Curios of the week #68

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

Image via AI

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Ballarat is in the midst of winter now and this means the locals continually complain about how cold it is — it really is not cold. Every so often, there will be a frost under a clear sky. The main difference with England, where I spent my first 34 years, is that in winter in Ballarat, there are still gloriously sunny days and it does not get dark at 3.30pm. I remember English winters where at midday with no cloud cover, the light was still a little gloomy.

I started the week by going for a walk in the Woowookarung Regional Park. The park is famous for its grass trees, a distinctive plant with a squat trunk and a burst of grass at the top that looks a little like a hair style. The park is a reminder of how Ballarat is a cityscape oasis surrounded by a countryside that is a mix of farmland and woodland.

This week’s Curios include tax, a restaurant critic, a shocking statistic and much more.

Meaningless results of the week

As part of their 2022 suite of PISA assessments, the OECD decided to assess ‘creative thinking’. This was a deeply flawed endeavour because from the outset, they defined creative thinking as a trainable, general skill:

“In its 2022 cycle, PISA defines creative thinking as “the competence to engage productively in the generation, evaluation and improvement of ideas that can result in original and effective solutions, advances in knowledge and impactful expressions of imagination”. It focuses on the cognitive processes required to engage in creative work and is aligned with the concept of “little-c” creativity – in other words, a malleable capacity that can be developed through practice and that can be reasonably demonstrated in everyday contexts.”

The recent scholarly consensus is that creativity is domain specific. In other words, we can be creative in one field — or ‘domain’ — and completely uncreative in another. This is because most definitions of creativity, like the OECD’s, include value criteria— it’s not enough to generate novel ideas, these ideas must also have value. To do that, we need a great deal of relevant knowledge and so we can be creative in those fields where we have that knowledge but not in the ones where we don’t.

If it is true that creativity is domain specific then the OECD’s assessment of it is not valid. Whatever it is they are assessing, it is not a general ability to think creatively.

To find out what they are assessing, it is useful to look at the sample test items. One typical item is called ‘robot story’ and involves generating two different ideas for a film story about robots without writing those stories. Another involves suggesting three different titles for a picture prompt involving a tree with a giant book behind it. A third involves writing the text for a comic strip. I am struck by the fact that these questions all involve narrative elements and picture prompts. They are reminiscent of the kinds of prompts Australian students are given when completing their NAPLAN narrative and persuasive writing assessments.

I ran the tree/book question through ChatGPT and it generated three different prompts containing three different, abstract ideas — “Journey Through the Pages”, “Landscapes of Imagination” and “The Book of Life's Path”. According to the rubric, although utterly uninspiring, this response would have scored full marks. If the idea is that we need to develop children’s ‘creative thinking’ because this is something machines will never be able to do then I think we have run into trouble.

What are we able to conclude from the fact that the top five countries on this assessment are, in order, Singapore, Korea, Canada, Australia and New Zealand, albeit with questions over the quality of the data in the last three due to these countries not meeting all the sampling standards? Your guess is as good as mine. Korea and New Zealand, for example, would seem to have little in common.

This week’s caption competition for creative thinkers only - Image via AI

Screening of the week

Kelly Norris of the Centre for Independent Studies, an Australian think tank, has written a paper arguing for a better early screening of foundational mathematics skills. Norris describes these as ‘number sense,’ an elastic term that has different meanings to different people. However, Norris defines it as

“…the three domains of number (including saying, reading, and writing numbers), number relations (comparing and understanding numbers in terms of ‘more’ and ‘less’) and number operations (understanding and facility with addition and subtraction).”

As Norris notes, these are teachable. They do not, therefore, represent the kind of innate number sense that allows us to correctly identify groups of up to four objects, but something more sophisticated. Norris argues that the evidence shows these skills are critical to later mathematical development and an early screen would allow us to intervene with students who have not mastered them.

It is a compelling argument.

It also made me reflect a little more on the ‘constructivist’ maths teaching argument I addressed earlier in the week.

In that post, I wrote about how mathematics is a code — that nobody, for example, is born knowing what ‘+’ and ‘=’ mean and they need to learn these. One response was that there is always a starting point and in this case, we could draw on counting.

It’s worth reminding ourselves, particularly those of us who teach mathematics to older students, that there is also nothing innate about counting and that this still represents a non-intuitive codification of the world. It is due to the hard work of early years teachers that teachers of later years mistake this for something innate.

Shocking statistic of the week

Sometimes, a figure really jumps of the page.