“You don’t fatten the pig by weighing it” An evocative phrase used by those who would rightly challenge the concept of over-assessment or too frequent external assessment or inspection. A Head Teacher’s Union leader even described the English Ofsted as the “Office of Pig weighing”. The use of the phrase has taken on a global currency as [...]
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The Scottish Government issued A Consultation on the Next Generation of National Qualifications in Scotland on the 10th June 2008. The authority will be making formal response before the closing date of the 31st October 2008.
I thought it might be useful to try to work out my own perspective on the questions. In a future [...]
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I recently bumped into a former colleague and briefly chatted about “A Curriculum for Excellence”. My friend has responsibility for developing learning and teaching at his school and was telling me that the school are going to give every pupil comprehensive course support materials for each of their certificated subjects - once the course has been completed. [...]
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The Educational Institute for Scotland (EIS) - the biggest teaching union in the Scotland have issued a number of press releases over the holiday period.
The last of these was entitled League Table approach and too much Testing remains Harmful to Education, say EIS
“The Educational Institute of Scotland (EIS) has called for a radical rethink on [...]
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The Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) is an internationally standardised assessment that was jointly developed by participating countries and administered to15-year-olds in schools.
The survey was implemented in 43 countries in the 1st assessment in 2000, in 41 countries in the 2nd assessment in 2003, in 57 countries in the 3rd assessment in 2006 and 62 countries have signed up to participate [...]
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I had a great visit this week to King’s Meadow Primary School in Haddington. At the beginning of my visit I had a chat with Headteacher Donald McGillivray about boy’s writing. Donald has done a fascinating analysis of boys’ attainment across the school and the statistics show that boys’ writing is of a much lower standard than [...]
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A group of us (some Secondary HTs and Quality Improvement Officers) met this afternoon to consider how we might develop attainment targets for schools.
One of the things we are all agreed upon is that the notion of plucking figures out of thin air and saying to a school “this is what you need to achieve [...]
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I had an interesting conversation with a teacher today about there being little need to differentiate in classes which have been set (put into ability groupings for certain subjects e.g. maths, english)
Such an assertion must be based upon the premise that all pupils are placed (through accurate assessment) in the appropriate set and that the class [...]
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Posted in Assessment on Feb 12th, 2007 2 Comments »
I met someone during the weekend who told me about his experience of trying to get his child into an Edinburgh fee paying primary school.
I knew selection took place but I was stunned to learn that the letter he received after the selection test read: “Due to the very high levels of intelligence demonstrated by the children who have [...]
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We made a decision last year to introduce Midyis baseline testing for all our secondary schools for a test which all S2 pupil sit. Over the last couple of weeks we’ve been analysing the data and its has thrown up some very interesting results.
Such has been the success that we have now agreed to use the [...]
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