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Martin Burrett

Life After Exams - 7 views

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    "We are currently deep in the middle of exam season here in the UK, but the end is in sight. But what do you and your pupils do with this strange time after exams when so much of your time effort (blood and sweat). Do you revel in the limbo and become demob happy, or full throttle to the end of the year? In this session of #UKEdChat we discuss your plans and opinions to 'life after exams'."
Sydney Lacey

Union Backs 'Bar Exam' For Teachers : NPR - 0 views

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    National Public Radio / All Things Considered transcript and audio for a story on teacher certification requirements and a proposal by AFT for a teacher "bar exam." "The system for preparing and licensing teachers in the U.S. is in such disarray that the American Federation of Teachers is proposing a "bar exam" similar to the one lawyers have to pass before they can practice."
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    National Public Radio / All Things Considered transcript and audio for a story on teacher certification requirements and a proposal by AFT for a teacher "bar exam."
D. S. Koelling

Online Courses Should Always Include Proctored Finals, Economist Warns - Wired Campus -... - 34 views

  • Online economics students do not absorb much material from homework and chapter tests during the semester—perhaps because they expect to be able to cheat their way through the final exam.
  • she has noticed that her online students perform much worse than their classroom-taught counterparts when they are required to take a proctored, closed-book exam at the end of the semester.
  • Ms. Wachenheim’s findings parallel those of a 2008 study in the Journal of Economic Education. That study found indirect evidence that students cheat on unproctored online tests, because their performance on proctored exams was much more consistent with predictions based on their class ranks and their overall grade-point averages.
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  • Those include insisting on a proctored final exam and reminding students of that exam “early, often, and broadly, so students are ever-conscious that they will be responsible for the material in an unaided environment.”
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    "In self-paced courses, many students appeared to cram most of the homework and chapter exams into the final week of the semester. Few of them bothered to do the ungraded practice problems offered by the online publisher." First, where is the teaching? It sounds more like a case of poorly designed instruction...or a complete lack of instruction. Of course these students are not learning...they are not being taught. Also, if they are in classes which are actively taught by a teacher, then where are the formative assessments by the instructors? That teacher should know long before the final exam if the students know the material or not. A good teacher and a well developed online course would have a number of ways to determine this which do not allow for "cut and paste" or cheating. Finally, does this department test a student's memorization of material or the mastery of the concepts and and understanding of how to apply those concepts? Perhaps, there is also a need to reevaluate the assessments. Good teaching is good teaching. If a student is not learning the material, who is really to blame?
Steve Ransom

Revisiting Extra Credit Policies | Faculty Focus - 3 views

  • ere’s how it works. The instructor attaches a blank piece of paper to the back of every exam. Students may write on that sheet any exam questions they couldn’t answer or weren’t sure they answered correctly. Students then take this piece of paper with them and look up the correct answers. They can use any resource at their disposal short of asking the instructor. At the start of the next class session, they turn in their set of corrected answers which the instructor re-attaches to their original exam. Both sets of answers are graded. If students missed the question on the exam but answered it correctly on the attached sheet, half the credit lost for the wrong answer is recovered.
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    The blank paper idea is very interesting. I don't give that many exams of this type, but if I did, I'd seriously consider this strategy.
Martin Burrett

Teachers predict pupil success just as well as exam scores - 14 views

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    "New research from King's College London finds that teacher assessments are equally as reliable as standardised exams at predicting educational success. The researchers say their findings, published today in the Journal of Child Psychology and Psychiatry, question whether the benefits of standardised exams outweigh the costs."
Sharin Tebo

Teaching Metacognition - 78 views

  • Step 1: Teach students that the ability to learn is not a fixed quantity The key to a student's ability to become a self-regulated (i.e., metacognitive) learner is understanding that one's ability to learn is a skill that develops over time rather than a fixed trait, inherited at birth.
    • Sharin Tebo
       
