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Should we teach skills directly, or concentrate on their component parts?

"Few people would be happy with an education which churned out pupils capable of doing basic sums, but unable to think creatively about problems they haven’t seen before"

Daisy Christodoulou
by Daisy Christodoulou
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In England, there is some consensus around the final aims of education. Literacy and numeracy are clearly vital skills. As well as these, developing skills such as critical thinking and problem solving are often agreed to be important aims.

Few people would be happy with an education which churned out pupils capable of reading basic texts and doing basic sums, but unable to think critically and creatively about problems they haven’t seen before. Similarly, few would defend a system that ignored the basics of literacy and numeracy.

The national curriculum in England has been changed and revised since it was introduced almost 30 years ago, but its various versions stress the importance of the skills listed. However, while there may be some agreement on these aims, there is more controversy regarding the best methods which will achieve them. It is possible to summarise two broad approaches to developing such skills.

The generic-skill method

One approach, a generic-skill method, is to teach a skill directly. If you want pupils to learn how to read, get them to read real books. If you want them to be good at solving maths problems, get them to solve maths problems. If you want them to think critically, set up activities that will give them the opportunity to do that.

In practice, such approaches might involve an element of project-based learning, where lessons are organised around skills such as problem solving, communication or critical thinking, rather than subject categories.

So, for example, pupils might carry out a project where they design a leaflet to help guide people around a local museum.

The idea is that if pupils work on solving problems which are more like the ones they might face in real life, this will help them to get better at solving such problems.

The deliberate-practice method

An alternative approach, the deliberate-practice method, argues that the best way to impart such skills is to teach them more indirectly.

While skills such as literacy, numeracy, problem solving and critical thinking are still the end point of education, this does not mean that pupils always need to be practising such skills in their final form. Instead, the role of the teacher should be to break down such skills into their component parts and teach those instead.

This means that lessons may look very different from the final skill they are hoping to instil.

For example, a lesson which aims to teach pupils reading may involve pupils learning letter-sound correspondences. The idea here is that the best way to develop skills may not always look like the skill itself.

The importance of debate

These debates about educational methods are absolutely crucial to debates around formative assessment, because formative assessment is all about methods, whereas summative assessment is about aims. Or, to put it another way, different approaches to developing skill don’t necessarily affect the assessment of learning.

Because the outcome is less disputed than the method, the final assessment of learning won’t look particularly different.

We might agree, for example, that pupils should be able to write an essay about the causes of the first world war by the end of their time in school or perform a successful science experiment.

Different interpretations of how we acquire skill really do affect assessment for learning. This is because these different interpretations are all about the method of acquiring skill. Assessment for learning is also all about the method, and the process, of acquiring skill.

If we return to our earlier example, we may agree that pupils should be able to write an essay about the causes of the first world war, but we may differ on the process and the methods that will lead to them being able to do that. This will, therefore, fundamentally affect the assessment for learning that takes place as a part of this process.

If you subscribe to the generic-skill model, then very similar tasks can be used for assessment of learning and assessment for learning.

The final assessment of learning should be the pattern for all teaching and all formative assessment.

If the final assessment is to write an essay about the causes of the first world war, then the formative assessment should also be to write an essay about the causes of the first world war, or perhaps to write a shorter version of it, or an essay about a related issue. This essay would then be marked and given feedback which would inform the pupil’s next attempt.

In this model, the assessment for learning tasks are very similar to the assessment of learning tasks. There are just more of them and they receive feedback. The result of this model is to do lots of tasks which have been designed to produce summative information but to add formative feedback to them.

On the other hand, if you believe that the methods that should be used to acquire skill are different from the skill itself (the deliberate-practice method), then assessment for learning looks completely different to assessment of learning.

In this case, the terminal assessment is the end goal but the teacher or the curriculum designer must carefully break down that end goal into its constituent parts. So, if the aim is to get pupils to write an essay about the causes of the first world war, then formative assessments will consist of a range of different assessments which may look nothing like the final assessment.

For example, formative assessments for this task may consist of short-answer questions that respond to a textbook article, multiple-choice questions about the causes of the war, activities that place key events in order, spelling tests on figures of the era, and narrative descriptions of key events.

In this model, pupils may not even begin to write analytical prose until relatively late in the unit of work. In some units of work, they may never write any analytical prose, but the unit will still help to develop their skills of analysis by developing the skills and knowledge which underpin such analysis.

With this model, most of the activities pupils do will not look like the final assessment, but the assumption is that these tasks will help pupils to do better on the final assessment.

One interesting implication of these different methods is that the generic-skill method is more likely to end up focussing narrowly on exam tasks because its model of skill acquisition suggests that practising a complex skill leads one to become better at it.

I believe that assessment for learning became excessively focussed on exam tasks not just because of the pressures of accountability, but because the dominant theory of how we acquire skills suggested that was the best thing to do. I also think that that this dominant theory of skill acquisition is flawed. Not only has this model led to a narrow focus on exam tasks, it has also been ineffective at developing the skills that are its aim.

Daisy Christodoulou is the head of assessment at Ark Schools. This article is taken from Daisy’s new book, Making Good Progress? (£17.99, Oxford University Press).

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