or design anything creative, you wouldn’t think the work was from the same year group, never mind the same student. He ended KS3 with a high level 6 based on the quality of his work in Excel, Access & Scratch, which of course fed in to KS4 predictions. He was placed in a top middle set which was completing OCR Nationals with a significant emphasis on graphics, which – of course – led to his grades falling like a rock.

Informing personalised learning

ICT is an intrinsically broad subject, but I think the three assessment focuses identified in the APP model cover everything nicely. Some students will excel in one particular area more than the others, and being able to identify that early means we are better able to nurture those skills, and use this data to inform setting & course choices in the current/next key stage.

At my school we currently only offer the OCR Nationals at KS4, and while they have their faults, they do at least offer a breadth of choice lacking in the majority of GCSE courses. I opted to teach (the wonderful) Unit 8: Innovation & e-Commerce to my top sets (1 & 3) for their second year. The course is largely essay-based, with a good deal of crossover with Business Studies, and radically different to everything the students had learnt in ICT thus far. The majority of students in the top set took to it very well, being perfectly well-equipped with the literacy skills to express their opinions on complex topics like legal, moral & ethical issues in ICT, or the impact ICT has had on society. However, several students in set three who had been working consistently to distinction standard in units 1 & 23 started to struggle significantly with the essay assignments.

This might all sound off-topic, but my point is this; students who excel in KS3 at finding, using & communicating information would be logical choices for an essay/report/presentation-based course. Students who excel at sequencing instructions and modelling would be well suited for a data manipulation/programming course, and students who excel at planning, developing and evaluating should be good at handling larger database/spreadsheet projects. Being armed with such information when students arrive in KS4 would better equip teachers & students to choosing the best possible programme of study.

Curriculum review

Without needing to start an in-depth review, I knew our weakest area was AF2, with only a scant look at spreadsheets that goes as far as IF statements (which is further than we’re required to go by the OCR Nationals coursework, incidentally), an introduction to (flat file) databases, and a lacklustre Flash unit. The curriculum was very AF3 heavy, which was no huge surprise as literacy levels are quite low for new arrivals in KS3 – when I wrote the year 7 SoW I wanted to ensure we were discouraging the copy & paste mentality, so spent a good deal of time hammering that home.

One year on, with a reasonably coherent scheme of work for our two-year Key Stage 3 borne out of hard work on the part of the department, I went to a subject leader network meeting where David Luke, the other Kirklees ICT advisor, put forward the idea of changing Key Stage 3 from the approach taken by many (including us) of half-termly topics on “spreadsheets”, “presentations”, “desktop publishing”, etc, that led to year 7 students learning how to use a piece of software, then leaving it behind them for a year until they came back to it in year 8.

Instead, taking a more holistic, project-based view of topics would ensure that students are revisiting key competencies regularly, building up their skills in gradual steps once per half term rather than great leaps once per year, and coming to see that pieces of software shouldn’t be pigeonholed applications that you use on their own, but that the best possible pieces of work combine many different tools. One year 11 student recently gave a truly outstanding presentation on e-commerce in which he hand-crafted icons to represent the key points of his talk in Illustrator and included a short movie – worlds away from bullet point lists & clip art.

Implementation

Once we knew what it was, and agreed that it would be a useful tool, the next question was, “How do we introduce it?” We had advice from two different sides of the same argument. One argued it’s a tool for teachers; to ensure the curriculum was covering all the bases, as well as introducing it as an assessment method, but the students don’t need to see it. The other advised giving the assessment grids to the students as part of the AfL strategy. “Students should be using these to assess their own learning – if it’s just us then nothing has actually changed.”

Information overload. Click for A3 PDF of the assessment criteria.

As a department, we agreed that presenting students with the A3 assessment grids would be over facing, and counterproductive. Our resolution was to take appropriate descriptors directly from the APP grid and set them as success criteria for project work. We maintain the overview of the curriculum, and students are getting the focus throughout their project, but without having to digest the glut of information on the assessment grids.

