‘Learning Careers’ or ‘Assessment Careers’? The Impact of Assessment Systems on Learning

Two increasingly important strands in current educational thinking are reflected in growing interest amongst researchers, policy‐makers and qualification designers in formative assessment strategies that motivate learners and enhance their educational attainment. In addition, a body of research suggests that learners develop ‘learning careers’ from primary education, through the National Curriculum into post‐compulsory education and beyond. This article engages with this work in order to highlight some key factors in ‘learning careers’, particularly in relation to the impact of formative assessment practices. It aims to relate findings from research on formative assessment in primary and further education, carried out by the authors, to studies which use Bourdieu's notions of ‘habitus’, ‘field’, ‘cultural capital’ and ‘social capital’ to explore learning careers and learning identities in different sectors of education. The article evaluates whether the concept of ‘assessment careers’ illuminates a specific strand within young people's ‘learning careers’. In particular, it asks whether the concept might offer more precise insights about how practices produced by different assessment systems, particularly those purporting to promote formative assessment, affect learners' identities and dispositions for learning.     

New concepts of play and the problem of technology,digital media and popular-culture integration with play-based learning in early childhood education

Technology, digital media and popular culture form an important aspect of young children’s life-worlds in contemporary post-industrial societies. A problem for early childhood educators is how to most effectively integrate these aspects of children’s life-worlds into the provision of play-based learning. Traditionally, research has considered barriers to teacher uptake of technologies in the early years, or teacher beliefs and attitudes about using technologies with young children. An alternative perspective focuses on children’s play as the foundation for early childhood curriculum provision and argues that what is needed instead are ‘new’ concepts of play more appropriate for explaining children’s contemporary play experiences in post-industrial societies. This article examines the influence of a new concept of play called ‘web-mapping’ on teachers’ curriculum practices in early childhood education, and finds that, according to Vygotsky’s ideas about explicit and implicit mediation, new concepts of play are likely to provide a fruitful avenue for addressing the ‘problem’ of technology, digital media and popular-culture integration in early childhood education.     

A Pedagogy of Friendship: young children’s friendships and how schools can support them

Children’s friendships are often neglected by teachers and researchers. This phenomenological study conducted with seven children aged five and six years explores young children’s perceptions of their everyday friendship experiences. This multi-method study used role play interviews, drawings and persona doll scenarios to consider children’s everyday experiences of friendship in school. The paper discusses the importance of socio-cultural aspects of children’s friendship including: imaginary friends; losing friends; protecting time and space to develop friendships and children’s routines and practices as they form and maintain friendships. Data and findings are discussed, leading to an original conceptual framework: a ‘Pedagogy of Friendship’. This is designed to help children make meaning from their friendship experiences and also provide practitioners with the opportunity to nurture and scaffold children through their friendship experiences in schools. We suggest that there is a need to raise the profile of children’s friendships in early childhood education and generate an educational perspective on friendship. Finally we conclude that listening to children’s views of friendship indicates that the application of the framework of a ‘Pedagogy of Friendship’ would be beneficial to children’s all round learning and development.     

Romantic expectations and harsh realities: tertiary access to the rescue

This paper examines the educational ambitions of adults from a disadvantaged area in Australia who returned to study at a further education institution as a means to access higher education. The study examines the significance and influence of romance, gender and social class on their formal learning, and the delaying influence of these factors in realising lifelong learning aspirations. It draws on written testimonies of students’ early expectations and beliefs about learning, education and life choices, their current beliefs and future tertiary and career expectations to argue that romantic conceptions of early motherhood/marriage have a negative impact on women from low socio‐economic backgrounds. The focus is on self‐reporting of the impact of early parenthood and/or the consequences of premature dissolution of a romantic relationship on educational aspirations or opportunity. We define the basic concept of romance as concerning love and ‘living happily ever after’, incorporating love and people’s social aspirations, hopes and dreams, offering the promise of a better life. We find, one, that the discourse of romance had a very powerful early gendered influence on the female students’ educational aspirations, and on their ‘enlightenment’ after romance ‘went wrong’ which contributed to their educational disadvantage; and two, that exclusion from education is a motivating factor in returning to learning as an adult and strongly influences parental aspirations for those with children.     

