Page 3157 - Week 10 - Thursday, 18 October 2007
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as they progress through the later years of schooling and beyond. This will be a sound basis for students to undertake courses in colleges, which will focus on particular aspects of history. I am concerned that this is the way the national curriculum will develop—a national government imposing its will without input from the educational bodies which will have to deliver it.
The issues for the ACT are the lack of consultation, the extent of prescription in the topics and methods of teaching history, the mandated hours requirement and the implications for the 2009 quadrennial funding agreement. These are all things which could have been discussed in a forum of collaborative negotiation. Mr Howard and Minister Bishop need to stop playing politics with the future of our students.
Similarly, the federal government’s attack on our extremely successful continuous assessment model is entirely motivated by politics. There is no educational merit in changing the ACT’s extremely successful continuous assessment model. The continuous assessment model provides for a high degree of integrity in the assessment process. It provides for more extensive coverage of the syllabus and allows for assessment of a broad range and depth of knowledge, understanding and skills over an extended period of time.
This model enables the use of a variety of assessment tools and strategies, including research assignments, extended essays, practical tasks, oral presentations, tests and examinations. It allows teachers to match assessment methods to the learning outcomes being assessed. It enables teachers to select the most appropriate assessment tools to cater for the broad range of student pathways and learning experiences, including work-based learning.
Further, continuous assessment encourages regular, systematic study and discourages last-minute cramming. It reduces the dominance of a final exam on the teaching and the learning processes. While on exams, I should discuss a bit more the national testing. The proposed introduction of the national testing system in 2008 is one of the more significant educational developments in recent years. The Howard government has often sought to politicise the important issue by criticising the states’ and territories’ efforts, and we saw that with Julie Bishop’s address to the National Press Club in February of this year. Nonetheless, the introduction of a national testing system raises a number of substantive policy issues. Unfortunately, the Howard government is more interested in reactive politicking than in developing policy on such critical issues.
Some of these issues remain unsolved. For example, who will fund the transitional cost of the move to the national system? Who will fund the ongoing costs? Who will own the data produced by the students? And what measures will be put in place to protect the privacy of schools and students? If national testing goes ahead, it should align to the curriculum, report on the performance of students at both state and national level, provide diagnostic information for teachers and parents, report on the range of student achievements at a point in time, and quantify and describe achievement and learning growth over time.
It is important to note that the national test should not be held up as the only educational issue, nor indeed the only assessment that matters. It is not a panacea and
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