Teachers would then have short, individual talks with students at the end of a project after assessing the work to discuss how they think they’ve done, as well as setting targets for the next unit.

So what’s next?

I’m champing at the bit to start the overhaul of our curriculum, and now I have the cornerstone. APP is a solid foundation upon which to form a programme of study that can shape what our students learn, and how they learn it from joining the school to leaving. By involving feeder primaries, sixth form colleges and the students themselves, I hope we’ll have the makings of a truly solid scheme of work with the flexibility to keep it relevant & the robustness to ensure it lasts.

On the Rose reforms, and kicking up a stink

James — Sat, 06 Jun 2009 15:42:09 +0000

I was interviewed by a freelance journalist for a TES article recently, and was told that our LA ICT advisor was unhappy with the comment I gave on the Rose reforms. “Good ICT is very difficult to teach, and rarely gets beyond skills building, or ‘trivial pursuits’ in primary schools,” I said, annoying primary ICT coordinators everywhere with my sweeping generalisation. “Teaching students to become technology aware – knowing how and when to use it in completing a task, as well as understanding what should be trusted, what should be regarded critically and what should be avoided – are vital skills.”

I do wish I hadn’t been quite so sweeping in saying that ICT teaching in primaries “rarely” gets beyond trivial pursuits, but in my defence I’ve rarely seen it happen in the primary schools I’ve been in.

Saying that we must teach the very young how to use the technologies in existence today would have been like saying ‘adults must teach children how to program a VCR’ in the 1980s. Children are already using computers to the extent that early years teaching would take them to through nothing more than intuition & play.

I don’t want it to seem as if I don’t value ICT as a subject. I wouldn’t have chosen to teach it if I didn’t think it had merit, but elevating it to the level of literacy, and reallocating teaching time from subjects like English & maths seems wrong-minded, to me. Some of my current year sevens arrived with a better understanding of how to use a computer than how to form a sentence. How will embedding ICT in the curriculum earlier stop this from happening? How useful is ICT as a tool if you lack the linguistic skills to express yourself?

I don’t mean to sensationalise, either, but I keep seeing this “ICT is everywhere, therefore it’s an important educational subject” mentality. In presentations the members of my PGCE course gave while we were training, many said exactly this; technology is a part of the fabric of children’s lives, therefore we must teach them how to use it. This is a reactionary view, and one that doesn’t account for the fact that adults are learning to use the same technologies at the same time as children. Can we focus their use? Can we direct them into using a piece of presentation software as a framing device for a verbal presentation on a particular subject? Absolutely. Is this what we’re talking about with the Rose reforms? No.

I’m running a project with some of my key stage three classes at the moment where they have to come up with an idea for an innovation they would expect to see in the next ten years or so, and I’m being consistently impressed by the grasp of how technology works these students have. They haven’t got it from me – the scheme of work has been focused on applications rather than “bigger picture” thus far – but they are coming up with ideas like disposable digital paper (one made the argument that “because of Moore’s law, microchips powerful enough to run one of these will cost pennies in 2019, so we can sell these as disposable computers”), holographic interfaces that will register users’ movements using sensors, personal projectors that will beam whatever display is needed onto whatever surface is available (“But what if you’re standing in a field on a sunny day? You can’t beam it onto the grass can you?” “No, but you can hold out the palm of your hand.”)

These children are so acutely tuned in to current technologies, and how they work, that they’re coming up with ideas the best and brightest are working on as we speak – without looking at the myriad crib sheets Google has to offer. Our brainstorming activity took place in a standard classroom… no computers to be found.

The lessons I had to sit through as a GCSE IT student where the idea of input and output devices was laboured to excess seem a world away. They understand the idea of an interface, even if they can’t explain it well.

So shouldn’t we be focusing on giving students the tools they need to explain their ideas, rather than hammering home concepts they already understand?