Learning one’s place and position through play: social class and educational opportunity in Early Years Education

Drawing on the theoretical work of the British sociologist Basil Bernstein, this paper documents how learning is structured and organised through play in three Early Years Education (EYE) settings catering for children aged three to five in England, UK. Its data address current issues raised within EYE research relating to ‘quality and high returns’ and ‘school readiness’ for compulsory education. The analyses reveal that multiple forms of play are evident in all three settings; however, they are afforded very different status and value in each, influenced by the assumptions practitioners [in this paper practitioner is used because this is what those working in the nursery settings viewed themselves as. Although we acknowledge that early childhood educator is perhaps a more common term in certain countries] make about children and their families’ knowledge and resources for learning. The effect of such processes is the reproduction of social class and cultural hierarchies inside EYE settings, reflecting those longstanding in wider UK society. Despite the best intentions of policy-makers and practitioners, EYE play as currently configured does not provide equal opportunities for all.     

Measured lives: the rise of assessment as the engine of change in English schools

The year 2000 marks the end of compulsory education for the first cohort of students to experience the National Curriculum throughout their school careers. This article describes their experience of assessment and compares it with the testing regime that those children who start school in 2000 are likely to experience. Changes in policy from the early Task Group on Assessment and Testing proposals are analysed, especially the increasing priority given to the use of assessment for monitoring and evaluating the performance of teachers, schools and local education authorities. This shift is interpreted in terms of underlying assumptions about effective strategies for change. While Conservative and Labour governments have pursued somewhat different goals, they have used a similar change strategy. This explains why the general thrust of policy has continued in a broadly similar direction - towards ever more testing in schools and the use of results as performance indicators. It is argued, however, that this strategy cannot be pursued indefinitely. After a point, further improvements will only be made if teachers are helped to work ‘smarter’, not just harder. Policy-makers need, therefore, to look again at the contribution that formative assessment - or assessment for learning as part of pedagogy - can make to lifelong learning, in a more coherent, balanced and ‘educational’ system.     

The Invisibility of the ‘Average’ Child in the Early Years

A sample of 52 children across two schools was tracked for the first four years of their school life. Adopting a naturalistic research strategy, relying on classroom observation of children and depth interviews with teachers, the emergence of each child's identity was monitored as it became revealed to their teacher. This investigation into early school careers suggests that children quickly acquire one of two distinct identities: either normal or deviant. The vast majority of children fall into the ‘normal’ category. Within the ‘normal’ category there seems to be a particular type of pupil who is to be found at the core of this socially constructed world of normality: the ‘average’ child. Acquiring an identity as an ‘average’ child seems to have important consequences for the child's experience of schooling. Whereas deviant pupils are conspicuous and continually noticeable, ‘average ‘pupils represent a conformity in classroom life which makes them apparently less visible to teachers. ‘Average’ pupils appear to conform to such an extreme degree that for much of their time in school they become ‘invisible’. This is an apparent anomaly for teachers in the early years when, in spite of a commitment to individualism, and often a tradition of child‐centredness, it seems teachers may be ‘blind’ to certain individuals in their class, especially those for whom teachers have recognised an identity as an ‘average’ child.

Research in early years education has understandably given prominence to issues of pedagogical practice, policy formation and curriculum development (Richards, 1982; Blenkin and Kelly, 1988). As in all sectors of education the concerns of educationists as practitioners or policy‐makers have often driven the quest for understanding and provided the dominant ethos of inquiry. In the field of early years education, the issues for debate, and consequently the questions generated for research, have rarely been prompted by the concerns of social scientists in their pursuit of more esoteric domains of theory construction.     

