It is now well known that Qld has done very badly in the latest national tests. We came second last, scraping home just ahead of the Northern Territory. In addition, in international comparisons Queensland is way behind the top rank players such as Taiwan. In maths, Taiwan has 45% of it students in the ‘advanced’ bracket whereas Qld managed just 3%.
To her credit, Premier Anna Bligh commissioned Geoff Masters of the Australian Council for Education Research to investigate the reason for Qld’s poor showing. Unfortunately for the Premier, an important finding of the report indicates that the usual excuse of the state government, that Queensland students are a little younger than their interstate counterparts, is not entirely valid. According to Masters, in the 1960’s and 70’s Queensland was on top of the league table in Mathematics, and our students were just as young in those days.
Although the Masters report concentrated mostly on basic numeracy and literacy in the lower school years, the problems in the high schools are probably just as bad. Masters hinted at this with the comment relating to junior high school maths “the decline in the government system between 1964 and 1995 was larger than in any other state and has been estimated as the equivalent of ‘more than two years of learning’”.
So how did we go from first to last? Firstly it is not only the fault of the present Labor government - the decline has been continuous for decades and occurred during a succession of Coalition and Labor state administrations.
One of the main problems with the Qld system is the Queensland Studies Authority (QSA). The QSA must not be confused with Education Queensland. The former is in control of the syllabus; the later is responsible for the nuts and bolts of running schools. By developing the syllabi, the QSA is responsible for what is taught in every school in Queensland, both private and public, and has developed some of the most crazy syllabi and assessment methods in the world. The QSA has consistently denied that any problems exist despite being told by University teachers that a significant decline in standard is evident in first year university students. The QSA thinks it has developed the most advanced education system in the world. The national testing system and the Masters Report has been a nasty shock for the idealogues of the QSA though they still deny they are partly responsible.
QSA syllabi are characterised by a very limited description of what is to be taught, extremely complicated and subjective assessment schemes, and an overemphasis on assignments especially in subjects such as Maths, Physics and Chemistry. The new Queensland syllabi completely de-emphasize content and facts. According to modern education theory, you don’t actually have to know anything; you only have know how to find out information.
It is interesting to look at Western Australia that introduced a similar system to Queensland a few years ago. Following a public outcry and a campaign supported by the West Australian newspaper and a community organisation called PLATOWA, the WA government did a complete U turn and have reintroduced a more traditional approach to their syllabi. The education debacle in WA was one reason for the fall of the Labor Government in that State
I am quite sure that the Bligh government is completely committed to improving our education system, but I am worried that the smooth talking education bosses in the QSA will deflect attention away from themselves.
If that is the case, there is only one thing to be done. Schools must change over to the International Baccalaureate system. They can then avoid the second rate QSA syllabi. It is interesting to note that Education Queensland’s Elite academies have already done this and so have many good solid public and private schools.
Thursday, May 28, 2009
Education in Queensland
In the last Qld election campaign it was notable that education issues barely rated a mention despite Qld’s appalling showing in the latest national tests. We came second last, scraping home just ahead of the Northern Territory. Worse, in international comparisons Queensland is way behind the top rank players such as Taiwan. In maths, Taiwan has 45% of it students in the ‘advanced’ bracket whereas Qld managed just 3%.
So what needs to be done? Fortunately we can make huge improvements without spending an extra cent. The main problem is that the Qld education system has been hijacked by ideologues that have developed some of the craziest syllabi in the world. It is the syllabi that are broken and which must be fixed, and it is the Queensland Studies Authority (QSA), supported by the education faculties of universities, that must be blamed for them.
One of many aspects of our syllabi that must be fixed is the system of assessment. It is fundamentally unfair to the students and excessively time consuming for teachers.
Presently in Qld marks are banned in Secondary Schools. No longer do you for example get a mark out of 20 for your assignment, out of 30 for practical write-ups and out of 50 for the exam. No longer are teachers allowed, or even able to add up the marks to get an overall mark from which grades are determined. Instead, an extended criteria sheet has to be written by the teachers for every item of an exam and for every assignment. A letter grade from A to E is given for each of these items, but here is where the problem lies. How do you combine all these letters to get a final grade? A complicated and tortuous scheme has to be used by teachers that relies on what is termed in the syllabus as a “holistic judgement”. That boils down to a guess based on gut feeling. Pages and pages of the syllabi are devoted to how this guess is done and is the subject of endless debate amongst teachers, moderation panels and even within the QSA.
