ICT and its impact on Schools Infrastructure, teaching and learning

Keynote speech at the haysmacintyre Schools' Conference at Drapers' Hall, 30/01/2013

 

Will Michael Gove allow ICT to revolutionise British Education?

Last week Michael Gove made a very interesting speech to a group of distinguished mathematicians and scientists, unsurprisingly, about the importance of Maths and Science education. One of the most significant parts of the speech was when the Secretary of State came on to discuss the place of ICT in schooling:

"Harnessing technology in the classroom

"In addition to the debate over what is taught, and the issue of who does the teaching, we also need to think about how the teaching takes place. So as well as reviewing our curriculum and strengthening our workforce, we need to look at the way the very technological innovations we are racing to keep up with can help us along the way. We need to change curricula, tests and teaching to keep up with technology, and technology itself is changing curricula, tests, and teaching.

"ItunesU now gives everybody with an Internet connection access to the world's best educational content. Innovations such as the Khan Academy are putting high quality lessons on the web. Extremely cheap digital cameras and the prevalence of the Internet allow teachers to share best practice and learn from errors." [My emphasis]

Gove raises a number of important issues here that have the potential to revolutionise British education:

• It is refreshing that the Secretary of State is indicating that wants to see a much more collaborative approach towards the sharing of best practice, resources and content. He acknowledges that ICT has an important part to play in providing the vehicle for this to happen. A more collaborative approach both between schools and between the Maintained and Independent sectors is clearly the way forward. ICT has enormous potential for bringing teachers together and putting teaching and learning at the heart of the educational agenda. Clearly there are small pockets where this is happening, but we have a long way to go.
  

• Does Gove's reference to iTunesU and to the Khan Academy indicate that the Government is happy to give up a degree of central control of educational resourcing? We have had a supply-driven - as opposed to a teacher demand-driven - educational agenda for most of the past twenty years. The DfE and LEAs have allowed educational suppliers to set the agenda for too long - suppliers telling schools what they need (Interactive Whiteboards, VLEs et al.) rather than teachers demanding want they need. Standards will rise by stepping back and allowing teachers to commincate and share how they are promoting learning.
  
  I am sure that his approach is driven by fiscal restraint. However, it is encouraging that Gove's solution is to embrace existing platforms rather than falling into the trap of his predecessors who no doubt would have wasted an enormous amount of money setting up a "national teachers' collaborative network". (I'm sure that Apple are delighted to receive the endorsement of the Secretary of State for iTunesU!)
  

• Most interesting is Gove's reference to testing. e-Assessment has long been the elephant in the room in the classroom ICT revolution debate. I have argued previously that the British examination system has become too dislocated from key working practices in wider society (In the C21 adult world, when does anyone ever sit in silence without access to technology? - See my previous blog post e-Assessment - the case for the defence). Is Gove here indicating that he is willing to embrace e-Assessment as part of the GCSE and A-level assessment regime? Given the imaginative work being done by the team at AQA (see my Can e-assessment maintain the "Gold Standard"?), I certainly hope so.
  

I am sure that the key to raising educational standards is for the Government to intervene less, to encourage teachers to share best practice and to remove the administrative burden so that they can spend more time being creative about how they promote pupil learning.


Michael Gove's Speech in full: Improving maths and science education Wednesday, June 29 2011

The UK Citizenship Test - e-Assessment at its worst

A close family friend is presently going through the process of applying for UK citizenship and thus has to pass the UK Citizenship Test. The Test is held up alongside the Driving Theory test as one of the triumphs of e-Assessment. I am not so sure.

The "curriculum" for the UK Citizenship test is broad-ranging and is intended to ensure that a potential citizen has "the knowledge of English and of UK life that you need for citizenship" UKBA website. Assessment is an online test consisting of 24 questions with a passmark of 18/24 [75%].