‘We believe in every child as an individual’: Nursery school head teachers’ understandings of ‘quality’ in early years education

This article addresses the issue of ‘quality’ in early years education, with the aim of highlighting the voices of nursery school head teachers. Government early years achievement statistics display a reductive and de-contextualised focus on young children’s developmental outcomes, with measures of the percentage of 5-year-olds achieving a ‘good level of development’ at the end of the Early Years Foundation Stage. Early years practitioner understandings of ‘quality’ are more sophisticated and multi-dimensional, and yet are marginalised in debates around what constitutes ‘quality’ early years provision and around what are desired outcomes for young children and how these can be achieved. Using qualitative data from interviews with nursery school head teachers and classroom teachers from across England, the article analyses these participants’ understandings of ‘quality’ early years provision. The study finds a consensus amongst these teachers that quality provision emanates from the professional skills of staff providing education for the whole child and their wellbeing: they conceive of ‘quality’ as relating to a depth of understanding of each child as an individual, enabling the child to progress in their learning.     

Early years curriculum: funds of knowledge as a conceptual framework for children’s interests

Children’s interests are frequently cited as a source of early‐years curricula. Yet, research has rarely considered the nature of these interests beyond the play‐based environment of early‐childhood education. This paper reports findings from a qualitative, interpretivist study in two early childhood settings in Aotearoa/New Zealand. Using participant observation, interviews, and documentation, the study examined children’s interests and teachers’ engagement with these in curriculum interactions. Evidence suggested children’s interests were stimulated by their ‘intent participation’ in family and community experiences and encapsulated in the notion of ‘funds of knowledge’. The concept of funds of knowledge provides a coherent analytic framework for teachers to recognize children’s interests and extend teachers’ curriculum planning focus beyond that of a child‐centred play‐based learning environment.     

Bilingual families as literacy eco‐systems

Mainstream educators tend to assume that families should follow a school‐prescribed pathway, centred on parent‐child storyreading sessions, to help their children become literate and achieve educational success. The research discussed here focuses on case studies of bilingual families with six‐year‐old children growing up in London, and shows that they function in more diverse and complex ways, to achieve the goal of children learning to read and write in English and in Chinese, Arabic or Spanish as well. The skills of different family members (including parents, siblings and grandparents) are harnessed so that they complement each other to foster children's learning. Each family thus operates as a ‘literacy eco‐system’, which is dynamic and open to change. The paper concludes by recommending that early years educators find out more about the systems used by pupils’ families, in order to support the work that is already taking place at home.     

Powerful teaching in preschool – a study of goal-oriented activities for conceptual learning

This article reports on a small-scale investigation of how teachers organise goal-oriented learning in Swedish preschools. The revised Swedish curriculum (National Agency for Education 2011) highlights the need for children to develop their mathematics skills through activities that integrate play and learning. This study investigates how different types of activities contribute to children developing their understanding of the concepts ‘half’ and ‘double’. Three preschool teachers participated in a developmental project in which they conduct teaching in accordance with the Variation Theory of Learning. The pedagogical contexts they bring into being reveal important insights for early childhood education. The pedagogical context that can be realised in the planned activities limits or favours the learning process and the success of the theoretical aspirations for the session. This article discusses the idea of ‘teaching’ and how to facilitate conceptual development in a goal-oriented but child-centred practice. The main results show that play is central in early childhood education, and that problem-solving as a means for mathematics education needs to be problematised and used with sensitivity to the children's intentions and perspectives.     

Understanding children’s motives when using iPads in Saudi classrooms: is it for play or for learning?

ABSTRACT

Even though studies of the accessibility of digital technologies in educational contexts have become progressively more extensive, understanding children’s motive for play or for learning is essential for identifying the way they relate to touch technology. This research paper seeks to understand the relation between the motive for play and the motive for learning when iPads are introduced into a grade one class in the Saudi Arabian education setting, where there is no custom for the use of digital technologies (five children, age range 5.5 (6 years old; n=80 hours of video observations; n=12 hours of children and class teacher interviews). The teacher put in place a new learning configuration involving the iPads, and by studying how the children interpret this new situation it is possible to see what factors influence the development of their motive for play to their motive for learning. The findings are important for the Saudi context, but also for early years teachers generally because it gives insights into how digital tools can act as a vehicle through which learning can be enhanced.     