The irony is that despite the banning of numerical marks to get the final grade for each subject; a purely mathematical system is used to obtain the eventual OP score This system is based on the ranking of each student in each subject of his or her school group. The teachers must provide the QSA with a number that has been magically derived from whole bunch of letters that have been combined in an undefined and unknowable fashion. This final number goes into the QSA computer and is combined with some solid statistical procedures involving means and standard deviations to provide, guess what? A number - because in the end, that is what the universities and employers want.
The farcical assessment system has problems with fairness and transparency and may be open to legal challenge by some disgruntled lawyer parent of a student who has not done as well as expected. Another concern is the sheer amount of effort that teachers have to expend on implementing the system. Criteria sheets are often pages in length. Determining final grades can take days. Lack of an objective system means they are always open to questioning by unhappy students, and worse still, irate parents. We are having trouble enough keeping good teachers, especially in hard mathematics and the numerical sciences, and the last thing needed is to waste vast amounts of their valuable time implementing a complex but silly assessment system.
A second problem with our assessment system is the gross over-use of long writing assignments even in maths, physics and chemistry. Any parent of a high school child dreads those periods when a batch of assignments are due. The child may literally burn the midnight oil for a few weeks, aimlessly looking at web sites and going over multiple drafts. As a parent you are faced with the dilemma. Remembering that teenagers know everything about everything and hate taking advice from their parents, do you attempt to help your child and totally destroy household harmony? Or do you do nothing and pretty well guarantee an inferior result?
The real problem with assignments is that teachers can never be sure who has done, or helped with the assignment and by how much. Was it the parent, the tutor, or the student? I know of quite a few of my undergraduate university students who were on a nice little earner helping with, or actually doing, assignments for children of well-to-do parents.
The overuse of assignments discriminates against children who do not have good support at home. How can the child of a family whose parents have poor education themselves or who take little interest in education, hope to compete.
Another problem with excessive use of assignments is that it is a major disincentive for many students, particularly those with a maths bent who often dislike excessive writing. Labouring for hours each night writing reports can destroy the joy of understanding and being successful at solving problems in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Additionally, if students do not get help at home or from a private tutor, it is unlikely that the teacher will have enough time to help improve with writing skills, the development of which is the main object of assignments. The net result is that there is little improvement in writing skills.
Finally, many of the open-ended assignments that teachers set require skill levels that are way beyond their students. Students are expected to write assignments on esoteric topics they know almost nothing about. Some require levels of expertise that I would not expect from third year university students. They should instead be getting a thorough understanding of the basic concepts and techniques of the subject. I was recently asked by a colleague at James Cook University a question about an electronic circuit diagram and after a few hours cogitating about the question I enquired why he was entering this line of research. He replied that it was actually his daughter’s year 12 physics assignment.
The QSA has shown over the years that it treats academics like me with disdain even though we are a major end-user of what the education system produces. It is therefore up to others to do something about our broken education system. I have mentioned problems with assessment but this is only a fraction of the problem, albeit indicative of the lunacy of which the QSA is capable. It is now time for teachers to stand up and be counted by protesting against the time-consuming and unfair assessment systems. Their interstate counterparts, and teachers in better performing systems overseas, do not have to tolerate such a pointless imposition on their time. They need to lobby the unions, moderation panels, school principals, Queensland Education, and the independent school organizations.
But most importantly, the Minister of Education needs to remind the QSA that it exists to serve the students and their parents. Parliament represents the parents and Parliament created the QSA. The QSA has failed the Parliament leaving our children exposed in a global economy with weak, low educational outcomes.
I urge the new Parliament to launch an Inquiry into the condition of education in our schools. The QSA should not be at liberty to experiment on our children with the latest trendy educational theory.
So what needs to be done? Fortunately we can make huge improvements without spending an extra cent. The main problem is that the Qld education system has been hijacked by ideologues that have developed some of the craziest syllabi in the world. It is the syllabi that are broken and which must be fixed, and it is the Queensland Studies Authority (QSA), supported by the education faculties of universities, that must be blamed for them.
One of many aspects of our syllabi that must be fixed is the system of assessment. It is fundamentally unfair to the students and excessively time consuming for teachers.
