Scottish ideas in education may be way for N.Z., Opposition suggests

Press, 21 January 1987, Page 14

Scottish ideas in education may be way for N.Z., Opposition suggests

Reforms to the systems for assessing school pupils have provoked widespread debate. RUTH RICHARDSON, the Opposition spokesman on education, puts her views.

Those who open their exam results this month have been placed on the “endangered species” list by the Minister of Education, Mr Russell Marshall. U.E. has gone, and apparently School Certificate is to follow. Students must be spared such testing times says the Minister. Yet politicians must face testing times" — they are called General Elections. I trust the Minister in his anti-exam fervour is not about to abolish elections too.

The “tests” politicians must undergo are highly competitive, the assessment is external, and there are no second prizes. The Minister has decreed that the testing of students must be none of these things. According to the Minister’s dictate:

• competition is out, co-opera-tive learning is in; • external exams are out, school-based assessment is in; • failure is out, and all the world’s a winner.

There is grave public disquiet with the Minister’s rush to rid the school system of exams. The public rightly seek some reputable measure of a student’s competence, and suspect that the Minister’s machinations will see diluted and devalued qualifications masquerading with the pretended authority of the old. It would be a pity if the debate over school assessment degenerated into a slanging match of the “tis,” “tisn’t” variety - . There are three questions that go to the heart of the assessment debate: Why assess? How should assessment occur? What assessment methods will best promote: (a) greater student competence, and (b) greater rates of student retention in education?

The answers to these questions will give a better steer to assessment reform than we have had’ from the Minister.

Why assess? Assessment must be conducted for two quite separate purposes:

To discover whether standards of achievement in the basic

school subjects are rising or falling; and

To discover the level of competence of an individual student. The most surprising feature of our educational system is the lack of any real measure of its performance. Despite the huge control schools have over students’ time (a fifth former has spent some' 15,000 hours at school), and the great commitment of resources to schooling, there are pathetically few measures of. what value the schools add to the learning and personal development of their students.

It is disgraceful that there is no objective measurement of the New Zealand-wide standards of competence. Sporadic international and national surveys tell us we should fear the worst — that standards have declined, maths being the most recent example. So the first item on the agenda of assessment reform must be the establishment of a system for the monitoring of standards of achievement in important areas of the school curriculum. The public need to have clear indicators of the effectiveness of their schools. It’s called accountability.

Standards assessment needs to be separated from the assessment of individual students. For the student, assessment is a measure of their personal competence. This is not a punitive exercise as the Minister makes out. On the contrary, assessment should be seen as one of a number of techniques employed to improve a student’s mastery of a subject field of knowledge.

Assessment of any use to a student must accurately identify a student’s level of competence, i.e. knowledge, skill and ability to apply and extend that knowledge. It must also subject each student to a common measure of performance, i.e. assessment must not vary in degree from school to school. And finally it must cany real weight in the market place, i.e. the public must have confidence that the qualification can be relied upon to deliver the competence it suggests. How should assessment occur? Traditionally school assessment has had two features: external examinations and ranking with built-in pass/failure rates.

The Minister should be ashamed of the half-pie, hurried, and therefore muddled fashion in which he has proceeded to reform this system. The Ministerial reforms are as follows: School certificate:

1. Ranking stays, although the Minister constantly complains of the built-in failure of ranking. 2. Marks go and grades (alphabetical system) take their place. The truth is that the marks must still be given to the schools, and students can get their marks on application. 3. For the future, School Certificate is to go. University Entrance:

U.E. has gone and with it any external exam at the 6th-form level.

Sixth Form Certificate: 1. Sixth Form Certificate is internally assessed, but schools are limited in the grades they can give by the marks the school achieved in School Certificate. So the guarantee of the integrity of the school-based assessment for Sixth Form Certificate is the performance of the school in the externally assessed School Certificate.

2. Grades (of the numerical variety) are awarded. 3. A student with a particular combination of grades may be awarded provisional entry to a University. Seventh Form:

Bursary and scholarship are untouched by the Minister’s hand (so far).

In the muddlement and confusion, it interests of the student that will inevitably suffer. So where do the more sensible and responsible reform options lie? First, a translation of the assessment jargon is called for:

Norm Referenced Assessment (ranking): This is assessing by placing in order of merit, and treating the first half as successful, and the rest as failures, e.g. School Certificate. Criterion Referenced Assessment (achievement-based testing): This is assessing by seeing whether a student can reach a stated level of knowledge and skill, e.g. driver’s licence. Any student who performs at that level is successful.

External Assessment: An exam conducted by an independent agency on an objective basis, and administered on the same terms for all, e.g. Bursary. Internal assessment: A subject tive school-based assessment. There may or may not be some effort to see that schools judge on a comparable basis. The first sensible step is to dump ranking. It is a disreputable system that tells you nothing about the level of achievement or competence of an individual student. So stupid is the ranking system that if 100 professors of mathematics sat School Certificate maths, 49 of them would be found to fail. All assessment should be criterion-referenced. We should be concerned to discover the actual achievement of a student,

not his or her order in class. This is the driver’s licence testing system and is the only responsible formula for reform. Next, we must settle the balance between external and internal assessment. Three factors deserve weight in deciding how that balance should be struck: 1. Fairness to individual students. The student at Akaroa Area School must be assured that their qualification will be given the same respect as an equivalent qualification from Auckland Grammar. This factor requires some erring on the side of external assessment.