The nineteen eightees: Prelude to curricular reform

Abstract

The massification of higher education in Australia since the early 1990s has foregrounded issues of access and participation for a range of ‘non‐traditional’ students. Such issues can unsettle academics’ normative assumptions of the learning behaviours of the traditional, ‘ideal’, university student and highlight normative beliefs and practices about teaching and learning. This can be seen most acutely in regard to the increasing numbers of students with disabilities, especially students with ‘hidden’ disabilities such as psychiatric disabilities and learning disabilities. The impacts of these disabilities go to the very core of the business of the academy: cognition, intellectual ability and academic success. Using Smith's (1999) notion of ‘cultural cartography’, this article takes a sociocultural approach to investigate and give voice to the responses of a small number of students with a ‘learning difficulty’ at a regional university about problematic aspects of their teaching and learning experiences. This demonstrated that the after‐effects of access and equity admission polices can play out in deeply personal ways for individual students when normative, behaviourist notions of ability and achievement continue to prevail within higher education environments. Although non‐traditional students are now permitted to enter the academy, this occurs at some personal cost to their feelings of belonging and self‐esteem, and can result in students taking on deficit or helpless positions within the academy.     

Listening to learn: children playing and talking about the reception year of early years education in the UK

Recently in the UK there have been dramatic changes in the state provision of early years education and care, most notably the introduction of the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority's ‘early learning goals’ in 1999 and ‘curriculum guidance for the foundation stage’ in 2000. Outlining the context in which these changes came to take place, this research begins to consider how we might understand children's experiences of this policy in practice in their reception year. Valuing children's potential as participants in research, a play‐based activity was designed to ensure that the process of generating data would be meaningful to the children as well as to the researcher. Analysis of the discourse highlights themes of early education that were of importance to the children. Further discussion of these themes offers insight into how concepts of work and play might be linked to the role of the adult‐in‐charge, potentially undermining opportunities for learning; and how concepts of the individual, normalisation and the individualised academic curriculum promoted by national policy stand opposed to a notion of community on which the children place great emphasis.     

Perspectives on Australian,Indian and Malaysian approaches to STEM education

STEM education faces an interesting conundrum. Western countries have implemented constructivist inspired student centred practices which are argued to be more engaging and relevant to student learning than the traditional, didactic approaches. However, student interest in pursuing careers in STEM have fallen or stagnated. In contrast, students in many developing countries in which teaching is still somewhat didactic and teacher centred are more disposed to STEM related careers than their western counterparts. Clearly factors are at work which impact the way students value science and mathematics. This review draws on three components that act as determinants of science education in three different countries – Australia, India and Malaysia. We explore how national priorities and educational philosophy impacts educational practices as well as teacher beliefs and the need for suitable professional development. Socio-economic conditions for science education that are fundamental for developing countries in adopting constructivist educational models are analysed. It is identified that in order to reduce structural dissimilarities among countries that cause fragmentation of scientific knowledge, for Malaysia constructivist science education through English medium without losing the spirit of Malaysian culture and Malay language is essential while India need to adopt constructivist quality indicators in education. While adopting international English education, and reducing dominance of impact evaluation, India and Malaysia need to prevent losing their cultural and social capital vigour. Furthermore the paper argues that Australia might need to question the efficacy of current models that fail to engage students’ long term interest in STEM related careers. Australian and Malaysian science teachers must be capable of changing the personal biographies of learners for developing scientific conceptual information. In addition both Malaysia and Australia need to provide opportunities for access to different curricular programmes of knowledge based constructivist learning for different levels of learner competencies.     

A Childhood Free of Knowledge? Reflections on German educational policy for the early years

This article, written by a researcher on international comparisons of childhood, contends that educational expectations towards preschool education in Germany have been low for over two decades. Particularly in the 1980s, during a period of stable economic growth, policy for the early years of childhood was primarily discussed in terms of child care, in order to allow more mothers to enter the labour market. Recently, however, the educational potential of the early years is being revisited in a lively debate. Since 1996 a German law guarantees every child beyond age 3 the right to attend a kindergarten and entitles parents to choose a kindergarten suited to their needs and to their expectations concerning educational quality. What, however, is meant by ‘educational quality'? The author and a group of childhood researchers and educational journalists investigated beliefs and suggestions for ‘best practice’ in early education (the ‘World knowledge of seven year olds’, 1996‐1999, project based at the Deutsches Jugendinstitut and funded by the German Federal Ministry of Education and Science.) In 150 in‐depth interviews people of all ages, from diverse strata of society and with varied professional experience, outlined their views on what they believe a 7‐year‐old boy or girl should have encountered, learnt to master or to question during their preschool years. The study results in a more tangible notion of what is meant by ‘key qualifications’ and ‘basic skills’ in the early years and how to promote them in a holistic way.     

