Irish Times – Change One Thing

Changing the way we test our students will get results.

We need to implement more sophisticated and innovative assessment systems at all levels in education.

At the individual level its primary purpose is to enable students to flourish and reach full potential. We seek to stimulate creativity and foster critical analysis based on a solid foundation of knowledge. In the context of education as a public good, it is recognised that education quality correlates with social and economic development and that a high-quality education system will be central to our future prosperity.

Students today live in a different world to that of 20 years ago. They live in a society that is globalised, knowledge-based, ageing and largely urbanised. We must develop a new type of rounded, innovative graduate for this rapidly changing world.

In addition to discipline-specific knowledge and insight, we must equip students with attributes to enable them to address 21st-century challenges; these attributes include leadership, effective communication, creativity, problem-solving, digital intelligence and global awareness. They should be integrated into every level of education and developed consistently from childhood.

It is a glaring omission that we do not have an education strategy with a system-level view of what we want to achieve for all our students, to ensure all stages of the  education continuum act coherently with common purpose.

The ‘don't test it, don’t get it' theory

Many of the problems we encounter in our education system arise from the incoherence in our approach across different levels, and they become very evident at transition points, such as those from primary school to secondary and, especially,
from secondary to third level. Surely it should be relatively straightforward to agree on the overall outcomes desired from our education system and align these objectives at every stage along the education continuum?

Consideration of the development of rounded graduates brings us to the critical issue of assessment.

“What you assess is what you get; if you don’t test it, you won’t get it.” These words from psychologist Lauren Resnick appear regularly in education literature. They capture concisely our understanding that assessments drive both learning and teaching behaviour. We know most students take seriously only those topics that are assessed regularly in exams and that teachers feel pressurised to “teach to the test”. The combination of the CAO points system and the Leaving Cert exam is having a major negative impact on our education system because of the nature of the teaching and learning behaviour it engenders. In particular, it creates a culture where rote learning and regurgitation are the surest path to success.

The universities, who are responsible for the CAO points system, are actively engaged in transforming the system and dramatic changes which will take the heat out of the points race will come in the near future. But tackling the other half of the problem needs to follow quickly. The high stakes, single terminal examination that is the Leaving Cert is more appropriate to the 19th century than a modem, innovative knowledge society.

We need to implement more sophisticated and innovative assessment modalities at all levels in education. In particular, the Junior and Senior Cycles at second level merit immediate attention and it is logical to begin this process at Junior Cycle.

Properly developed, we can move from “assessment of learning” to “assessment for learning” whereby the assessment itself can be a tool to improve learning.

If we wish to foster the development of particular attributes in our students we must start assessing those attributes using state-of-the-art methodologies.

Our major problem is that we have no national centre of expertise in assessment. We need to establish such a national resource to research and develop policy in innovative assessment methodology.

The current dispute between teachers’ unions and the Minister for Education over Junior-Cycle reform is in a vacuum of expertise, and objective informed comment is conspicuous by its absence. The creation of such a resource, which should play a key role in both teacher education and national exams, will result in a major transformative impact on our education system and the quality of learning.

Professor Brian MacCraith, President of Dublin City University - As published in the Irish Times, Tuesday the 8th, April, 2014.