I hate marking!

While I fully understand the importance of assessment and how valuable it is in learning, simply knowing this doesn't make the process of marking any more pleasant.

Free Manure
Originally uploaded by slimmer_jimmer

Right now, I am knee deep in a pile of 3,500 word essays. Perhaps I'm getting punchy, I'm definitely getting tired, but I find myself grasping at any passing straw to make the process less painful. A recent exchange described by a History student will show you what I mean.

The student was introducing a topic on the Norman Conquests. Apparently (and I didn't know this) one of the reasons the Normans won was because they brought horses with them and therefore had a very effective cavalry. The student wanted the pupils to appreciate what a feat this was and to see just how difficult it would be to transport horses in the small ships they used at that time. The student was therefore pleased when a pupil said something like:

"The boat would be full of poo... unless they could train the horses to do it over the side!"

I was very amused by the mental picture this conjured up. I can just see the horses all lined up, with their hind quarters sticking out over the edge of the ship, while a trainer stands in front of them shouting: "Un... deux... trois... Poo!"

As I say, I have to take what small amusements I can as I continue the painful process of marking. :-)

Mobile phones and teenagers

I saw a link to an American study on teenagers' use of phones. The headline was Teens Use Phones to Cheat which is a shame since the study seems to say a lot more than this simplistic summary would suggest. It looks like the poll is based on the responses of American teenagers but I wonder if UK teens would be any different?

"My phone lightens my load"
Originally uploaded by Bah Humbug

A longer report on the poll is given at the Common Sense Media site. On the cheating issue, it notes that 35% of students interviewed admitted to using mobile phones to cheat and over half cheat using the Internet. I must admit that I haven't read the more extended report which the site also provides but I wonder what the statistics were for cheating pre mobile phones? Students have always tried to beat the system but has mobile phone and Internet use led to an increase in cheating?

The other aspect of the report summary that struck me comes from the Benson Strategy Group site:

"The findings also reveal a split in perception between teens and parents: Only 23% of parents whose children have cellphones think they are using them at school; 65% of students say they do."

I suspect my parents don't know the half of what I got up to at school and I'm sure that I am equally in the dark about my own children's activities at school. New technology but an old problem?

Question
I may come back to this once I've had a look at the full report but in the meantime, what do you think?

21st Century Assessment

I read an article on Internet use in exams on the BBC news site with interest. It begins:

"In Denmark, the government has taken the bold step of allowing pupils full access to the internet during their final school year exams."

From: Danish pupils use web in exams

One Of These Buttons Will Get Me Out Of Here
Originally uploaded by Cayusa

Now that's eAssessment! For some time pupils in Denmark have been able to choose whether to handwrite answers or type them on a computer. I suppose it could be argued that this is just a logical extension. The article says that on the morning of the exam, the students are helped to set up "their laptops". It is not clear whether they are the student's own laptops or if it just means the laptops they will use. The opportunity to use your own machine, with the software etc. set up just the way you like it would be an interesting.

Clearly, allowing Internet access changes the nature of what you assess. For example, the article notes, "The teachers also think the nature of the questions make it harder to cheat in exams. Students are no longer required to regurgitate facts and figures. Instead the emphasis is on their ability to sift through and analyse information ."

There is a Have Your Say page linked to this article and the responses are fairly polarised. I find the number of people posting comments such as, "An even better way to ensure success would be to give them the examination answers already, that way nobody has to fail and feel upset." slightly depressing. Is that really what people think is happening or is it trolls at work? In the response page there is a clear school of thought that believes memorising and recalling facts is the only thing that assessment can do and that any deviation from that undermines and devalues examinations. And why is there an assumption that changing what is assessed and how it is assessed is about dumbing down? Analysis and synthesis are much higher order skills than factual recall.

What are your thoughts? Good thing? Bad thing? What kind of change would that bring to the kinds of exams we set and the way we teach if a system like that was introduced here?

