I am reading the new book by the Facebook / Meta whistleblower - Careless People by Sarah Wynn-Williams.

Interesting bit where she says that the big tech bosses all push their products on other people's kids but refuse to let their own kids use them. Big tech firms devote enormous amounts of data, money & engineering talent to exploiting weak spots in 14-year-old brains.

Yet people argue it's fine to have phones in class & easy for teens to use them sensibly - eg this letter in yesterday's Guardian.

theguardian.com/technology/202…

In 2013, I wrote a book about educational myths.

I *didn't* include learning styles. Why?

Because even in 2013, so much research had already been published showing they were bunk. Didn't feel worth me going over it all again.

It's now 2024. What's in @TheEconomist ? A leader article arguing for schools to improve provision for students by identifying their learning style.

During lockdown, I wrote 30k words about VAR and measurement theory. No-one wanted to publish it - they all said it was mad.

But offsides like this Coventry one mean I can't stop thinking about it.

3 major issues. 1 - I am not convinced it was the right decision - I am not convinced the technology & frame rates of the cameras are good enough to make these very fine calls.

A remarkable article in Sunday Times on the Scottish curriculum.

When Scotland's Curriculum for Excellence was introduced in 2010, I was told repeatedly that its skills-based focus was superior to knowledge-rich approaches I & others supported.

13 years on & what do we see? One of the architects of the curriculum, Keir Bloomer, has said they should have emphasised knowledge more. "Without knowledge there can be no skills."

Totally agree.

daisychristodoulou.com/2013/10/false-…

Today we are publishing the results of our latest primary writing assessment! 13,085 teachers from 1,092 primary schools judged the writing of 48,006 Year 3 pupils who responded to this task.

blog.nomoremarking.com/assessing-prim… This is the 5th year in a row we have carried out an assessment like this. Over those 5 years we have seen relatively stable results, with a slight upward trend..

There is a lot of research on the difference between screen & paper assessments. It's not as simple as just pasting a paper assessment on screen.

Here's what some of the research says.

https://twitter.com/tes/status/1714134139509588099

Reading on-screen
- On PISA tests, students did worse on-screen than doing the same test on paper.
- We tend to skim & scan more when we read on screen.

In 2013, I wrote a book about educational myths.

I *didn't* include learning styles. Why?

Because even in 2013, so much research had already been published showing they were bunk. Didn't feel worth me going over it all again.

It's now 2023. What's in today's Financial Times? An op-ed arguing for reworking the education system to take account of....learning styles.

🤦🤦🤦

ft.com/content/2738d8…

Just listened to Keir Starmer’s big education speech. Some big ideas & as ever, I think the devil will be in the detail (which is totally understandable). Here are 4 examples of the pitfalls that need to be avoided. 1) Greater emphasis on creativity.

If this means working out the specific knowledge & skills that are a prerequisite for creative thought, great.

If it means pretending creativity is a domain-general skill, not so great.

(Great Herbert Simon quote below on just this).

Another sample of Year 6 writing from our big standardisation project.

This piece was marked using the Teacher Assessment Framework (TAF) by 11 trained & experienced KS2 markers.

Click the next tweet to see the grades it was given. We subdivided each of the 3 TAF grades so that the piece was marked on a 9-grade scale. The 11 teachers' grades spanned SIX of the grades!!

Two teachers gave it the second highest grade. One gave it the third from bottom!

ChatGPT has enormous potential to improve education.

But it will end up doing a lot of damage if we fall for the many bad takes that are already doing the rounds.

This latest from the FT is a classic of its kind and a great example of what to avoid.

ft.com/content/412430… First, memorisation is criticised & set up in opposition to understanding.

But we know from all the latest research that understanding *depends* on memory - because our limited working memories need help from our vast long-term memories.

More here daisychristodoulou.com/book/seven-myt…

This term we’ve run our first national writing quiz. It consisted of 20 multiple-choice questions on sentence structure and over 10k students from Years 1 - 9 took part. What have we found? As you might expect, the average score goes up in each year group, from 3/20 in year 1 to 12/20 in year 9. There is one exception: the average score goes down from year 6 to year 7. Perhaps this is another example of the year 7 dip!