2. Teacher assessment skills. Teachers are the first to concede that considerable development in teacher assessment skills is required before it can be said with confidence that a consistently high and uniform standard of assessment is being exercised throughout the country. This factor, too, suggests a weighting in favour of external assessment. 3. Market confidence in the qualification. A qualification is of no use if it has no currency in the market place. The Minister has shown scant concern for the market place credibility of his new assessments. It is unacceptable that in the wholesale retreat from exams, the Minister has forced employers to judge not the merit of individual students, but the repute of the school that issued the qualification. Only an objective and external assessment can continue to guarantee the credibility of the qualification.

I don’t argue that an external exam can measure the totality of a student’s competence. There needs to be a measure of schoolbased assessment to discover a student’s skill in applying knowledge, for example to see how a student manages the practicality of a scientific experiment or displays a capacity for oral expression. In my view, the ideal assessment system should be achievement based, with a 60 per cent external exam component, leaving 40 per cent to be determined by internal assessment. Equally ideally we should move from once-a-year testing to a twosemester year, with a student being left to elect whether to

take one or two shots at the qualification. This is the system I believe will best promote greater student competence and greater student retention rates. The public will quickly dismiss as phoney a certificate or award that pretends a competence that does not exist. The Minister’s develop that knowledge and skill to new levels.

Those who argue for exam reform maintain that for too long the demands of exams have dictated the curriculum and cramped the breadth of learning; the critics say that learning has been geared to exam success rather than to knowledge and skill development. The remedy to the legitimate elements of this complaint does not lie in dumping exams, but in reforming the basis on which the assessment is conducted.

As I have argued, shifting from ranking to achievement-based assessment would allow a true test of competence. Curriculum reform does not require the sacrifice of exams, merely a change in the basis on which the exams are conducted.

. New Zealand has a quite disgraceful rate of student retention. For a start we have an obscenely low school leaving age of 15. It should worry us that one-third of all students leave school with no recognised educational qualification. It should worry us still further that more than 70 per cent of young people finish their school days never to return to any form of further education or training. This woeful statistic compares most unfavourably with the 75 per cent of young Asians or Americans who make it their business to continue with their education and vocational training.

Small wonder their economies grow apace, while New Zealand continues to slide in the stand-ard-of-living stakes. We must increase our rates of participation in education if we are to secure ’social and economic prosperity.

Yet another quarrel with the disreputable ranking system 1 is that it casts people aside early in their learning career and bars them from further opportunities. Such systems are a gross waste of our talent and must cease. The Scottish, so often the leaders in educational reform, have again pioneered a set of ideas and a system that deserves scrutiny in New Zealand as an appropriate means of tackling this issue. The ideas came in their 16-18 Action Plan, and the system is called the 16 plus (16 is the school leaving age in Scotland.)

It has been apparent to the Scottish for some time that the dual systems for providing education and training for young people, after the ending of compulsory education at 16, required “E" grade in a School Certificate subject will be seen for what it is

• — a failed competence. This nonsense of pretending all the world is a success with grades creates a well-founded suspicion in the public that the current process of Ministerial reform’is a con-trick. The public will not hold in the same regard a devalued and diluted qualification.

The public really want to know a student’s level of competence, that is, the knowledge of the student, the skill in applying that knowledge, and the ability to reform. Specific concerns' included: The relatively low numbers of 16-18 year-olds opting to stay on for non-compulsory education; The inadequacy of courses in meeting the needs of many young people and employers; the need, in particular, to take account of the growth of new technology; the proliferation of syllabuses and certificates which had caused unnecessary complications for employers, and which had led to inefficient use of costly educational facilities; the need to integrate education and training into structured courses which would prepare young people, not just for their first job, but for a future career, and for life in an increasingly complex society. The new framework set out in the Action Plan proposed: new programmes based upon a collection of “modules,” usually 40 hours long, to replace present non-advanced courses in Scotland; a single new National Certificate crediting students’ cumulative performance in the new programmes, with assessment based upon performance criteria specified for each module; a range of points of entry to and exits from education and training, with greater freedom of choice for youhg people; better opportunities to change" areas of study while retaining credit for earlier achievement; closer links between schools and further education colleges and between education and train-

ing schemes, designed to prepare young people for working life or to equip them with skills for employment. The assessment system for the National Certificate is based on a criterion-referenced approach. Assessments of students’ work are made in the schools, colleges, and other centres in relation to nationally prescribed learning outcomes and performance criteria. '

Learning outcomes state the knowledge, skills, and behaviours which the student can profess on the successful 1 completion of a module. Typically, there are five or six of these learning outcomes in each module.

(Performance criteria indicate the standards which must be achieved in the learning outcomes.) Scotland has achieved the happy marriage of curriculum and assessment reform in a fashion that will be productive of greater competence and greater participation in education.

This must become our ambition in New Zealand. The Minister’s doctrinaire efforts to engineer education to his own socialist notions demonstrate what we must not do if we are to have a hope of achieving that ambition.

'Sporadic surveys tell us to expect worst—standards have declined’

'A qualification is no use if it has no currency in the marketplace’

‘lt should worry us that one-third of pupils leave school unqualified’