A school in Sydney has trialed a new form of assessment task where students are able to take in laptops with Internet access, mobile phones, MP3 players for use during the exam.
Read the story here: http://www.abc.net.au/worldtoday/content/2008/s2341549.htm
The theory behind this decision was that this would allow the school to assess skills that were relevant to the modern world. Rather than just sticking to 19th century style pen and paper no-info-allowed-in-exams to test how good your memory is, this style of assessment aims to test students’ ability to find information, assess its reliability and cite it correctly.
This makes perfect sense. I remember a wonderful story about Henry Ford I once read. During the war, a Chicago newspaper published editorials calling Henry Ford (among other things) an ‘ignorant pacifist’. Ford objected and brought a suit for libel. The paper’s attorneys placed Ford on the stand to prove he was ignorant and fired off a rapid series of questions at him including things like ‘Who was Benedict Arnold?’, ‘How many soldiers did the British send over to America to put down the rebellion of 1776?’. Eventually Ford tired of this and basically replied (not exact sorry as from memory): ‘Look, if I really wanted to answer any of these foolish questions, I have a row of electric push-buttons on my desk and by pushing the right button I can summon to my aid men who can answer any question I might have. Why should I clutter up my mind with general knowledge when I have men around me who can supply any answer I need?’
And our ‘electric push buttons’ have come a long long way since Ford’s time.
Our assessment system in Australia needs a radical overhaul. Although the NSW Year 12 HSC exams do test more than just memory skills (you do have to be able to apply the information) there is still a large component of memorization necessary. So you may be a fabulous essay writer, but if you don’t have the content packed away in your head, if you haven’t memorized the dates and the quotes, then unfortunately your wonderful essay writing skills are all for naught.
The other issue teachers face is that the syllabus is packed to the rafters with content. It would be lovely to be able to go off on a tangent and explore more relevant skills but the reality is that in the senior years teachers have a duty of care to prepare students for what is essentially a set of university entrance examinations. It is a challenge to just complete the course in most subjects, much less do anything extra.
Something else that concerns me is that the university entrance mark is composed of 50% exam mark and 50% school based assessment. My understanding for this change (when I did the HSC it was 100% based on the final exam) is that it allows students who do not perform well in exams to showcase their abilities in other forms of assessment. It was also supposed to take the pressure off the one big final exam (although my observation is that all it has done is take the pressure that students used to feel at the end of Year 12 and spread it over the entire year so they are just as stressed as they were before but now it lasts all year long – but that is a topic for another day). There are guidelines in place to try and make sure that these assessments do not just become a series of additional exams – I would question how effective these guidelines really are. When we are so focused on the final exams it is difficult to make decisions (on what to teach, how to teach and how to assess) that are not influenced by the knowledge that students must sit these exams.
So hats off to PLC for being brave enough to take a risk and try something new. If the decision makers are not going to recognize the need for updating and innovation, then it is up to the grassroots to lead the way for change.
students especially need to aware that the people they are interacting with may not necessarily be who they represent themselves to be.
One of the things I do not like is that the Catholic church seems so backward in things like the concept of women or married priests (in fact I sent the Pope a Christmas card this year, all the way to the Vatican, explaining that due to priest shortages my mother’s parish can only have mass every second week and asking if they could explain why we can’t have married and women priests – I just don’t get it. No reply yet but it is only 3 months, I am hopeful).