Topics include:

• Migration to Britain
• The changing role of women
• Children, family and young people
• Population
• The regions of Britain
• Religion and tolerance
• Customs and traditions
• How the UK is governed
• Housing
• Services in and for the home
• Money and credit
• Health
• Education
• Leisure
• Travel and Transport
• Identity documents
• Looking for work
• Equal rights and discrimination
• At work
• Working for yourself
• Childcare and Children at work

[Before reading on you may like to do a sample UK Citizenship Test - you will probably complete it in under 10 minutes, although officially you have up to 45 minutes]

I have a huge sympathy with the idea that all UK citizens should have a knowledge and understanding of how British society works. I am comforatable with any measure that encourages those who want to live and work in this country to have a greater understanding of, and respect for, our traditions and culture. Indeed, I am often surprised at the widespread ignorance of what used to be called "British Constitution". Some of the questions in the UK Citizenship test fulfil this function, for example,

• A By-election is held
  A halfway through a Parliament,
  B every two years,
  C when an MP dies or resigns,
  D when the Prime Minister chooses to call one

• Which TWO of the following can vote in all UK public elections?
  A Citizens of the Irish Republic resident in the UK
  B Citizens of EU states resident in the UK
  C Citizens of Commonwealth resident in the UK
  D Anyone resident in the UK
  

or more obscurely

• The official report of the proceedings of Parliament is called
  A the Speaker's Notes,
  B Hansard,
  C the Electoral Register,
  D the Constitution

• How many parliamentary constituencies are there?
  A 464,
  B 564,
  C 646,
  D 664

Some of the questions test knowledge of Britain and some of its important institutions, for example,

• Which TWO of these are names for the Church of England?
  A Methodist,
  B Episcopal,
  C Anglican,
  D Presbyterian

• 'Ulster Scots is a dialect which is spoken in Northern Ireland.' True or False?

But other questions stretch the limits of what any citizen might be expected to know:

• 'In the 1980s, the largest immigrant groups were from the West Indies, Ireland, India and Pakistan.' True or False?

• In which year did married women get the right to divorce their husband?
  A 1837,
  B 1857,
  C 1875,
  D 1882

• The number of children and young people up to the age of 19 in the UK is
  A 13 million,
  B 14 million,
  C 15 million,
  D 16 million

[Do the sample test if you want to check your answers]

I like to think that, as a paid up Today Programme listener, I have a reasonable general knowledge, but I must confess that many of the questions were beyond me. Indeed I suspect that most people living in this country would fail the test.

Did you [honestly] know that

• Information in the Census is kept secret for 100 years?
• Schools must be open 190 days a year?
• Children aged 13-16 cannot work more for more than 12 hours in any school week?
• The percentage of Muslims in the UK in 2001 who said they were Muslim was 2.7%.
  

I have no problem with this "curriculum" in general terms, although is does suffer at times from the left-wing political correctness that was endemic in the Blair-Brown Governments. However, I do find it surprising that we are setting a significantly higher bar for all potential citizens than we do for our own school-leavers.

My main gripe is with the nature of the examination. I can see that it makes good financial sense for the test to be online, but this sort of test does not really examine citizenship and gives a bad name to e-Assessment. Remember this is no pub quiz - the stakes here are high. The prize for passing the test is a British Passport and the right to vote in National elections. Sadly, the fantastic developments in e-Assessment over the past few years [See my previous blogpost Can e-Assessment maintain the Gold Standard?], have been ignored. The UKBA have reduced the assessment of citizenship to rote learning of, what must appear to most of those sitting it, random trivia. If the team at AQA were given the remit of producing a test for the same material, I believe that they would have come up with a much more meaningful process that would incorporates components of testing of understanding how our society works, rather than just knowledge of randomised decontextualised facts. The end result of the present vehicle is that the nature of the assessment undermines the good intention of having a Citizenship test and does little to inform those wishing to live in this country of the true way in which British society operates.

If you have got the bug for random trivia about Britain - try some more practice tests here

Common Entrance Exam to go online

Plans are being drawn up to put the Common Entrance exam online in an attempt to make it less stressful for pupils, according to IAPS. Introduced in 1904, the Common Entrance is the national 13+ test taken by children applying to Independent Schools, particularly the large, national boarding schools. David Hanson, IAPS Chief Executive, said: “Other examination systems have come and gone, but Common Entrance has remained because it has great qualities. What we need to do now is build on those qualities and make best use of new technology to ease the burden of examinations on young pupils.”

