I have to admit that I’m not a fan of rubrics – preferring non-standardised forms of assessment – and perhaps because most of the rubrics I have come across have been pretty terrible. So I thought I’d have a go at developing a better one. (more…)

By Dennis Sherwood

We all know that old cliché 'Necessity is the mother of invention', and events over the past nine months have validated its truth: that wretched virus has caused many new things to happen, from enhanced remote teaching at all educational levels to the ever-closer development of a vaccine.

Why has there been such an outburst of the discovery of new ideas, of creativity? (more…)

There seems to be a widespread belief that you need an ATAR to get into an Australian university. Indeed, based on their research with students and teachers, O’Shea & Groves (2020) identified that (more…)

We know that summative assessment drives practice in schools. We also know that current forms of summative assessment inhibit both curriculum and pedagogical innovation because of their focus on 'knowledge' (as viewed in a knowledge based curriculum). The challenge is to find new forms of summative assessment which satisfy the criteria against which they will be judged. Those criteria should include: (more…)

I am talking about theory in the sense of a framework for making sense of the world, what Abend (2008) calls 'Theory₅' - so the title of this blog post perhaps should have been 'How might your theoretical framework inform your research?'.  We know that there needs to be alignment between your theoretical stance and your methodology, design, methods and instruments, analysis, and outcomes (the claims made) (Twining et al, 2017; Twining, 2018). But what does that look like in practice? I'm going to illustrate this (more…)