Results!

Today has been GCSE results day in the UK. As well as the usual reports of some students (fewer than usual) achieving between 11 and 13 top grades (Why do they need to sit so many? Back in our day even the brightest only sat 9 O Level subjects.) there was a bit of a furore. English Language, English Literature and Maths have all been made harder and have been graded 9 (highest) to 1 (lowest). Results went down by 0.6% -shocking! Even worse, only 2000 pupils achieved a Grade 9 all three subjects.

Inevitably there has been much discussion about how and why this has come about. Someone who marks GCSE English Literature examination papers listed reasons why pupils lost marks:

 1. Narrative: retelling the story – particularly for the novel and drama, but also for the poems – with little or no focus on answering the question.
 2. Irrelevant: the student unloads all their knowledge about the text regardless of whether it answers the question or not.
3. Terminology overload: the student is desperate to use all the terminology they’ve been taught, so they forget to do any analysis. The response becomes an exercise in feature-spotting.
4. Translation: generally for poetry, specifically for unseen poetry, the candidate feels they have to go through the text line by line "translating" it for the examiner. Again, they fail to answer the question. 

All of that sounds rather like the sort of thing we used to hear long ago.


In the field of Maths I heard one commentator complain, or explain, that the new GCSE contains material that used to be part of the A Level course. Now, I find this rather interesting. When I was a sixth form teacher I occasionally observed A Level Maths lessons - part of a programme where we picked up techniques from each other - and found that they were often learning stuff that I had studied for O Level.

There must be a message in there somewhere.

While on the subject of the old way of doing things, here is an excerpt from an article about study techniques:

 "As laptops become smaller and more ubiquitous, and with the advent of tablets, the idea of taking notes by hand just seems old-fashioned to many students today. Typing your notes is faster — which comes in handy when there's a lot of information to take down. But it turns out there are still advantages to doing things the old-fashioned way.

For one thing, research shows that laptops and tablets have a tendency to be distracting — it's so easy to click over to Facebook in that dull lecture.

And a study has shown that the fact that you have to be slower when you take notes by hand is what makes it more useful in the long run. In the study published in Psychological Science, Pam A. Mueller of Princeton University and Daniel M. Oppenheimer of the University of California, Los Angeles sought to test how note-taking by hand or by computer affects learning. "When people type their notes, they have this tendency to try to take verbatim notes and write down as much of the lecture as they can," Mueller tells NPR's Rachel Martin.

 "The students who were taking longhand notes in our studies were forced to be more selective — because you can't write as fast as you can type. And that extra processing of the material that they were doing benefited them.""

I could have told them that.

I was, however, reminded of when Phil and I were students, conveniently on the same course and thus attending the same lectures. At our most efficient we used to pool our notes and type up a neat version on my little portable typewriter. This had the advantage if forcing us to read through the notes we had taken in lectures, something that often does not happen.

 Maybe the problem is that students have forgotten how to learn.