Private school test goes online to ease stress BBC Website 04/01/2011

Related Blogpost:
Common Entrance: past its sell-by date?

Can e-assessment maintain the "Gold Standard"?

On-screen testing has come a long way from the simple the automation of multiple choice questions. The next generation of GCSE questions that are presently under development by AQA open up new, exciting and innovative ways of examining young people.

The Technology Enabled Assessment for Learning (TEAL) team at AQA, working in partnership with btl, are harnessing the additional functionality of Web 2.0 to enable examiners to set totally different type of task to assess pupils. Questions employing interactive graphics and drag-and-drop technology enable the opportunity for candidates to demonstrate quite advanced mathematical, experimental and interpretative skills. Take the following science question for example: [click on image to enlarge]

[Image: Copyright AQA - used with permission]

In this question, candidates are required to make a scientific observation of this "virtual experiment" and then to "plot" the 30cm reading to the correct point on the graph. What these sample questions demonstrate is that onscreen testing has reached a sufficient level of development to allow for a complexity and range of questions that give scope for examiners to challenge the digital generation. The technology is now available for on-line testing to be as equally demanding as the paper examinations with which previous generations grappled and thus there is no reason why e-assessment itself should threaten the Gold Standard in KS4 testing. AQA have just posted some exemplar "future thinking" questions on their website. [I am grateful to AQA for giving me permission to use the image of the Photosynthesis experiment in this blogpost - the image remains the copyright of AQA]

e-Assessment - the case for the defence

It is not difficult to imagine the reaction of my colleagues in HMC and GSA, not to mention the national broadsheets, if the exam boards were to announce that all GCSEs would be conducted online.

e-Assessment has a bad name – the popular imagination associates it with low standards, indeed some would go so far as to see it as an active instrument in the dumbing of the exam system.

We have seen increasing automation of the examination system over the past ten years – online entries, online results, the scanning of scripts, onscreen marking, and even some online testing [AQA offer an e-Assessment version of GCSE science]. The move towards e-Assessment has been driven principally by efficiency and cost savings – the developments above make the whole examination process faster, better able to cope with increased capacity and at a cheaper unit cost. Important thought these factors are they should not be the drivers in this debate.

The fact is that e-Assessment is an established part of adult society, not only in Government departments with the Driving Theory and the UK Border Agency Life in the UK tests, but also as key part of professional training and assessment in aviation, financial services, medical education, fire training and in battlefield simulations for HM forces. It is anomalous that, as a society, we are willing for e-Assessment to play an important role in these vital and professional services, but are reticent about its place in mainstream education.

I believe that there is a strong educational case for e-Assessment that is based on innovative approaches both to teaching and learning and examinations. One of the greatest advantages of e-Assessment is that it is able to effect a shift from summative to formative assessment. Tests within interactive learning programmes are able to give immediate feedback to the learner and give opportunity to go back through one’s answers to learn from the mistakes.

In the same way, e-Assessment can do things that paper examinations can’t. For example it is possible to make examinations adaptive so that if a candidate does well in the early part of the test, they progress to higher level questions; and if they do poorly, then the questions get easier. Adaptive testing allows each candidate to find his or her level, which makes the whole examination process a better differentiator at each level, more meaningful and a more positive experience.

One of the greatest blocks on the move to e-Assessment is that the public is blinded by its preconceptions of what exams look like. Generations have sat in silence in rows in silence with pen and paper – and that image is etched on our brains. There is an element here of the grumpy sixth former about us all “we went through it, why shouldn’t they go through it – it didn’t do us any harm.”

Schools have a responsibility to prepare young people for the world that they are going to inhabit and not one of the past – and I am concerned about the dislocation of schools in general, and the examination hall in particular, from the world of work. e-Assessment is an important step to bridging this divide.

e-Assessment - the battlelines are drawn

Today's publication of the second report of the Chief Regulator of Ofqual not only opened up the important debate about e-assessment but to some extent has signalled that this is the desired direction of travel.

