T&L Bitesize Blog T2 / Week 7: The widening gap between richer and poorer students at KS4!

 

Dear WA,

I hope everyone is well! This week I was interested to read a recent article about the widening gap between richer and poorer students at GCSE level in the UK in The Conversation. In particular, it was interesting to consider given our focus on the WA Way strand ‘Assess and Adapt’. 

Objectives: To understand the gap between the richest and poorest students at GCSE level, and propose solutions to alleviate this.
 
Summary: 

• The attainment gap between disadvantaged students and their peers is now the largest it has been in a decade. 
• Centre-based assessments in 2020 appeared to alleviate the gap significantly, although teacher-based assessments in 2021 widened the gap again.
• The author proposes this is due to the compound effect of two years of disruption on disadvantaged students, whereby an ongoing lack of access to resources seems to have had an impact.
• The author argues that there is a misunderstanding that in returning to normal-style GCSEs, the assessment of students is more robust. In fact, the author claims that there is no good evidence that teacher-assessed grades are less robust.
• The author also argues that the supposed anonymity afforded by normal-style GCSEs is not necessarily good at eliminating marking biases that may impact the attainment gap.
• The author proposes that a better way to truly assess students would be to use a variety of ways, combining teacher-based assessments and exams.

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

What does this tell us about WA’s attainment gap (much lower than the national average) and approaches to assessment?
What are my current approaches to assessment? What would I like to change?
What support do I need?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks,

Jaya

L&T Blog T2 Week 5: Challenging misconceptions about learning

 

Dear WA,

I hope everyone is well! This week I was interested to read a summary from Edutopia about common misconceptions about learning. 

Objectives: To debunk some common misconceptions about learning and strategise for more robust strategies influenced by cognitive science.
 
Summary: 

The three misconceptions that the article aims to debunk are:

• 1) That every student has a ‘learning style’. Instead, the authors argue that educators are better to focus on processing information in multiple different ways (e.g. diverse examples, use of different senses, abstract and concrete representations). This helps to cement long term retention of the knowledge. 
• 2) That testing should be used only to assess student learning. Instead, the authors argue that as well as assessing student learning, testing actually changes student learning. This speaks to important cognitive science about retrieval practice.
• 3) That concepts that are easy to learn are easily remembered. In fact, techniques that speed up the acquisition of ideas often speeds up the forgetting of the ideas. The authors recommend considering the level of challenge and struggle to support with this and with the long term retention of concepts. 

How does this impact me and my practice?: Some reflections arising from this that might be helpful to consider are: 

Which of these myths are ones that I consciously or subconsciously subscribe to?
How can I tweak my practice to be more aligned with developments in cognitive science? 
What support do I need to be able to do this?

Please do get in touch if you would like to talk further about this - I’d love to hear from you!

Thanks, Jaya