It is worth thinking about the detail in Anne Salmond’s opinion piece in this morning’s NZ Herald Anne Salmond Open Entry for Maori a near miss Monday July 6 2009.
In addressing Pita Sharples’
suggestion of open entry for Maori students to universities, Salmond uses
research findings from the Starpath Project to make three disturbing claims about education
in New Zealand.
Claim #1.
The management of educational data in New Zealand has more to do with the
distribution of resources rather than with tracking the long-term success or
failure of students.
As a result – “schools
are often unaware when bright students begin to fail; or when groups of
students (say, Maori boys) begin to follow pathways that lead to failure and
early exit.”
Claim #2.
New Zealand educational investment in initiatives aimed at enhancing student
achievement are “largely working blind”. We not only do not know if the
investment is making a positive difference we also do not know if the
investment is targeting the real problem.
A result – “leading to many uncoordinated, short-term initiatives (80 in one school that Starpath studied) and a failure to identify those approaches that really work, so that they can be adopted across the education system.”
Salmond also calls for a more careful monitoring on government funded initiatives that claim to enhance learning outcomes for Maori, Pacific and low-income students.
Those initiatives that don't have a positive impact on student outcomes should be dropped, while those that are highly successful should be adopted across the education system.
I find it somewhat disturbing that Salmond feels the need to recommend “dropping initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student outcomes" – it suggests that this is not currently the case.
If the Starpath Project has
evidence of initiatives that do and initiatives that don’t – I hope they
offered this evidence to Anne Tolley before the recent budget - and that Anne Tolley respected their findings - so that we can be confident that we are no
longer funding initiatives that don’t have a positive impact on student
outcomes.
Claim #3 – Our
qualification system NCEA is so complex that families cannot make wise
decisions about which courses to study, which educational pathways to pursue.
As a result, “while most
Maori, Pacific and low-income students aspire to gain university entrance (78
per cent in one study), it is too easy for them to find themselves on NCEA
pathways that foreclose this option.”
I will admit to being
attracted to chaos theory, fuzzy logic and ambiguity in what I read but it
unnerves me just a little to realise that the Starpath Project research
suggests the New Zealand Government is funding educational initiatives where
uncertainty of focus and indeterminate outcomes rule. In truth it is
easier to understand Pita Sharples call for open entry for Maori to
universities if you accept that the current framing/ educational design
and funding of the MoE initiatives designed to raise Maori and Pacific
achievement is closer to whimsy than anything professionally responsible.
Claim#3
captures my interest this evening. Our latest budget set aside “$8 million to ensure NCEA
assessment tools are of a high-standard and well understood by teachers.”
Presumably on the basis that teachers understanding of NCEA assessment leaves
something to be desired. Salmond’s remarks suggest that parents and
students similarly lack the understanding needed to make good decisions about
NCEA assessment.
It all makes me wonder
how we could re-design the NCEA course options available at secondary schools
so that students and their parents would find it easier to make wise choices
There is more to it
than this of course - Any New Zealand student studying for NCEA can relate
instances where they or their friends have been excluded from courses or
dissuaded from certain option lines on the grounds that the institutions deems
the chance of student success unlikely. In New Zealand secondary schools the
right to try (and fail) is seldom available. Like Etruscans divining the
future from the entrails of sacrified animals, secondary teachers continue to
confidently (and perhaps patronisingly) practice haruspicy on the NCEA course
selections of their students.
So parents and
students not only need to understand NCEA well enough to make wise choices they
also need to understand it well enough to fight the institution for their right
to access courses based upon these choices.
Nina Simon in the Musem2.0 Blog has been
looking at ways museums can design recommendation systems for their visitors in
Designing recommendation systems that go beyond “You’ll like
this” .
Much of her thinking about customised museum tours can be usefully transferred to educational contexts – where museum exhibits become educational options and courses. For example Simon’s thinking helps me think in new ways about the design of solutions to help students and their families make sense of the courses and learning pathways available to them.
When it comes to museums, recommendation systems are a natural solution for the problem of the customized tour. How can a museum offer each visitor suggestions for exhibits and experiences that will uniquely serve their interests? There are many lovely example of museums providing quirky tours based on particular interests. For example, The Tate Modern offers a set of pamphlets featuring different tours of the museum based on emotional mood. You can pick up the "I've just split up" tour and wallow in depression, or the "I'm an animal freak" tour and explore your wilder side. And the site I Like Museums lets you find whole institutions of interest based on your preference for trails like "making things," "nice cup of tea," or simply "pigs."
Salmond's call for more careful monitoring of student learning outcomes ....
Above all, the compulsory
education system needs re-engineering. Information systems in
schools should be tracking the educational journeys of students, identifying
the strengths and potentials of individual students (so that they and their
parents get optimal advice), and patterns of success and failure across the
student body (so that initiatives are accurately targeted).
... sounds like it could be answered in part by the design principles in the recommendation system
Simon suggests for museums – one based upon collaborative filtering (“like the one used to
recommend new songs to you on Pandora or new movies on Netflix?”) –
Perhaps we can design
a platform for the monitoring of individual educational journeys in New Zealand
– one that could aggregate content about the strengths and potentials of
individual students and build it into a Pandora/Netflix like recommendation
system – a system alerting students and their families of the educational
targets to be met and the course options available.
Then the patterns of success data available might allow students and their families to thoughtfully design learning pathways - pathways that not only meet their aspirations but also extend them to create alternative educational reach.
Recent Comments