MORE EVIDENCE OF EDUCATIONAL DECLINE IN BRITAIN

When you look past fudged exam results to actual tests of what kids can do, the evidence is stark

It has become an annual rite of summer. Out come the Sats/GCSE/A -level results - take your pick - and up pops a government minister to say that grades are higher than ever, teachers and schools have done a fantastic job, but there's still room for improvement. Not everyone takes this at face value and there are a few grumbles about exams becoming easier. But even if there are suspicions that standards have dropped, no one has ever seriously suggested that children's cognitive abilities have deteriorated. Until now. New research funded by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and conducted by Michael Shayer, professor of applied psychology at King's College, University of London, concludes that 11- and 12-year-old children in year 7 are "now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago", in terms of cognitive and conceptual development.

"It's a staggering result," admits Shayer, whose findings will be published next year in the British Journal of Educational Psychology. "Before the project started, I rather expected to find that children had improved developmentally. This would have been in line with the Flynn effect on intelligence tests, which shows that children's IQ levels improve at such a steady rate that the norm of 100 has to be recalibrated every 15 years or so. But the figures just don't lie. We had a sample of over 10,000 children and the results have been checked, rechecked and peer reviewed."

To understand both the science and its implications, we need to step back 30 years, to when Shayer was part of a six-strong team of academics - including Margaret Brown, Geoffrey Matthews and Philip Adey - engaged in research at Chelsea College on concepts in secondary science and mathematics. "We realised that no one had actually bothered to investigate how children learned maths and science, or where the difficulties lay," he says. "So the Social Science Research Council (SSRC) funded a five-year project - the longest ever research programme of its kind - to find out."

As the time frame suggests, it was a slow process and Shayer has clear memories of a young, blue-suited academic - one Ted Wragg - being sent round after two years had elapsed to check up that the SSRC's money was being well spent. Wragg gave the Chelsea College team the thumbs up and in 1979 the research was published.

One of Shayer's main difficulties had been to establish a benchmark of ability. The psychometric tradition had obvious disadvantages. For one thing, the Flynn effect implied that an absolute scale of mental age was impossible, but there were other problems. A score of 105 might tell you that a child is slightly above average, but it does not tell you what maths he or she can or can't understand. For this reason, Shayer decided that using the developmental model of the Swiss psychologist Jean Piaget was a better bet. "Although controversial, Piaget's descriptions do provide an underlying, logic-based, theoretical model to differentiate different levels of complexity," he says. "It describes the same behaviours - for example, the ability to control variables in experimenting - whether the subject is nine or 16." Crucially, the model met the statistical demands of being criterion-referenced and could be given equal interval properties.

According to Piaget's model, children go through four main stages of development - sensorimotor (infancy), pre-concrete (up to age 5), concrete (5-11) and formal (11-16) - each of which are divided into several sub-groups. Shayer's first task was to check this model against a broad cohort of 14,000 schoolchildren. "We conducted a wide range of tests on all the secondary-age year groups over the course of a year," says Shayer. "These were designed to assess a child's exact ability on the Piagetian scale."

Shayer's work naturally focused on the different sub-groups of the concrete and the formal. The concrete stage, in regard to maths, meant testing a child's ability to put things in order, use descriptive models and plot simple graphs. The formal stage involved testing more abstract concepts and the ability to predict. His results showed that Piaget had only described the top 20% of the population. "Like many scientists, Piaget picked the best specimens, so his results were weighted in favour of the most able children," says Shayer. "We took a broad section of the population and found that, far from being at the early formal level (3A) as Piaget had predicted, the average 11-year old was firmly back in the centre of the middle concrete level (2B)."

Not everyone was overjoyed by these findings. Many educationists found it hard to accept that children were less able than previously thought, and were reluctant to admit that there were huge differences in development that weren't purely attributable to environmental factors. To Shayer, though, it was no great surprise. "You would expect children of bright parents to be brighter than average," he says. "Similarly, you would expect children whose parents played with them regularly in a creatively challenging way to do better on developmental tests."

