1. Mind the Gap Ken Smith Director-General
Department of Education & the Arts, Queensland

2. Curriculum-Assessment^

5. We’re not talking about Monkey Trials…

6. Types of assessment
Formative
Summative
Punitive
Sedative

7. Assessment’s appeal to policymakers as an agent of reform…
Tests and assessments are relatively inexpensive…
Testing and assessment can be externally mandated…
Testing and assessment changes can be rapidly implemented…
Results are visible. Test results can be reported to the press… policymakers can reasonably expect increases in scores in the first few years of a program … with or without real improvement
(Linn 1994)

8. Testing’s effects on Policymakers
Positive
Negative
Help policymakers to judge the effectiveness of educational policies
Improve policymakers’ ability to monitor school system performance
Foster better allocation of state educational resources
Provide misleading information that leads policymakers to suboptimum decisions
Foster a “blame the victims” spirit among policymakers
Encourage a simplistic view of education and its goals
(Stecher 2002)

9. Getting the balance right
Responsiveness to local needs and diversity
Pedagogical innovation
Professional discretion and educational leadership
Ideological neutrality
Primacy of curriculum
Portability and buying power
Communicating expectations and achievement
Motivating excellence
Intellectual rigour and stretch
Alignment of curriculum, assessment and reporting
Less or less
centralised testing
More or more
centralised testing
More testing?

10. Evaluation and aspiration
Evaluation and aspiration 
…when I went to school in Brisbane it was as if I had missed out on my primary education…
I got straight As at Kowanyama but when I got to Brisbane I was getting Cs and Ds. …
Education should be uplifting, not serve to reinforce lack of self-esteem and the heart wrenching low expectations that my mob suffer from. If we cannot get education right then we are doomed.
– Tania Major, young Aboriginal leader,
speaking to the Prime Minister 2003

11. Evaluation and aspiration PISA: Aspirations and attainment correlate.
Evaluation and aspiration 
(OECD average)
PISA: Aspirations and attainment correlate.
(De Bortoli & Cresswell 2004)

12. The Pygmalion Effect We form certain expectations of people or events.
We communicate those expectations
with various cues.
People tend to respond to these cues
by adjusting their behaviour to match them.
The result is that the original expectation
becomes true.
This creates a circle of self-fulfilling prophecies.

13. 1883 – Guess who? Winston Churchill 8th place out of 11
Composition: very variable
Grammar: fair
Diligence: …very naughty
7th place out of 10
French: not very good
Weak in geography
Drawing: very elementary
Winston Churchill

14. Oh bring back higher standards –
the pencil and the cane –
if we want education
then we must have some pain.
Oh, bring us back all the gone days.
Yes, bring back all the past…
let’s put them all in rows again –
so we can see who’s last.
…let’s label all the good ones,
we’ll call them ‘A’s and ‘B’s –
and we’ll parcel up the useless ones
and call them ‘C’s and ‘D’s.
…We’ll even have an ‘E’ lot!
…an ‘F’ or ‘G’ maybe!!
…so they can know they’re useless
…and not as good as me.
(Peter Dixon)

15. Unintended effects
Assessment systems that are useful monitors lose much of their dependability and credibility for that purpose when high stakes are attached to them.
The unintended negative effects of the high-stakes accountability uses often outweigh the intended positive effects.
(Linn 2001a)

16. Spoon feeding in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the spoon.
– E M Forster
(Regurgitation in the long run teaches us nothing but the shape of the bucket.)

17. The Bloom Taxonomy The reduction to knowledge Evaluation Synthesis
of Educational Objectives
(Cognitive Domain)
Synthesis
Analysis
Application
The
reduction to
knowledge
Comprehension
Knowledge

18. It’s Tuesday. This must be Algebra.

19. Hackney's schools worst again
Schools in Hackney have been making progress
Hackney in London, whose education service is now being run by a trust, is at the bottom of the primary school results tables - again.
Hackney is the worst-performing local education authority - although results in its schools did improve, from an average aggregate score of 197 to 210.

20. Not everyone loves the King of the Sea…
a 45 minute primary lesson on Flipper,
shared reading of stories of Flipper,
pictures and videos of Flipper,
worksheets and art work on Flipper.
wonderfully orchestrated… wonderfully socially supportive environment…
At the end of lesson, what had the kids gained? Flipper.
Now that’s what I mean by ‘dumbing down’
of the curriculum.
(Allan Luke 1999, 2001)

21. The Queensland Curriculum, Assessment and Reporting Framework (Years P–10 )
a defined essential curriculum
curriculum appropriate to local needs
standards of achievement in essential curriculum
bank of assessment tools linked to essential curriculum and standards
comparable assessment against standards at three key points
common reporting framework
ongoing review and refinement of syllabuses

22. Rene Magritte:
Clairvoyance, 1936

23. Mind the Gap Ken Smith Director-General
Department of Education & the Arts, Queensland