Presently in Qld marks are banned in Secondary Schools. No longer do you for example get a mark out of 20 for your assignment, out of 30 for practical write-ups and out of 50 for the exam. No longer are teachers allowed, or even able to add up the marks to get an overall mark from which grades are determined. Instead, an extended criteria sheet has to be written by the teachers for every item of an exam and for every assignment. A letter grade from A to E is given for each of these items, but here is where the problem lies. How do you combine all these letters to get a final grade? A complicated and tortuous scheme has to be used by teachers that relies on what is termed in the syllabus as a “holistic judgement”. That boils down to a guess based on gut feeling. Pages and pages of the syllabi are devoted to how this guess is done and is the subject of endless debate amongst teachers, moderation panels and even within the QSA.
The irony is that despite the banning of numerical marks to get the final grade for each subject; a purely mathematical system is used to obtain the eventual OP score This system is based on the ranking of each student in each subject of his or her school group. The teachers must provide the QSA with a number that has been magically derived from whole bunch of letters that have been combined in an undefined and unknowable fashion. This final number goes into the QSA computer and is combined with some solid statistical procedures involving means and standard deviations to provide, guess what? A number - because in the end, that is what the universities and employers want.
The farcical assessment system has problems with fairness and transparency and may be open to legal challenge by some disgruntled lawyer parent of a student who has not done as well as expected. Another concern is the sheer amount of effort that teachers have to expend on implementing the system. Criteria sheets are often pages in length. Determining final grades can take days. Lack of an objective system means they are always open to questioning by unhappy students, and worse still, irate parents. We are having trouble enough keeping good teachers, especially in hard mathematics and the numerical sciences, and the last thing needed is to waste vast amounts of their valuable time implementing a complex but silly assessment system.
A second problem with our assessment system is the gross over-use of long writing assignments even in maths, physics and chemistry. Any parent of a high school child dreads those periods when a batch of assignments are due. The child may literally burn the midnight oil for a few weeks, aimlessly looking at web sites and going over multiple drafts. As a parent you are faced with the dilemma. Remembering that teenagers know everything about everything and hate taking advice from their parents, do you attempt to help your child and totally destroy household harmony? Or do you do nothing and pretty well guarantee an inferior result?
The real problem with assignments is that teachers can never be sure who has done, or helped with the assignment and by how much. Was it the parent, the tutor, or the student? I know of quite a few of my undergraduate university students who were on a nice little earner helping with, or actually doing, assignments for children of well-to-do parents.
The overuse of assignments discriminates against children who do not have good support at home. How can the child of a family whose parents have poor education themselves or who take little interest in education, hope to compete.
Another problem with excessive use of assignments is that it is a major disincentive for many students, particularly those with a maths bent who often dislike excessive writing. Labouring for hours each night writing reports can destroy the joy of understanding and being successful at solving problems in physics, chemistry and mathematics. Additionally, if students do not get help at home or from a private tutor, it is unlikely that the teacher will have enough time to help improve with writing skills, the development of which is the main object of assignments. The net result is that there is little improvement in writing skills.
Finally, many of the open-ended assignments that teachers set require skill levels that are way beyond their students. Students are expected to write assignments on esoteric topics they know almost nothing about. Some require levels of expertise that I would not expect from third year university students. They should instead be getting a thorough understanding of the basic concepts and techniques of the subject. I was recently asked by a colleague at James Cook University a question about an electronic circuit diagram and after a few hours cogitating about the question I enquired why he was entering this line of research. He replied that it was actually his daughter’s year 12 physics assignment.
The QSA has shown over the years that it treats academics like me with disdain even though we are a major end-user of what the education system produces. It is therefore up to others to do something about our broken education system. I have mentioned problems with assessment but this is only a fraction of the problem, albeit indicative of the lunacy of which the QSA is capable. It is now time for teachers to stand up and be counted by protesting against the time-consuming and unfair assessment systems. Their interstate counterparts, and teachers in better performing systems overseas, do not have to tolerate such a pointless imposition on their time. They need to lobby the unions, moderation panels, school principals, Queensland Education, and the independent school organizations.
But most importantly, the Minister of Education needs to remind the QSA that it exists to serve the students and their parents. Parliament represents the parents and Parliament created the QSA. The QSA has failed the Parliament leaving our children exposed in a global economy with weak, low educational outcomes.
I urge the new Parliament to launch an Inquiry into the condition of education in our schools. The QSA should not be at liberty to experiment on our children with the latest trendy educational theory.
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