      Carol Dweck's book on having a Growth Mindset comes to mind here...
  • Step 2: Teach students how to set goals and plan to meet them
  • Step 3: Give students opportunities to practice self-monitoring and adapting Accurate self-monitoring is quite difficult.
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  • In particular, students are encouraged to think about the key points of the lecture as they listen and take notes. At the end of the lecture, students write what they think the three most important ideas of the lecture were on an index card.
  • Example: lecture wrappers
  • Teaching Self-Monitoring Strategies Monitoring and adapting strategies can be taught as learning habits. A wrapper is one tool for teaching self-monitoring behavior. A wrapper is an activity that surrounds an existing assignment or activity and encourages metacognition. For example, wrappers can be used with lectures, homework assignments, or exams. Wrappers require just a few extra minutes of time, but can have a big impact.
  • Example: homework wrappers Before beginning a homework assignment, students answer a brief set of self-assessment questions focusing on skills they should be monitoring. Students complete the homework as usual, and then answer a follow-up set of self-assessment questions.
  • Example: exam wrappers When graded exams are returned (as soon as possible after the exam was given), students complete an exam reflection sheet. They describe their study strategies, analyze the mistakes they made, and plan their study strategies for the next exam.
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    "Metacognition is a critically important, yet often overlooked component of learning. Effective learning involves planning and goal-setting, monitoring one's progress, and adapting as needed. All of these activities are metacognitive in nature. By teaching students these skills - all of which can be learned - we can improve student learning. There are three critical steps to teaching metacognition:"
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    Really useful reminder of how we need to address very basic ideas about how to absorb new information and ask students to self-monitor and push themselves. I appreciated the information and plan to incorporate the wrappers!
Roland Gesthuizen

Should students memorise their essays? - 15 views

  • There is a moral dimension to the process. It is one thing to memorise an answer which you have prepared, but it is wrong to present an answer prepared by someone else.
  • Answer memorisation is inevitable in high-stakes and somewhat predictable examinations.
  • High-stakes tests always corrupt teaching, learning and curriculum.
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  • The reality is that many questions are answered by a process of ''recognition of sameness''.
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    "Examiners will struggle because the HSC exams have a degree of predictability. They are based on known content and skills. They use the same, known format. If the exam drifts too far from past norms people scream and the media vent complaints of unfairness. The consequence is that parts of exams are readily exploited by prepared answers."
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    Intersting implications when we rely on state wide examinations to assess students.
Martin Burrett

Exams: Use the motivation, lose the stress by @rhcaseby - UKEdChat - 11 views

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    "Ten tips to beat exam stress"
C CC

Using metacognition during exams - a guide for teachers and students - UKEdChat - 29 views

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    A useful guide developed to help teachers and students use metacognition and metacognitive skills during the exam period.
Martin Burrett

Activities after SATs Exams - 11 views

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    "Activities after SATs Exams"
Jenny Staley

Promoting Academic Integrity in Online Education - Faculty Focus | Faculty Focus - 5 views

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    Although there's some disagreement as to whether distance education is more susceptible to academic dishonesty than other forms of instruction, what isn't up for debate is the fact that for as long as there's been exams, there's been cheating on exams. The online environment simply opens up a different set of challenges that aren't typically seen in traditional face-to-face courses.
Maureen Greenbaum

Daniel Pinkwater on Pineapple Exam: 'Nonsense on Top of Nonsense' - Metropolis - WSJ - 18 views

  • An agent I had years ago said just because it’s nonprofit and educational, don’t let them not pay you, because they’re making money.
    • Jolynn Asato
       
      Wow. What is done in the name of "educational". So much exploitation by an industry that makes much money off the misery of high stakes accountability!
  • They basically turned it into test-ese.
  • and I must interject that I admire the job they did, because it makes even less sense than mine
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  • We don’t count that against the kid’s grade, we put that there as a sort of brain teaser to show them that not everything is quantifiable, and to let them have a little fun,” then I’ll retract all my aspersions about how they’re money-grubbing b——- and overcharge for this stuff and sell it over and over again and underpay the poor authors they buy it off of
  • those stupid tests — and you can quote me, stupid tests
  • maybe I misjudged them. Maybe somebody working on the test was slowly going crazy, and wanted to put in something amusing for him or herself, and also for the kids.
  • I’m on this earth to put up a feeble fight against the horrible tendency people have to think that there’s a formula. “If I do the following things, I’ll get elected president.” No you won’t. “If I do the following things, my work of art will be good.” Not necessarily. “If I follow this recipe, the dish will come out very delicious.” Maybe. Trust me, there is no formula for most things that are not math.
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    "Daniel Pinkwater on Pineapple Exam: 'Nonsense on Top of Nonsense'"
Sarah Schaller Welsh

Freakonomics » What Should Be Done About Standardized Tests? A Freakonomics Q... - 42 views