Just so we know what we are talking about, the report defines e-assessment as:

For our purposes e-assessment is where the learner responds to questions or tasks on a computer. It does not necessarily mean that the computer carries out the assessment. ..... Nor do we use the term ‘e-assessment’ to mean the use of technology as a tool to support other aspects of the assessment process, such as on-screen marking or the standardisation of markers.

Standards in e-assessment Ofqual Website

The report touches on a number of key areas in this debate:

1. Cheating: "Care must be taken to ensure that a candidate cannot copy from a neighbour’s screen, make inappropriate use of the Internet or exchange information if the assessment runs over a number of days."
2. The number and length of test windows– the time during which candidates can take their assessment. "Is it better to have a longer time period or a number of single-day windows?"
3. School Technology infrastructure: "At present many test centres, and particularly schools, may not have the technology infrastructure available for all candidates, for a large examination to take an e-assessment at the same time."
4. Is "on-demand" testing, whereby the learner takes the assessment when it is most appropriate, desirable or even essential?
5. Most importantly, can an e-assessment framework be produced which avoids distorting the curriculum merely to make it easier to assess on a computer? "Whatever its nature, assessment must cope with all the richness and diversity of the teaching and learning experience."

I believe that there are good educational and social reasons to make significant changes to our public examination system, so I welcome this report, but my fear is that the agenda outlined above does not go far enough. I think that it is desirable that we move to an examination system where pupils have access to the Internet, at least for some of their examinations. There is an obvious parallel here to the debate about calculators in Mathematics exams in the 1980s, the tedious use of slide rules and log tables has gone and the advent of calculators actually meant that pupils can get on with doing more mathematics. Thus, I am intrigued by the reference in the report [quoted above] to the "inappropriate use of the Internet", as this does offer a ray of hope that there will be appropriate use of the Internet in examinations.

It does strike me as rather counter-intuitive that at the very time that schools are considering moving away from the traditional "ICT suite" and are beginning to embrace the idea of pupils using their own small mobile devices in classrooms to support their learning, that we are going to have to invest in some form of fixed-desk infrastructure for examinations.

Further Information
PDF version of the report (Ofqual)
Pen and paper exams 'could be axed' (Daily Telegraph)
Forget pen and paper, it’s time to switch to on-screen GCSEs (Times)
Are public exams entering the twenty-first century? (Blog post 1 May 2009)
QCA efutures website

Are public exams entering the twenty-first century?

When was the last time that you did any work for a prolonged period of time sitting in silence, using a pen, without access to the Internet or the ability to communicate with colleagues in person, by phone or online? The world of work has moved on and has left the working conditions of the examination hall a long way behind. The British Examination system has become increasingly alienated from the skills of the workplace.

Let us not underestimate the importance of this issue - for the examination system is driving a number of key aspects of curriculum in schools - ultimately there is an element here that we teach what we can examine. Sadly this is the tail wagging the dog.

When I was reading Theology at Cambridge there was a discussion in the faculty as to whether or not students should be allowed to take copies of the bible into examinations. Traditionalists argued that we should all know the texts by heart and be able to quote key passages to support the arguments in our essays; modernists argued that knowing this material was not a virtue, being able to find relevant information under the time pressure of the exam was just as important and the examiners should focus on crediting the higher skills and understanding being assessed.

Twenty years on we are having the same debate. We need to recognise that factual information is of a very low value in a world where we all have immediate ubiquitous access to the Internet through mobile devices. The ability to find and weigh up the importance of relevant information is far more important; as are the abilities to marshal arguments and evaluate issues are higher skills still.

With the exception of special needs pupils [where most of the functionality of the computer is disabled], we do not allow students to use laptops in examinations because of concerns about cheating. These are genuine concerns.

Personally, I have no problem with examinees having access to the knowledge base of the Internet during their examinations, so long as we can ensure that the examinee is exercising the research skills and not just linking to someone online who is doing the exam on his or her behalf.

This scenario is some way off, but the news of a trial project in Norway whereby students can sit their national examinations on their own laptops is an interesting development. The Norwegians are using software to monitor what examinees are doing in examinations to prevent them from cheating or from communicating with other. They have not gone so far as to allow Internet access, but at least it is a step in the right direction.

BBC Report on Norway tests laptop exam scheme