Curios of the week #89

Clippings, endnotes and other ephemera

---

The week began for me in the garden, soaking up some delightful spring weather and watching as the bees worked their way through the violet flowers in our border. Our back deck is a great place to catch the early evening sun and read a book. Soon will come the time of barbecues.

We hosted some visitors from New Zealand on Thursday and took them on a tour of our remaining classes—now our Year 12 students have left and our Year 10 students are completing their exams. As ever, they asked interesting questions and caused us to reflect on some of the details of what we do. I am now thinking about board work…

This week’s Curios include a whimper, an amoeba, some critical thinking and much more.

Blog posts of the week

Professor Kathy Rastle has written a blog post about the fallout from the Education Policy Institute (EPI) report on England’s phonics check that I mentioned in last week’s Curios.

The authors of the EPI report claim that the phonics check had no ‘discernible positive impact’ on reading levels. For example, they state:

“After the introduction of the PSC, an existing general upward trend in the proportion of children meeting the ‘expected standard’ in key stage 1 (KS1) reading continued, though at a slower and stalling rate compared to that before the introduction of the check”

The authors imply this is evidence of a lack of impact of the check. However, it can also be interpreted as consistent with the check having some impact because scores improved. Note that a more rigorous approach to phonics teaching was introduced prior to the check after the 2006 publication of the Rose Report and this could have contributed to the rising scores prior to the check. It is also not clear to me that meeting the expected standard at key stage 1 would respond linearly to improvements in phonics knowledge and there could well be diminishing returns beyond a certain point. As Rastle states:

“…we might anticipate that the [phonics screening check] would lead to improvements in phonics teaching, and that these improvements would lead to gains in phonics knowledge and subsequently, reading comprehension. It's also important to remember that [key stage 1] and [key stage 2] reading comprehension tests reflect many aspects of reading that go beyond phonics knowledge: for example, decoding fluency, vocabulary, syntactic knowledge, genre knowledge, world knowledge. For both of these reasons, we might anticipate that any rises in [key stage 1] and [key stage 2] reading scores should be gradual, and certainly less dramatic than observed for [phonics screening check] performance itself.”

While making the ‘no discernible impact’ claim, the authors of the EPI report also claim that due to the phonics check being introduced to all students simultaneously in 2012, ‘it is impossible to perform a definitive causal quantitative national evaluation of its impacts’.

Rastle points out that the authors are therefore claiming that they have not found something they acknowledge they could not, in principle, have found. This seems like a misleading claim to make.

“…the press release issued with the report offers the strong conclusion that there is no “discernible positive impact of the PSC on the reading levels of primary aged children in England”.  That’s not a responsible claim given the weaknesses in the research design: if a research design does not allow you to establish a positive impact, then the absence of one shouldn't be pitched as big news.”

It is interesting that a simple check on students’ knowledge of letter-sound relationships should continue to draw so much negative commentary. This points, I believe, to deeper ideological currents about how education should be.

Which is addressed in a different way by Heather Fearn in a recent post on her blog. Fearn prompted a debate on Twitter/X by stating that knowledge used to be an unacceptable word in education in England. This then caused a lot of people to—often very rudely—tell her she was wrong and that everyone had always taught knowledge. Fearn’s post was a response to this. This section resonated with me from my time teaching in England:

“If you had talked about knowledge as ‘crucial’ at that time perhaps you would be told that knowledge was needed but was ‘low level’ or ‘rote’. Perhaps you would be told mere memorisation was not important. Quite likely… it would be explained that skills mattered more because they were useful in life and knowledge could always be googled.”

I also contributed to this debate earlier in the week.

Media appearances of the week

I was quoted in a piece by Alex Crowe in The Age this week. The quotes were the same ones I gave a couple of weeks back to their sister paper, The Sydney Morning Herald. So, nothing really new from me. However, I feel duty bound to promote a story that mentions me and it also places a Victorian slant on things, emphasising the drop in advanced mathematics enrolments in our state.

I was also quoted in a news story in The Sydney Morning Herald by Christopher Harris. This time, the focus was on maths anxiety and its potential effect on uptake of maths by girls. Harris illustrated this with data from PISA showing comparisons between countries.

I am convinced that some students are anxious about maths and the maths anxiety concept has considerable research behind it. However, I still wonder whether it is an actual thing and it’s worth reading Marty Ross on this perspective.

Anyway, this was my contribution.

“Evidence suggests that teachers in East Asia want their students to understand maths just like we do. However, they also appreciate the fundamental importance of practising facts and procedures to fluency. Without this fluency, there is no strong foundation. Students are presented with problems they struggle to solve and this is what plausibly drives maths anxiety.

When it comes to the gender gap, there are other factors at work, many of which are complex. However, if we taught maths better – if we taught it clearly and explicitly and asked students to practise to fluency – we may reduce the aversion to maths felt by some girls because they would experience more success as a result of this better teaching.”

I am always happy to provide quotes to excellent education journalists like Crowe and Harris. Get in touch.

Interesting finding of the week

Image via AI

It is always fascinating to read a paper where a prediction based on cognitive load theory does not come true.