Help Talking-up Scotland keep going

Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going

Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421

Quick as you don’t like, BBC Scotland‘s ‘Education Correspondent’, with barely a thought it seems, is taking the latest Pisa data on reading all-too-dimly.

Who is she?

Lucy Adams at the University of Glasgow -She studied for an MLitt in Creative Writing at the University of Glasgow between 2006 and 2008. This is an interesting part of her background because creative writing can strengthen narrative skill, precision of language and the ability to bring lived experience vividly onto the page. She also completed a Postgraduate Diploma in Journalism Studies at Cardiff University from 1998 to 1999. That formal journalism training would have given her a solid grounding in reporting practice, ethics, media law and newsroom standards. https://elevatenew.co.uk/lucy-adams

So, ‘studied for’, ‘completed?’ Impressive no? but less, far less study of the nature of reading than a Primary Education graduate and, it seems, than a published researcher on Pisa and reading

Adams seems not to be aware of the research revealing that Pisa is narrowing and damaging reading itself in a very specific way.

PISA reading is applied literacy: find information, interpret, evaluate, use mixed and digital texts. That is a real skill. The risk is that schools start treating that as reading, and spend less time on:

• long literary texts
• reading for pleasure
• fluency and writing
• cultural and aesthetic reading
• knowledge-rich subject reading (history, science content that makes texts easier to understand)

Wayne Au’s synthesis [Assistent Professor, CSU] of 49 studies of high-stakes testing found the dominant pattern was curriculum contraction to tested subjects, fragmented knowledge, and more teacher-centred, test-shaped teaching. Language arts was one of the areas most affected. PISA is not identical to those national high-stakes tests, but countries often respond to PISA with national tests and programmes that do have those effects. https://jwilson.coe.uga.edu/EMAT7050/articles/Au.pdf

David Berliner [Stanford] made the same argument about high-stakes testing generally: the rational response is to teach what is thought to be on the test, which reduces creative work and can weaken later learning. https://www.researchgate.net/publication/251735612_Rational_response_to_high-stakes_testing_and_the_special_case_of_narrowing_the_curriculum

There’s more, much more, if Adams can be bothered or up-to-it.

Help Talking-up Scotland keep going

Crowdfunder at: https://www.crowdfunder.co.uk/p/help-talking-up-scotland-keep-going

Or by direct bank transfer to: JOHN WATSON ROBERTSON Sort Code – 08-91-04 Account – 12266421