Playing the game of panoptic performativity? (#ecer2009)

Live blog live blog capture of a session by Matt O’Leary, from the University of Wolverhampton, United Kingdom

Playing the game of panoptic performativity? Perspectives on the grading of observations of teaching and learning...

The focus of this session is the graded observation of teaching and learning in Further Education and its impact on the professional lives of those working in the sector. Graded observations are a very contentious area in FE. The overwhelm use of lesson observation in FE colleges is for internal quality review and is often sold to staff as a way of driving improvement.

The grading of observation is felt to be divisive - particularly when the grades are mde public - it can lead to labelling. People with grade 1s are then asked to allow people to observe them teach and to run staff development etc. It can be seen as a poisoned chalice.

Concerns were expressed about inconsistency and reliability of grading and feedback. Also, there was evidence of people playing the game and ticking boxes. There is also concern about who owns the data, who was involved in the process and the time and resources allocated.

Colleges are using the OFSTED criteria but they are quite vague. In general, no attempt to triangulate with students views as this was seen to be too threatening.

The right to fail?

Should pupils be allowed to fail? Is there a trend to always encourage children - to place happiness as the highest ideal? Should schools always seek to protect children from all negative consequences?

scrabble - testing, testing, 1, 2, 3...
Originally uploaded by Loving Earth

Partly this post is prompted by this very old news report that I filed and intended to write about but somehow, I never got around to it - Pupils 'distressed over spelling':

"A primary school has stopped carrying out spelling tests because children find them distressing..."

It also is related to some of the things I've been thinking about in relation to assessment.

Questions:
What do you think? Should the chief aim of schools be to make children happy? Is there value in failing? Is it possible to recognise achievement in some without de-motivating others who can't achieve to the same standard?

CAL 2009: Paperless Assessment

Captured live at #cal09, posted late.

Using tablet technologies in marking paperless assessment
Hilary A. Cunningham-Atkins, Wendy A. Fisher The Open University

Practised what she preached - first thing she did was pass round a tablet for people to sign in and give their email. :-)

Biggest part of lecturers' job is marking! Researcher's university moved to paperless assessment in 1999. Meant that lecturers were constrained in where they could mark - had to be at desktop PC. Previously they could mark papers with pen anywhere. Also, how do you annotate a diagram. Example was given of an essay with tutor annotation compared with pro-forma feedback on electronic assessment. By going paperless, there was an impact on the quality and quantity of feedback. Filling in a pro-forma removes the location of the comments from the assignment being commented.

Researcher wanted to see if tablet allowed paperless assessment but with at least some of the advantages of hand-written annotation. Used software that comes with the tablet to annotate document (.doc, .html, .pdf, ...). Tutors can write in document' existing white space, can highlight sections and (if necessary) can create extra whitespace. Annotations and document saved together as a pdf. Used in conjunction with pro-forma but gives richer feedback to students.

The technology now costs around £600. They tried using a £20 graphic tablet but, although you can do most of the same things it is significantly harder!

Students liked the personalised feel of the feedback. They felt the handwritten notes were much more personal. Tutors gave significantly better feedback - perhaps even better than written feedback.

Use of technology by lecturers is individual and dependent on their pedagogical views as much as their technological skills.

Extension project is looking at recording audio or video annotations and embedding in the document.. {Record facility in Word? - DM}

Critical Skills Workshop

{I attended a Critical Skills workshop last week which was led by one of my colleagues. These are my notes from the workshop with only minor edits of the live capture}

The Critical Skills programme started in New Hampshire in 1981. Teachers and business leaders go together and drew up a list of life skills and characteristics that they thought pupils would need. The ideas in the programme are not necessarily new but it provides a structured approach that uses variety of techniques and may help teachers to examine their practice and work in more pupil centred ways.

