Curios of the week #26

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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It has been another busy week at work and my feet have hardly touched the ground. I am looking forward to some rest in the coming term break. But before that, I had a trip to Churchie, a school in Brisbane, where I delivered a Keynote on Cognitive Load Theory and Explicit Teaching for their conference, A Learner’s Toolkit. The great Terry Byers organised my trip and was gracious in welcoming me to the stage.

Churchie is a welcoming spot and I had a great time doing one of the things I like best — talking about teaching and education research. Sad, I know. My school is keen to engage with others in the education community, share what we have learned and learn from others. To the latter point, I was given some great leads to follow-up on helping students cope with the stresses of school life by Rebecca Birch and Emma Macey of Queenwood school in Sydney.

This week’s Curios include an article on the link between anxiety and testing, a punishing blog post, a video featuring some special guest appearances and much more.

Hopeless test of the week

In 2012, England introduced its phonics screening check for students in their first year of schooling. This is a simple tool that checks whether students can sound-out simple words and therefore is a check on their knowledge of letters and the sounds they represent. When launched, much controversy centered around the check’s use of 20 real words and 20 nonwords, with the latter presented to children as the names of a set of goofy looking space aliens. This controversy was, of course, mainly performative and the reason why nonwords are used is sound. It ensures children have not seen them before and so could not have memorised them by sight.

We have been using a version of this check at my school for many years now. It provides useful information that enables us to target support where needed. And although correlation is not causation, the introduction of this screening check has coincided with a surge in England’s performance on the PIRLS assessment of reading comprehension.

The first Australian state to adopt a similar screen was South Australia. This was followed by New South Wales. And the federal government have made a national check available for those who want to use it — the states rather than the federal government control what happens in government schools.

Rather belatedly, The People’s Republic of Victoria has now joined the party. Except that its check is not quite the same. It includes only ten words — five regular words and five nonwords — and assesses a range of other things at the same time.

This has led various expert to call-out the Victoria check in an article by Robyn Grace The Age. In the process, Grace delivered a succinct explanation of the difference between a structured phonics approach and the outdated ‘balanced literacy’ that still has its advocates in Victoria:

“How reading is taught is a heated topic in Victoria. Unlike other states that have openly backed a phonics-based approach, the Victorian government allows primary schools to choose their own literacy strategy.

As a result, some schools have adopted the phonics-based science of reading principles, which teach children the sounds of the English language and the letter combinations that make them.

Other schools choose a balanced literacy approach, which combines some phonics with whole language practices that teach children to read using full words and predictable texts that encourage them to guess words.”

If a child is guessing words, they are not reading.

Test anxiety research article of the week

Regular readers will know I am not a huge fan of meta-analyses due to the tendency to mush disparate treatments and outcomes into one supposed effect size. This may be appropriate in medicine, where treatments and outcomes are more precisely defined, but in education, this can obscure as much as it uncovers.

However, that does not mean I am against systematic reviews of the literature on a specific topic. So I tend to read meta-analyses with interest while largely ignoring the effect size calculation.