Curriculum and assessment
Who should decide what students learn at school? I’ve grown increasingly interested in this question since becoming an educational researcher, but writing this article also reminded me of something that happened when I was still at secondary school.
How well do our students learn what we set out to teach them? There are many opinions, but not enough facts. This article summarises the results of 35 years of international surveys of achievement in reading, mathematics, and science. There is some support for our reading programmes in the cross-national data, but serious questions remain about our weaknesses in mathematics and science.
The implication that teachers with high expectations will improve student achievement has an appealing logic. However, whether or not the instructional practices and beliefs of teachers having high expectations would differ from those whose expectations were low has not previously been explored. High and low expectation teachers identified in a previous study were interviewed and observed teaching reading.
What might a "fun" and "interesting" curriculum entail from the pupils' point of view? The author draws on findings from a review of the research undertaken in the UK on pupils' perspectives and experiences of the curriculum. The article explores some of the findings in relation to pupils' views on relevance and enjoyment in the curriculum across the key stages, and highlights where greater emphasis might be needed in the curriculum according to the views of learners.
How do students understand concepts in school history curriculum and assessment documentation?
"Switched-on" history teachers tap into students' conceptual understandings, promote conversations about the processes of historical research, encourage critical and evaluative thinking, and so develop students' historical consciousness.
A series in which we ask a leading researcher to distil three key ideas from their work over the years.
At the beginning of July I attended Scicon, a conference for teachers of science. One of the keynote speakers was Amanda Berry, a teacher-educator from Monash University in Victoria, Australia. Her presentation was about teachers’ pedagogical content knowledge (PCK), specifically in science, but I think her ideas are relevant to other curriculum areas as well. Amanda talked about teachers’ PCK often being tacit. She believes that when teachers explicitly understand what they are doing and why, the value of their professional practice and knowledge is recognised.
Student-centred curriculum integration is inclusive and future focused, enabling students to develop the competencies, values, knowledge, skills, and understandings espoused in The New Zealand Curriculum. To better align schools with curriculum principles, more innovative, student-centred forms of curriculum design are required.
These days we are keen to make the most of our test data, particularly when it comes to informing next steps for teaching and learning. Sometimes we may examine how students have responded to particular questions on a test. This is good practice. It can be very enlightening to see what students found difficult (or easy) within a particular assessment and to think about the responses they made. It is also always important to know what was actually tested and how this matches our learning intentions. However, we must take care when dealing with responses to single questions.
Interviews with primary teachers revealed questions of control of operational curricula. Schools hold significant power over curricula through their organisation, planning, and assessment requirements which sometimes have little educational purpose or benefit. Implications for schools and for teacher agency are discussed.
