Curios of the week #17

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Back in England, I took the opportunity to visit my hometown of Quarry Bank in the West Midlands. None of my family live there now and there have been some key changes — my old primary school has been completely rebuilt and is far better for it. Interestingly, the Conservative club appears to be still going strong but the Labour club is now just Quarry Bank social club. I cannot help juxtapose this jarring development in an area that voted for Brexit with the near inevitability of Labour winning the next UK election. I am not convinced that the stray lambs of populism will ever fully return to the fold.

You can see my Twitter thread here.

In other developments, I met with a UK academic in order to conspire together on diabolical schemes and today, I spoke to a group of primary teaching and learning leads from the E-ACT multi academy trust about cognitive load theory.

This week’s curios include a poorly executed attempt at censorship, research on timed tests, the continuing soap-opera that is the California Maths Framework and much more.

Bad idea of the week

One of the most important points I seek to press on people in the UK is that they should not abandon their system of national examinations at the age of sixteen. In Australia, we did so long ago and it can leave the upper level of secondary school as a bit of a wasteland. Exams are not fair, but they are a fairer way of assessing students than any of the alternatives. Exams at sixteen are something the vast majority of students can cope with and exams prepare students for similar stressors — such as job interviews — in later life. And even though ostensibly high stakes, with the majority of students staying at school until 18, there is plenty of time to address any issues the exams uncover.

It therefore comes as little surprise that a report released in Scotland calls for their abandonment. Over the last 20 years, Scotland has been following the education experts and doing the opposite of what empirical evidence and common sense would dictate. In this case, the report suggests burdening teachers with the hamster wheel of continuous assessment, at the precise time that advances in Artificial Intelligence will make it almost impossible to prevent cheating on tasks students do not complete under exam conditions.

No wonder Professor Lindsay Patterson, Scotland’s sensible education academic, is raising the alarm.