The main objection to Shayer's research came from those who argued that the Piagetian tests described only a child's ability to perform those particular functions and were of no predictive value with regard to general level of performance. "Shayer disproved this with his subsequent work in the 1980s," says Paul Black, emeritus professor of education at King's College and chair of the 1988 National Curriculum Task Group on Assessment and Testing (TGAT), whose report formed the basis for the implementation of Sats. "He helped to develop two-year intervention programmes for those children who had been identified by the Piagetian model as being below average in year 7. Science and maths were the contexts through which the programmes were taught, but the prime focus was on general developmental skills. "These programmes [Cognitive Acceleration through Science Education and Cognitive Acceleration through Maths Education] both significantly increased the children's Piagetian scores and markedly improved their maths and science GCSE grades from those predicted at entry level testing. More important, these children also showed an improvement on predicted grades in other subjects, such as English and history. This showed the programmes had a generic impact, rather than just a specific effect."

Shayer's work was subsequently validated by similar research in Greece, Pakistan and Australia. It also managed to free itself of its purely Piagetian approach by assimilating some of the properties of psychometric testing into a unified developmental test. It became one of the criteria by which age-related attainment targets were benchmarked when the national curriculum was introduced in 1988. And there the story would have ended were it not for the fact that Shayer's wife, scientist Denise Ginsburg, was regularly employed by schools to run their Year 7 maths and science developmental testing to see which children needed the Case or Came programmes. "She reported to me that she had begun to notice a significant falling off in children's abilities," Shayer says, "and, because of this, I decided to investigate further." His research project was undertaken last year and involved the assessment of 10,000 year 7 children's performance on developmental volume and heaviness (VH) tests.

VH, which concerns the conservation of liquid and solid materials, internal volume and intuitive density, was chosen partly because it has substantial predictive validity for both science and mathematics achievement and is an effective way of alerting teachers to their students' range of abilities, but also because it is recognised as a test that measures abilities that are not directly teachable. As such, it was an objective research method, free from any process of adaptation to changing circumstance. "Similar tests conducted in the 70s showed a big difference between boys and girls," says Shayer, "with boys scoring noticeably better than girls. The new research reveals that the gender gap has disappeared, with both sexes deteriorating significantly. Boys have fallen by more than one Piagetian sub group - from the middle of 2B [mature concrete] to below the middle of 2A/2B [middle concrete]. By any standards, this is a huge and significant statistical change."

For the same reasons that he stood by Shayer's original research, Black believes no one should dismiss these current findings. "There are bound to be those who would prefer to ignore these results," he says, "because they find them politically unacceptable or inconvenient. But Shayer has a proven track record and you have to respect his science."

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Why Australia's greatest story is just not being told

The nation's heritage is being forgotten in history lessons, writes Kevin Donnelly


Was John Howard correct this week? Has the teaching of history fallen victim to a politically correct, New Age approach to curriculum, and are students receiving a fragmented understanding of the past? The evidence suggests "yes". Since the 1970s and '80s, as outlined in Why Our Schools Are Failing, left-wing academics, education bureaucracies and professional associations have embarked on the long march through the institutions to overthrow more conservative approaches to education.

The so-called traditional academic curriculum, with its emphasis on initiating students into established disciplines such as history and literature, and the belief that education can be impartial, have been attacked as misguided, Eurocentric and socially unjust. One of the first examples of the new history was the Keating government-inspired national studies of society and environment (SOSE) course outline published in 1993. History as a discrete subject disappeared and early drafts of the document were described as "a subject for satire" and "a case of political correctness gone wild". European settlement is described as an invasion, Australia's Anglo-Celtic heritage is either marginalised or ignored, indigenous culture is portrayed as beyond reproach and teachers are told they must give priority to perspectives of gender, multiculturalism and global future.

The 1999 Queensland SOSE curriculum, for one, was also decidedly New Age and one-sided. The values associated with the subject mirror the usual PC suspects, such as social justice, peace and ecological sustainability. In line with postmodernism, students are also taught that "knowledge is always tentative", that they should "deconstruct dominant views of society", "critique the socially constructed element of text" and examine "how privilege and marginalisation are created and sustained in society". Forget the ideal of seeking truth and developing a disinterested understanding of the world. Students are now told that everything is tentative and shifting and the purpose of education is to criticise mainstream society in terms of gender, ethnicity and class.

