Exams The Way They Should Be
There was a lot of comment on lists today about this Sydney Morning Herald Article entitled “Phone a friend in exams” It is such an indicator of how pedestrian we are in schools when a large publication newspaper picks up such an obvious 21st Century skill as being able to access external information to answer questions. I would really like to think that schools have been allowing kids to have “open information tests” for some time. I know that we were looking at doing it day one of our notebook programme in 2000. Our biggest issue was getting teachers to change the style of questions that they were asking on tests.
Chris Betcher from the school in the article writes far more intellegently about the programme in his post “The Truth is Out There”
I am interested to see how they are going to expand this to all subjects as we found it very difficult to get the maths and science teachers in particular, to redesign assessments that measured the outcomes of the courses that they taught in a way that allowed for collaboration. Chris mentions this as well in his post when he comments about “what sort of tasks were best suited to this approach”. I know as a former maths and science teacher, that it was tough to design assessment tasks that were suited to a collaborative approach as the course outcomes did not allow for all of the great social discussion about issues in science that should have been there.
Anyway. Great food for thought. I really think that those students with the critical literacy to effectively access, synthesise and be creative with the “entire sum of human knowledge”, will be most in demand in a knowledge economy. Giving them adhoc access is a great place to start, but actually fostering the development of critical literacy is still the most important part. What an exciting to time to be born with an inquiring mind!
Photo: Old Bakelit Phone by aussiegall
Filed under: Learning for a Flat World | Tagged: collaboration, exams, reform
With all due respect, you have to challenge fundamental beliefs about exams.
It is not worth arguing about making minor technological. Improvements to terminal life-altering exams. You need to fight for the elimination of all such midieval kid sorting practices. There are a million and one reasons why any exam system undermines educational opportunity, quality and justice.
Throw all exams on the dustbin of history. We know how to do it and more importantly, why.