  • Gaston Caperton
  • Standardized tests have much in common with French fries. Both of them differ in composition as well as quality. French fries are available in numerous incarnations, including straight, curly, skins-on, skins-off, and, in recent years, with sweet potatoes. Regarding quality, of course, the taste of French fries can range substantially – from sublime to soggy. It’s really the same with standardized tests.
  • Take the No Child Left Behind Act, for instance, a federal accountability law requiring scads of standardized tests to be used in evaluating schools. Do you know that almost all of the standardized tests now being employed to judge school quality are unable to distinguish between well taught and badly taught students?
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  • all schools – kindergarten through college – should employ exit exams allowing us to determine what students have actually learned. We owe it to our students to make sure that they’ve been properly taught.
  • Then there are the questions of what to do with the results. I have actually sat through an extended discussion of how we could use regression analysis to parse out the contribution different teachers made to a group of students’ performance on a set of standardized tests. The answer was, yes it was possible, and could in fact be used to award merit pay increases. But nobody left the room feeling very comfortable that there would be any gain in what we knew made for good teaching.
  • Roughly half of the nation’s students are taking tests under NCLB that are completely free of open-ended questions.
  • educators have a strong incentive to “teach to the test.” In this case, that means teaching low level skills at the expense of the more demanding material that everyone says students need to master in today’s complicated world.
  • But is it fair to give students what amounts to a counterfeit passport to college or work? And do such tests spur high school teachers and principals to aim high with their students? To both questions, the answer is, “No.” In most states today, high school exit tests serve the same role as the standardized tests mandated by NCLB: they try to jack up the floor of student achievement in the nation’s schools. The best high school exit tests would be end-of-course exams akin to the “comprehensive” exams that many colleges and universities require students to pass in their majors before graduation – tests, that is, that would raise the ceiling of student achievement.
  • High-stakes testing has narrowed and dumbed down curricula; eliminated time spent on untested subjects like social studies, art, and even recess; turned classrooms into little more than test preparation centers; reduced high school graduation rates; and driven good teachers from the profession. Those are all reasons why FairTest and other experts advocate a sharp reduction in public school standardized testing and a halt to exit exams.
  • igh school grade
  • point average is a better predictor of college success than either the SAT or the ACT.
Javier E

The Decline of Final Exams - NYTimes.com - 52 views

  • Keith O’Brien surveys a national decline in final exams, reflected at Harvard, where fewer than a quarter of the undergraduate courses scheduled the tests in the spring term last year.
  • There’s nothing magical about finals, Bangert-Drowns added. They can be arbitrary and abstract — an inauthentic gauge of what someone knows.
  • many still find value in the final exam. It might be stressful, even terrifying, but it has the singular power to force students to go back over material, think critically about what they have read, review hard-to-grasp-topics once more, and even talk about the subject matter with classmates and instructors — all of which enhance learning.
Martin Burrett

What Should Teachers Actually Mark? by @RichardJARogers - 22 views

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    "As teachers, we are messing up our schedules and creating added stress because we do not ruthlessly prioritise enough. It's absolutely essential. All marking is important: every student must receive feedback and acknowledgement for their efforts. However, you may have to give your exam-preparation classes greater quality feedback that your younger classes at certain points in the year. You may also have to give it back in a more swift and timely manner too (e.g. when you've just finished the mock exams, or when you've had an end-of-unit test)."
Martin Burrett

5 Easy Ways to Help Exam-Level Students by @RichardJARogers - 5 views

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    "Many students require years of experience to discover their preferred (and most efficient) style of revision. For me, I found that dictating my notes to myself and playing them through my earphones when I lay in bed at night was effective, but this might not work for everyone."
Martin Burrett

Checking phones in lectures can cost students half a grade in exams - 25 views

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    "Students perform less well in end-of-term exams if they are allowed access to an electronic device, such as a phone or tablet, for non-academic purposes in lectures, a new study in Educational Psychology finds. Students who don't use such devices themselves but attend lectures where their use is permitted also do worse, suggesting that phone/tablet use damages the group learning environment."
Martin Burrett

What Makes an 'Authentic' Teacher? by @RichardJARogers - 19 views

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    "It was lunchtime but I didn't mind. Neither did my German teacher. I ran upstairs and entered her room. She was free - success! I pulled out my listening exam script: a set of learned responses to verbal questions that could come up in my GCSE exam. I'm sure she was hungry and I'm sure she wanted lunch. I didn't think about that when I was 16 years old. I probably should have."
Martin Burrett

Ofsted's new inspection arrangements to focus on curriculum, behaviour and development - 2 views

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    "From September 2019, Ofsted will refocus inspections of schools in England, early years settings and further education and skills providers, to make sure that learners are receiving a high-quality education that puts them on a path to future success. Ofsted inspectors will spend less time looking at exam results and test data, and more time considering how a nursery, school, college or other education provider has achieved their results. That is, whether they are the outcome of a broad, rich curriculum and real learning, or of teaching to the test and exam cramming."
Martin Burrett

Video: 30 Revision Apps, Sites & Tools - 35 views

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    A collection of 30 apps & website to help students learn and study for exams
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