Skip to main content

A-level reforms?

I read that the head of Ofqual Glenys Stacey is looking at wide-ranging reforms to A-levels and is now seriously concerned about grade inflation. She has also suggested that modules may need reforming and that they may be appropriate for some subjects but not others. The possibility is also raised that not all subjects require an AS-level.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/education/2012/apr/29/exams-a-level-reforms-grade-inflation?CMP=twt_fd

I always thought it was a shame that when the Curriculum 2000 discussions took place we did not take advantage of the opportunity to seriously broaden A-levels. The "gold standard" people won the argument and we ended up with the "dog's breakfast" situation in England and Wales whereby students usually do four subjects at AS-level, then three at A-level. I would have preferred us to have broadened to five subjects studies over two years.

It is hard to see how one could do away with AS-levels for some subjects and not others. If a student studied a subject for one year, then dropped it, what qualification would they be awarded?

As for grade inflation, yes, it has occurred, as it does all over the world, though my feeling is that in modern languages it has had less effect at the top of the scale than lower down. An A grade is still hard to get (A* particularly so, but that's another issue), whereas the weaker student who, 30 years ago, may have failed, would now get a low pass grade. One obvious antidote to grade inflation is to only allow a certain percentage of students to pass at each grade. There are arguments against this, but given how hard it is to define what an A, C or E grade precisely represents, then I would understand a move in this direction.

Modules never suited modern languages, of course, so we end up with the costly process of large numbers of re-sits in the A2 year. Along with many colleagues I would not be unhappy to see the back of modular exams which can disrupt teaching and may have had a deleterious effect on a student's overall understanding of a subject. It is quite possible to test students' understanding during a course without resorting to the formal exam system.

Vested interests and tradition may mean we continue to work with our highly specialised post 16 curriculum. A greater involvement of universities in A-level exam setting will only reinforce the narrowness of our curriculum.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

What is the natural order hypothesis?

The natural order hypothesis states that all learners acquire the grammatical structures of a language in roughly the same order. This applies to both first and second language acquisition. This order is not dependent on the ease with which a particular language feature can be taught; in English, some features, such as third-person "-s" ("he runs") are easy to teach in a classroom setting, but are not typically fully acquired until the later stages of language acquisition. The hypothesis was based on morpheme studies by Heidi Dulay and Marina Burt, which found that certain morphemes were predictably learned before others during the course of second language acquisition. The hypothesis was picked up by Stephen Krashen who incorporated it in his very well known input model of second language learning. Furthermore, according to the natural order hypothesis, the order of acquisition remains the same regardless of the teacher's explicit instruction; in other words,

What is skill acquisition theory?

For this post, I am drawing on a section from the excellent book by Rod Ellis and Natsuko Shintani called Exploring Language Pedagogy through Second Language Acquisition Research (Routledge, 2014). Skill acquisition is one of several competing theories of how we learn new languages. It’s a theory based on the idea that skilled behaviour in any area can become routinised and even automatic under certain conditions through repeated pairing of stimuli and responses. When put like that, it looks a bit like the behaviourist view of stimulus-response learning which went out of fashion from the late 1950s. Skill acquisition draws on John Anderson’s ACT theory, which he called a cognitivist stimulus-response theory. ACT stands for Adaptive Control of Thought.  ACT theory distinguishes declarative knowledge (knowledge of facts and concepts, such as the fact that adjectives agree) from procedural knowledge (knowing how to do things in certain situations, such as understand and speak a language).

La retraite à 60 ans

Suite à mon post récent sur les acquis sociaux..... L'âge légal de la retraite est une chose. Je voudrais bien savoir à quel âge les gens prennent leur retraite en pratique - l'âge réel de la retraite, si vous voulez. J'ai entendu prétendre qu'il y a peu de différence à cet égard entre la France et le Royaume-Uni. Manifestation à Marseille en 2008 pour le maintien de la retraite à 60 ans © AFP/Michel Gangne Six Français sur dix sont d’accord avec le PS qui défend la retraite à 60 ans (BVA) Cécile Quéguiner Plus de la moitié des Français jugent que le gouvernement a " tort de vouloir aller vite dans la réforme " et estiment que le PS a " raison de défendre l’âge légal de départ en retraite à 60 ans ". Résultat d’un sondage BVA/Absoluce pour Les Échos et France Info , paru ce matin. Une majorité de Français (58%) estiment que la position du Parti socialiste , qui défend le maintien de l’âge légal de départ à la retraite à 60 ans,