IQ and Ability

Teachers work constantly with students of varying degrees of ability.  For true equity to be achieved all student would begin with the same level of ability, teachers would deliver the same material in the same way and everyone would grow up to have the job of their dreams.  This is far from the reality of teaching.  Current research suggests that future workplaces with require employees who self manage, collaborate, set and achieve their own goals and the employees expect to have fun while they do it.  An education system that makes judgements about student ability on IQ tests is operating from a deficit perspective and is making the assumption that all student learning is completed in isolation from other students.  IQ tests also don’t take into account the pre learning home environment.  Student who arrive at school without much pre – school stimulation and bound to be behind students who come from enriched home environments and will sadly remain behind for the rest of their learning lives.  IQ tests don’t acknowledge whether the testing is completed with the good will of the subject. Working in high schools I constantly see students ‘bomb’ out on tests that they are more than capable of completing because of emotional trauma, disinterest, lack of relevance and plain old distemper.  Students who have lower ‘IQ’ are able to complete the course requirements with assistance and most learning assistants are savvy about not completing the work for the student.

Old school approaches to teaching and learning required a strong emphasis on the memorisation of ‘facts’ which were agreed and finite because of access to information.  People seemed ‘smart’ if they could remember what they were taught about geography, biology, language including spelling, Presidents of different countries and whatever else was the agreed and accepted limited curriculum.  The attitudes to learning were that it was the way to get ahead, a way to improve your life and teachers were treated with respect and awe because of their high level of ‘knowledge’ of all curriculums.  Times have changed dramatically.  Knowledge is still power.  With the information explosion students are not able to absorb the whole knowledge that is available.  Teachers question the validity of knowing all the Presidents of the world in alphabetical order or knowing the exact map reference for all the rivers in a country.  With GPS navagation soon reading maps will be a skill of the past.  The internet has replaced expensive volumes of encyclopedias that some parents used to mortgage their houses to afford to help their kids stay ahead of the rest of the pack.  Education has become more wholistic with far less education in the home as homework becomes increasingly a thing of the past.  Students use communication technologies to have social schedules that are full.

IQ testing becomes less and less relevant in this technological age of skills rather than knowledge.  Even well designed tests have biases.  Whilst there may be legitimate science behind the design of the tests, what is the point of giving someone a number?? Only those that suspect they have a high IQ are actually interested in finding out.  Mental prowess is useful in a number of different forums but lets face it, there is employment out there that requires a little bit of common sense and a moderate amount of on the job training.  What use is a high IQ?? More often than not a huge amount of memorised information is mistaken for a high IQ anyway.

Criteria and Quality Rubrics – My Assessment Journey

I have had an interesting philosophical journey about assessment over the course of my decade of practice.  Whilst that doesn’t seem very long in the scheme of things, I have worked in 3 settings and seen a broad spectrum of students.  I remain conflicted about what is the best way to provide feedback to students.  It has been governed by the best practice requirements of the school I have attended and my own professional judgement.  Initially it was good enough to correct errors in the work, write a few comments about how to improve particular parts of the task and record and grade in my markbook.  The marks were then tallied at the end of the semester to come up with an overall grade.  This was an incredibly easy way to arrive at a final mark but I’m aware that there was little improvement for the middle of the road and underperforming students.  The high flyers were willing to remember feedback because they were constantly looking for ways to improve their next task.

When I arrived in the Lanyon Cluster of Schools there was a professional understanding that to provide students with a grade or a score along with feedback means they will simply look at the score and ignore the feedback which is a problem when the feedback indicates how they might improve their work.  Using criteria and quality rubrics was one way the school met the challenge of giving students an idea of the criteria described explicitly and feedback using the criteria which allowed them to see where they needed to improve the task.

The criteria and quality rubric is different from the typical understanding of rubrics where each level of achievement is articulated.  Rubrics that describe 5 levels of achievement make it easy to give a task a grade but it is a deficit approach to marking student work.  The underperformers see what the absolute minimum expectation for the task described and they submit the bare minimum every time.  To articulate the highest level of achievement and to clearly describe what the task will look like when done well initially posed challenges for staff.  Gone were the days when teachers could describe work as having ‘flair’ or ‘that certain quality that just is an ‘A’ grade’.  We were forced to break the task down into clearly described criteria to be open and accountable with our students about what we were expecting.  Gone was the learn to do a task by osmosis and guess work.  Gone were the days of high marks simply because it was coloured in superbly (not that I ever did this!!!)  Those fussy girls who delivered shallow work suddenly understood why thinking was important.

This storyboard assignment was a complex task with lots of different levels of thought required.  The students couldn’t just reproduce the key scene and identify what kinds of shot types were used.  They had to adjust the scene to show different values, explain their choice of shot types and techniques and present it in a way that way clear and easy to understand.  Multimodality was addressed by allowing a choice of presentation media.  This Criteria and Quality rubric was used in the Sydney White element I wrote, taught and evaluated for the New Learning and New Literacies Masters.