Did you know?

National Curriculum levels in England were reported to have had a profoundly negative impact on teaching and learning (Commission for Assessment without Levels).

In Ontario, Canada, teachers found the OBE assessment process frustrating and difficult.

In South Africa, teachers found OBE unfairly increased their workload by imposing a requirement for individual based diagnostic assessments.

In Western Australia, the student outcomes framework was found to be too general and lacked the specificity required for developing teaching programs and for precise assessment.

I cannot find any evidence that learning progressions are a proven reform. Yet it would appear that many submissions to the Gonski Review Panel asked for learning progressions to be developed.

How can we develop learning progressions in a way that decreases teacher workload and that leads to improved student performance?

References

See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Outcome-based_education for a synopsis of Outcomes Based Education

Report undertaken by Donnelly, 2005, for the Commonwealth Department of Education, Science and Training, entitled Benchmarking Australian Primary School Curricula https://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/ED501707.pdf

Paper given at AARE conference https://education.unimelb.edu.au/__data/assets/pdf_file/0009/974610/YAT081051_AARE2008.pdf

https://www.atl.org.uk/policy-and-campaigns/policy-posts/assessment-without-levels For unions summary of the assessment without levels

https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/commission-on-assessment-without-levels-final-report For the full report of assessment without levels

See https://www.smh.com.au/national/nsw/naplan-is-bad-but-rob-stokes-alternative-is-worse-20180515-p4zfaw.html for a teacher’s reaction to the NSW learning progressions