Through a different lens: exploring Reggio Emilia in a Welsh context

In Wales, concerns about the perceived over‐formalisation of young children’s educational experiences led to the introduction of a Foundation Phase Framework for children aged three to seven years that advocates a more holistic, play‐based approach. Following the staging of the Reggio Emilia travelling exhibition, funding was secured for a project in which teachers explored Reggio philosophy and practices as a means of gaining insight into their thinking and pedagogy. Given the introduction of the Foundation Phase, the project also intended to support teachers’ explorations of child‐led learning. Looking at their practice ‘through another lens’ exposed teachers’ commitment to an approach dominated by prescribed, subject‐related outcomes. This approach influenced the way in which the teachers interpreted key aspects of Reggio philosophy and contributed to their difficulties with ‘supporting’ child‐led learning. The paper concludes that moving away from a ‘subject‐centred’ approach, particularly when the Framework includes prescribed learning outcomes, may be extremely challenging for teachers.     

Mobile devices in early childhood education: teachers’ views on benefits and barriers

Mobile devices and, in particular, tablets have become increasingly popular in young children’s lives; however, there is limited empirical evidence regarding early childhood teachers’ perceptions on mobile technology-learning in early years. This study investigated teachers’ views on mobile devices’ usage in early childhood education classrooms, focusing on their perceived benefits, barriers and their concerns. A questionnaire with open ended questions was completed by 30 early childhood education teachers, in Greece. The primary perceived benefits regarded the facilitation of the educational process, the interactive learning environment and the support of children’s learning and development. Major perceived barriers were related to the lack of (or limited) resources/equipment, the limited teacher training opportunities and lack of funding, while key concerns regarded the constraint of hands-on experiences, children’s concentration, and cyber safety issues. Implications for pre-service and in-service teacher training, educational policy and practice, as well as links between home and school are discussed.

     

Female survivors’ perceptions of lifelong impact on their education of child abuse suffered in orphanages

Many children raised in orphanages suffered ongoing child abuse and neglect including sexual abuse, and nearly all were denied an adequate education. This paper explores adult females’ perceptions of the impacts on their education of child sexual abuse they suffered while living in orphanages in Australia. In-depth qualitative and anonymous one-on-one interviews were undertaken with 10 female volunteers. Their narrative quotes emanate from questions asked about their experiences and perceptions of child sexual abuse, and its impacts on their educational achievement, educational development and educational opportunity. Of these volunteer females, only two had completed primary school, none had completed more than two years of secondary school, and none had undertaken any tertiary education. All had perceived child sexual abuse, in particular, to have had overwhelmingly negative impacts on their lifelong, educational achievement, educational development and educational opportunity. These impacts have had detrimental inter-generational consequences upon their own children. These adult females perceived child sexual abuse to be a major factor in their very poor, life-long educational development, achievement and opportunities, with intergenerational consequences for their self-esteem, wellbeing and success. Implications for practice are that children at risk should receive specialised teaching, educational support and counselling; adults with deficient education need help with learning processes such as dynamic learning, to help achieve active and inclusive citizenship.     

‘I am not clever,they are cleverer than us’: children reading in the primary school

This paper examines the experiences of children learning to read in a multi-ethnic London primary school. The data are drawn from doctoral research, based on ethnographic fieldwork, with children aged six to seven years and ten to eleven years. Reading is revealed as a strongly emotional realm for children. The children are weak to resist teacher assessment of themselves, but nonetheless seek to create consoling narratives against what they perceive to be the negative identity of ‘poor reader’. The data are distinctive, as resistance to school hierarchies and strong feelings about educational failure are manifested in the narratives of children as young as six years old.