Skills identified by the programme include:

• Problem Solving
• Decision Making
• Critical Thinking
• Creative Thinking
• Communication
• Organisation
• Management
• Leadership

There is strong emphasis on problem solving and pupils centred activities ("...less teacher voice"). Community building is a key feature. The Critical Skills programme clearly fits in with other current developments such as Curriculum for Excellence, Assessment is for Learning, enterprise, creativity and citizenship, etc. (e.g. collaboration, listening to others...).

Putting it into practice: In the PGDE(S), Ashley Reid {the presenter of the workshop - DM} has worked much harder at community building and challenges than she would have otherwise. She has also used challenges to explore the areas students identify as more problematic. The challenges are worked on as small groups and then the results are shared. The hope is that students will take some of the ideas into their own teaching. For example, one challenge was to produce a Dummies guide to an aspect of the curriculum. {The Dummies Book Cover generator could be useful here - DM.}

We were then set a challenge to come up with a board game that will raise money for the university. :-) The board game was to focus on Curriculum for Excellence. The game has to highlight good practice already happening in Curriculum and Pedagogy classes. The purpose of the exercise was to encourage collaboration and we were expected to describe what our collaboration would look like and sound like. {These were written on post-its and collected in. The idea was to check at the end if we'd met our own criteria. However, we did not take this part entirely seriously and after playing with the jargon generator for a while we said we'd look like "...we were herding cats" and that we'd sound like "...academic guffaws!" - DM.} Different roles were defined for the group, e.g. facilitator, resource manager, quality checker and time-keeper.

{Our game started off as a cross between chess and Risk but got modified as we went along. The game board is divided into four quadrants, one for each of the CfE capacities. We wanted people to be able to repulse other players from their quadrant somehow but never worked out the mechanism for this. Where we ended up was that you would roll dice to land on challenge squares. Successful completion of a challenge gets you a Capacity Card (or a wedge for your playing piece). Crucially, to complete a Responsible Citizen challenge and an Effective Contributer challenge you have to work with one of the other players. There is competition because there is a winner but you cannot win without co-operating with fellow players. Example challenges were: Confident Individual - Talk for one minute on animal testing; Effective Contributer - Direct a blindfolded partner through a maze. Once you have all four types of Capacity Cards, you can storm Jargon Hall Towers at the centre of the board and win the game. - DM.}

The two groups produced two very similar board games {although ours was much better :-) - DM} and in the debrief we looked at what we said the groups would sound like and look like. Did we learn what colleagues were doing? Did we collaborate? Did we feel creative? How would we improve it? In our case perhaps there should have been more focus on the curricular content and less on creativity. {However, in the time available it was perhaps inevitable that we would concentrate on the game idea at the expense of the curriculum. For the workshop we spent about 20 minutes on an activity that would normally last 2-3 hours. - DM}

A screen full of references was displayed but the only one I got was Hillis, P. (2008). Authentic learning and multimedia in history education. Learning, Media and Technology, 33(2):87-99.

So, what do you think? Does anyone have experience of using the Critical Skills approach in the classroom?

Cheaters never win and winners never cheat!

This article from the Guardian suggests that the old adage from the tile of this post may not be true:

...almost one in two Cambridge University students in a poll of 1,000 admitted to cheating in their studies.

Footballistic cheetah
Originally uploaded by Tambako the Jaguar

One in two! Grief! Given that this is from a report by a consultancy firm called Plagiarism Advice, they may be asking a very broad definition of cheating and bigging up the problem... but one in two is worrying what ever definition of cheating you use. Perhaps most worrying of all though is the revelation that: "Law students were the most likely to plagiarise, with 62% saying they had broken university rules."

To me, this underlines the importance of exploring issues to do with internet literacy and responsible online citizenship at school level. I suspect we also need to look at how we assess students if the best essays come from jiggling around a bit with the order of stuff found in a Google search on the essay title.

So that's the aim; but how do we teach this sort of internet literacy? What should assessment look like in the Internet age?

P.S. Not sure why Facebook is named and shamed in the article's headline. Any suggestions?