Dear Steve Ryan President of QTU,
I attended my first QSA ‘monitoring’ meeting on Friday 12th in Maryborough. As a new HOD in Queensland I was aghast at the assessment process going on. My concerns are broad so I will break it down into a few key points:
1. I’ve seen this all before in WA and to see it being implemented here is very disheartening. To put it simply, criterion based assessment doesn’t work. The criteria used here are wordy, imprecise, and lack any common sense or logic. The distinction between the grades has no logical basis in any established learning theory and they’re unclear and open to a wide range of interpretations. This system of assessment was tried in WA in 2006 but teachers rejected it. Under pressure from teachers and the press, it became the subject of two large studies commissioned by the WA Curriculum Council. The first was by Professor David Andrich and second by Dr John Tognolini; a synopsis both reports can be found here:
http://platowa.com/documents/CC/Synopsis%20of%20Andrich%20Report.pdf
http://platowa.com/documents/Tognolini%20Report.pdf
Both of these reports concluded the same thing, that assessment regimes which involve broad teacher judgements based on criteria (such as Queensland’s) are inferior to systems that use individual teacher marks and percentages. In WA these recommendations were quickly implemented by the Curriculum Council and entire assessment process in WA was changed.
2. To further confuse things, here, we try to map these broad grade based judgements to the SAI, on a scale from 200 to 400. How logical is that? These verification meetings apparently can get quite heated because teachers cannot easily correlate a grade to a 200 point scale…no wonder, it is back to front and it is trying to mesh two philosophically opposed assessment approaches – criterion based with norm referenced. How did this come about? It is precisely what Andrrch and Tognolini said should not happen.
3. I note that the QTU is ‘philosophically opposed’ to external exams. Why is that? On what basis can a Union make a statement like that? Indeed, is it the role of the Union to make claims about curriculum and assessment issues? This needs to be re-examined.
4. The current position of the Union creates a lot more work for teachers, without any benefit. 100% school based assessment is a large impost on teacher’s workload. The requirement for teachers to try and make an ‘on balance’ judgement of a student’s work based on exit criteria, task specific criteria, general objectives, exemplars and the answer key is an impossible task. The human mind cannot store this type of information, let alone synthesize it and apply it. In a time when teacher workload and ‘burnout’ are becoming big issues, isn’t it imperative that the teaching and assessment process be kept simple?
5. For teachers to be accountable for the entire assessment process is unfair given the conditions under which we work. The requirement for teachers to read and grade submissions (with a miserly capped fee), attend monitoring and validation meetings, and to somehow adjust their work programs based on panel judgements is an inordinate amount of work for no gain, none at all.
6. With the exception of the ACT no other states use this system. As you know many use a 50/50 school and external exam based approach; this is for good reason. Coming from this system I can tell you it is much easier for teachers and schools to administer without any loss in ‘depth and breadth’ of learning. It does not ‘narrow’ the curriculum, cause undue student stress, and nor does it demean the learning process by ‘teaching to the exam’. I taught in WA and produced some very successful graduates – highly skilled people who did well in school. I find these kinds of myths being spread around here offensive, especially since they’re coming from people who have never taught in another system.
7. You have indicated in the past that teachers are happy with the assessment approach here. I don’t know who you are talking to but every science and maths teacher I have spoken to does not like this approach and many openly state they would prefer some type of external exam. Even the panel chair admitted this to me last Friday. Steve, I strongly urge you to reconsider this situation and to open up a discussion about assessment in Queensland schools. Clearly, there are some obvious trends here:
· Second lowest university enrolments among year 12 graduates
1. Dropping enrolments in the maths and sciences
2. Poor NAPLAN results.
3. A growing teacher shortage in maths/science.
With the national curriculum coming online it is time for the QTU, the QSA and EQ to improve the assessment process in Queensland and bring it into line with the other states.