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| Merry Christmas to you all. |
Educational Readings By Allan Alach
The New Zealand school year is coming to an end, and teachers are
looking forward to a well deserved rest. In line with this I will be taking a
break from educational issues until the end of January.
Have a great Christmas and New Year. Make sure you put your energies
and time into the most important things - yourself, your family and your
friends, and forget about GERM and all that this entails!
I welcome suggested articles, so if you come across a gem, email it
to me at allan.alach@ihug.co.nz.
This week’s homework!
Educational Measurement
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‘Educational measurement
doesn't work and shouldn't be called measurement. The reductionism and worship
of quantification in our society is twisting education as a mantra of
"improving scores" drives every decision in the schools. We should
make decisions about education based on what makes sense, not merely on what
improves test scores.’
Theory of Mind: Why Art
Evokes Empathy
An explanation of why art should be an integral part of life.
‘We have a sense of empathy
with works of art. If we see gestures in a portrait, we
actually almost
simulate those gestures in our mind. We often implicitly act as if we are
moving our arms in response empathically to what we see in the painting.’
Who Says Math Has to Be
Boring?
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| Explore maths of a bridge |
‘The system is alienating
and is leaving behind millions of other students, almost all of whom could
benefit from real-world problem solving rather than traditional drills.’
Why the United States Is
Destroying Its Education System
Or why are other
countries following the USA in destroying their own education systems?
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| Standardisation |
‘A nation that destroys its
systems of education, degrades its public information, guts its public
libraries and turns its airwaves into vehicles for cheap, mindless amusement
becomes deaf, dumb and blind. It prizes test scores above critical thinking and
literacy. It celebrates rote vocational training and the singular, amoral skill
of making money. It churns out stunted human products, lacking the capacity and
vocabulary to challenge the assumptions and structures of the corporate state.
It funnels them into a caste system of drones and systems managers. It
transforms a democratic state into a feudal system of corporate masters and
serfs.’
Even When Test Scores Go
Up, Some Cognitive Abilities Don't
‘...schools whose students
have the highest gains on test scores do not produce similar gains in
"fluid intelligence" -- the ability to analyze abstract problems and
think logically -- according to a new study from MIT neuroscientists working
with education researchers at Harvard University and Brown University.’
More
on PISA
The PISA 2012 scores show
the failure of 'market based' education reform.
Pasi Sahlberg - do I need to write anything else?
‘PISA
consumers should note that not every high-scoring school system is successful.
A school system is "successful" if it performs above the OECD average
in mathematics, reading literacy and science, and if students' socio-economic
status has a weaker-than-average impact on students' learning outcomes. The
most successful education systems in the OECD are Korea, Japan, Finland, Canada
and Estonia.My personal takeaway from the PISA 2012
study is how it proves that fashionable Global Educational Reform Movement
(GERM) is built on wrong premises.’
The Pitfall of PISA Envy
‘Recognizing people or
nations for doing the right thing for the wrong reasons can be misleading and
ultimately unsustainable. PISA's rankings on their own are useless. The
real lessons from PISA are found from researching how each nation achieved their results and then assessing their
methods via ethical criteria that is independent of their results.’
Among the Many Things
Wrong With International Achievement Comparisons
‘My attention was drawn to
the section on “misinterpreting international test scores,” since I have long
felt that these international assessments are a mess of uninterpretable numbers
providing a full-employment program for psychometricians, statisticians, and
journalists.’
Education rankings
“flawed”
‘But as Pisa’s influence
has grown, so has the attention it gets from academics. And 13 years in – with
a towering stack of policy and reforms and reputations at stake – some who have
examined Pisa closely are adamant that the whole thing is built on swampy
statistical ground. Many believe there are problems with the way data is
collected and analysed. These problems go so deep and matter so much, some say,
that we should ignore the rankings completely – and certainly stop using them
to drive changes to the way we teach our children.’
The leaning tower of PISA?
‘The assumption that
questions are equally difficult for people in different countries is fundamental
in the OECD's analysis of the results and this, according to Spiegelhalter is a
major flaw.’
Dr. Christopher Tienken
Explains PISA and Real Education Beyond PISA
‘Not only are PISA results influenced by experiences “in the home and
beyond”, but there is a sizeable relationship between the level of child
poverty in a country and PISA results. Poverty explains up to 46% of the PISA
scores in OECD countries.’
From Bruce Hammonds ‘Oldies but Goodies’ blogs from the
past.
The learning brain
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| Abused by schooling!! |
‘Although the structure and
how the brain works are interesting to learn about what is more important is to
consider how we can create the conditions, or the environment, to ensure we
develop all the potential that lies within each individual brain.’
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