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>> So we’ve got these four pillars that are emerging from the research; know how,
procedural knowledge, the ability to put it all into action where the teacher lets go
of your hand and that disposition to learn, that view of yourself as a learner as the
fourth pillar.
>> I think it is interesting when you look at that reflected in things like NAPLAN data
and if you look at some of the states and territories and the NAPLAN responses. We just
look at the responses; the frequencies from low to high performance in NAPLAN. When we
put the South Australian data on top of that what we see is that the whole curve is shifted
down a bit and so our students at the bottom end are performing a little bit lower and
students at the top end are performing lower as well. When you dig into that some of the
things that we see is there is a kind of barrier that’s holding this group of kids back in
SA. There’s this barrier, where some kids kind of have their faces pressed up against
the barrier, and what’s happened is they’ve had all this instruction and they’re good
at answering those questions where the question says - here’s the thing what’s the answer?
Oh yeah this is the answer. Here’s another thing - what’s the answer? Oh yeah this
is the answer. The instruction has been brilliant; that foundation that they’ve got in SA has
been really good but they’re getting closer and closer to the barrier and some of the
kids are getting pushed right up against the barrier, but they’re not breaking through
into that problem solving. They’re not breaking through into that reasoning. They’re not
breaking through into that inference and that comprehension part of it. And you can see
that in the questions.
>> So now this left hand side of the barrier if you like, some of these questions about
the temperature at the base of the mountain is 8 degrees but at the summit it’s 26 degrees
colder. Just an operational thing, as a knowhow thing, I’m going to do a subtraction, there’s
a little conceptual bump that we go into negative numbers. Questions like: oh there’s that
reflex angle question; which of these angles is a reflex angle. You can teach that; you
can instruct that. These are the things that pushing the kids closer and closer to that
barrier; they’re getting better and better. And even this one, this is interesting in
a South Australian context because one of the things we saw in SA was that there was
a large cohort of students who didn’t understand what this meant; they thought it meant means
or makes. So they would read this as, this number plus this number makes this. They weren’t
thinking that whatever is on this side is equal to what is on that side. They were reading
it across and some of the kids were writing the answer to that sum in there and then going;
I don’t know what that’s for? Equals! Because this makes this and this makes this!
And what’s interesting about that is, that’s instructable. When you do your assessment
and you see that that’s the case; you can tell the kids what equals means. You can help
them to practice it and get to grips with it and to get conceptual understanding of
the equals sign and that’s what happened and we improve. It’s about knowing stuff
and being able to use your operations and pop it into practice. But then on the other
side of the barrier, the sorts of things we see are the problem solving questions. This
is a brilliant question; it is a Year 7 Maths question. Sue draws a polygon; it's got a
certain number of 120º angles, the same number of 150º angles and no other angles. What
kind of polygon is it? Show this to adults and often they’ll say well if I was in Year
7 I could do that, couldn’t I! The idea being that someone would have told them about
the angles inside polygons that they’d be able to tell us back, and of course that’s
not what the kids in Year 7 are required to know. What this question is asking them to
do is to work it out. So as an adult we should be able to work it out. This is demanding
a lot cognitively. Actually in terms of your knowledge it’s not demanding that much but
in terms of the problem solving, the cognition, and the disposition, I’ve no idea what the
answer is but I’ll try this and I'll try that, and I’ll give it a go and I’ll fail.
And I’ll give it another go and I’ll try this and I’ll try that. What we’re seeing
is that these questions require more than what we can tell the kids. They require what
we can tell the kids and something else: something beyond it, that ability to put it into action,
that ability to think of oneself as a reflective learner and have a go at it.