As a result of adopting an outcomes-based education model, all Australian history education documents adopt a constructivist view of learning. The student is placed centre-stage while the learning of important dates, events and the significance of great historical figures gives way to studying the local community or the life of such worthies as princess Di. As noted in Stuart Macintyre's The History Wars, detailing how history is taught in schools: "The traditional discipline came under increasing criticism from curriculum reformers for being old, stale and simply unrelated to students' needs. 'Relevance' became an educational ethos." Current approaches to history ask students to uncritically celebrate multiculturalism and cultural diversity without recognising that much of Australia's economic, political and legal stability relies on a Eurocentric tradition steeped in the Judeo/Christian ethic. A commitment to human rights, the rule of law and tolerance does not arise by accident.

The reality is that Australian society has proven to be such a successful social experiment because of those very values grounded in Western civilisation that can be traced back thousands of years via England and Europe to early Rome, Greece and biblical Israel.

Australian teachers are also told that how one interprets history is subjective and relative to one's culture and place. As argued by the History Teachers' Association of Victoria in the early '90s: "One of the great developments in history teaching has been the emphasis on the nature of representations, or versions, of history. There is no single version of history which can be presented to students. "History is a version of the past which varies according to the person and the times ... So not only is there no single version of history, but each generation re-interprets the past in the light of its own values and attitudes."

Taken to its logical conclusion, such a view allows Japanese textbooks to ignore the rape of Nanking and for British author David Irving to deny that millions were killed in the Holocaust. The belief that different versions of the past are of equal value and that each generation has the right to re-interpret history in terms of current values also allows revisionist historians to judge past actions in terms of what is now considered politically correct. As a result, today's historians describe the First Fleet as an invasion even though the Admiralty had given Governor Phillip express orders to co-exist with the indigenous population and Phillip, after being speared, did not punish those responsible.

As noted by the Monash University historian Mark Peel, of greater concern is that generations of students no longer understand or appreciate the grand narrative associated with the rise of Western civilisation and Australia's development as a nation. Peel states: "Students seem anxious about the absence of a story by which to comprehend change, or to understand how the nation and world they are about to inherit came to be. Indeed, their sense of the world's history is often based upon intense moments and fragments that have no real momentum or connection

Source




Puffed-up and self-righteous school officials can't bear being laughed at

Being laughed at is probably what they need most

A high school senior who was transferred to an alternative school as punishment for parodying his principal on the Internet is suing the district, arguing it violated his freedom of speech. Justin Layshock had used his grandmother's computer and the Web site MySpace.com to create a phony profile under the principal's name and photo. The site asks questions, and Justin filled in answers peppered with vulgarities, fat jokes and, to the question "what did you do on your last birthday?" the response: "too drunk to remember," according to the lawsuit filed on Justin's behalf by the American Civil Liberties Union.

School officials weren't amused. They questioned the teenager about the site on Dec. 21, and he apologized to the principal, the ACLU said. Then, on Jan. 6, the district suspended Justin for 10 days and transferred him to an alternative program typically reserved for students with behavior or attendance problems, according to the lawsuit. He also was banned from school events, including tutoring and graduation ceremonies. "The school's punishment affects his education," said Witold Walczak, Pennsylvania Legal Director of the ACLU. "In this critical last semester, Justin's opportunities to gain admission to college may be irreparably damaged."

According to the lawsuit, Pennsylvania State University notified Justin that his application had been put on "a registration hold" and asked for more information about the suspension. "It is unknown how or why the university had received this information, since it is supposed to be confidential under federal-student-privacy laws," the lawsuit says. Officials with the Hermitage School District declined to comment. The lawsuit, filed in U.S. District Court in Pittsburgh, seeks Justin's immediate reinstatement to his regular school. A hearing for a temporary order is set for Monday. "Not to excuse it, but school officials need to understand that they're not parents," Walczak said. "School officials can't reach into parents' homes and tell them how to raise their kids."

Source

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For greatest efficiency, lowest cost and maximum choice, ALL schools should be privately owned and run -- with government-paid vouchers for the poor and minimal regulation.

The NEA and similar unions worldwide believe that children should be thoroughly indoctrinated with Green/Left, feminist/homosexual ideology but the "3 R's" are something that kids should just be allowed to "discover"

Comments? Email me here. For times when blogger.com is playing up, there is a mirror of this site (viewable even in China!) here

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