The problem with today's report on education from the Tony Blair Institute is it reads like it could have been written in 1985.

It's promoting ideas that were the future, once.

And it doesn't even seem aware of genuinely cutting-edge ideas with transformative potential. Here are some of the problems with what they recommend.

1. Continuous assessment

This was the hot new idea in the 1980s but it has real problems. It's unfair on poor kids. It's inaccurate. It's time-consuming.

daisychristodoulou.com/2015/10/tests-…

Today we've published the results of our latest Year 1 primary writing assessment! 12,890 teachers from 1,127 primary schools judged the writing of 43,720 Y1 pupils.

Headline: Y1 attainment is about 2 months behind expectations for this time of year.

blog.nomoremarking.com/assessing-prim… We assessed Y1 pupils using a similar assessment in Jan 2020. Back then, the Y1 cohort averaged 411 on our writing scale. This year, they averaged 404 - that's a difference of about two months.

Today we are publishing the results of our biggest ever primary writing assessment! 12,834 teachers from 1,122 primary schools judged the writing of 46,033 Year 3 pupils.

Our main finding is that Y3 performance is a bit above where we'd expect it to be.

This was the task. We assessed Y3 pupils using similar assessments in Oct 2019 & 2020. In those two years, the Y3 cohort averaged 485 on our writing scale. This year, they averaged 490. Read more details in this blog.

blog.nomoremarking.com/assessing-prim…

The new winners of the Nobel Economics Prize are more famous for their work on the minimum wage and labour markets. But they've also done some really interesting work on education. 🧵 1. This 2016 paper by David Card & Laura Giuliano showed that when Florida schools introduced standardised tests, it increased the numbers of disadvantaged & minority students selected for a gifted & talented programme. pnas.org/content/113/48…

Just finished listening to this programme. Some interesting ideas, but would have been nice if it had featured more evidence & balance. Lots of research contradicts the ideas featured here, & lots of people have very different views about future proofing. bbc.co.uk/programmes/m00… For example, the programme approvingly cites Sugata Mitra's work on how students in India taught themselves through a computer placed in a 'hole in the wall'. This project is famous, but it was never properly evaluated, and subsequent studies found major flaws in its claims.

Interesting to see lots of talk about grammar lately. Here's a thread from me on why I think explicit grammar instruction is important, but not all explicit grammar instruction is created equal! I think explicit grammar instruction is important because it helps pupils to write better sentences. Pupils often write run-on sentences, and they aren't sure where they should put a full stop. This makes their writing much harder to understand.

We’ve just sent out the results of our September 2020 Year 7 writing assessment to school. Key findings: Year 7s are 22 months behind where we’d expect them to be at this time in the year. Over 112,000 pupils from 644 schools in England took part in this assessment. They scored an average of 533 on our universal writing scale. We’d expect them to score about 557. In March of Year 6, earlier this year, the same cohort averaged 550 on one of our assessments.

HOW FAKE NEWS SPREADS.

On Weds night, at 9.49pm, @Telegraph tweeted this.

https://twitter.com/Telegraph/status/1293650828180574208

It quoted Gavin Williamson:

"Mr Williamson said that, if teachers' grades were used, "we would have seen them shoot up, which would devalue the results for the class of 2020 and would clearly not be fair on the classes of 2019 and 2021", ...

I’m at the Olympic Stadium and there is a break for a VAR check. It’s going on for a while, so I thought I’d take the opportunity to jot down a few thoughts about VAR. What I find fascinating about VAR is how it perfectly encapsulates many wider 21st century preoccupations: the promises & limitations of rationality, the tensions between the rule of law, experts, crowds & tradition, and the challenges of finding meaning in late modernity.

Response to @solomon_teach latest blog post medium.com/solomonkingsno… I agree completely we should design our curriculum to focus on the fundamentals, & rushing through advanced content in a superficial way is good for no-one. However, I don't agree this is a GCSE design problem. GCSEs are summative tests, and summative tests are designed to provide shared meanings of the performance of large numbers of students. This inevitably means they have to differentiate between wide ranges of attainment, so they need questions which differentiate.