Coursework gets ’supervised’
Alan Johnson along with axing Maths coursework today, has also stipulated that all other coursework will have to be supervised in “classroom style conditions”. This is to prevent the few who cheat using the internet. This comes from concerns expressed by the media in June over copying and plagarism from the web and was mooted back in July by QCA, the examination watchdog. It was something I blogged on at the time.
How supervising coursework in “classroom style conditions” is supposed to stop cheating I’m not sure. During these supervised sessions is the use of computers going to be banned? Are internet-based sources no longer legitimate for research? Or does ’supervision’ mean that the supervisor polices ‘copy and pasting’? How does this fit in with the personalised learning agenda and e-portfoilos?
Has nobody realised that we need to find new ways to assess individual expertise and learning other than by written coursework? Work has been done on this. Back in 2004, Ultralab conducted research for the QCA (the same body that suggested this policy) on innovative ways of assessing students, albeit in ICT capability, using online portfolios and a unique system in which students took a ‘viva’ on their mobile phone.
Shouldn’t we be seriously addressing the assessment of co-operative and group learning to meet the needs of 21st century not locking down access and retrenching to the past?
Listen to Alan Johnson’s speech here.
Image Credit: Abscond
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January 6th, 2007 at 2:33 am
[...] The introduction of a National ICT Strategy for Key Stage 3 ICT recognised that ICT as a subject was being poorly taught, and that, as a subject, it was vital to students’ education in the modern world. The introduction of statutory testing and reporting was, and is, vital in reinforcing the status of this area of the curriculum because it is, unfortunately, only through national assessment procedures that all schools take heed of priorities. We’d all like it to be different, but at present it’s not. What can one assume when coursework in Mathematics is swept away in a single stroke, and at the point when ICT might receive the attention it deserves by introducing statutory testing through examination, the minutes of the QCA (the body for setting subject standards on schools, say, “that it was not necessary to burden schools with anadditional statutory test, considering that ICT was something thatshould be embedded into other subjects”? [...]
June 14th, 2007 at 1:47 am
[...] First it was Maths, and now as predicted all coursework from home will be scrapped from 2009. As stated in my previous post, the plan is that coursework will be conducted under supervision “by a teacher and access to books, the internet and other sources of information will be controlled”. The reason being, as John Dunford of the Association of School and College Leaders said: [...]