Just how good are the Australians?

I never thought I’d be using an article about the Ashes to explain how the Brightpath mathematics assessments help teachers teach to student’s point of need, but it’s fun to give it a go.

And my apologies to my English colleagues, I know this hurts.

In an article in The Australian yesterday, Peter Lalor posed the question:

‘Just how good are Australians?’

Being the nerd I am, I first noticed Lalor had left out the definitive article in his headline, but I guess space didn’t allow him to insert ‘the’. Once I had got over the missing article, I drifted onto his opening paragraph.

‘While there is almost universal acceptance that this has been one of the worst performances by an England side on these shores – and this may be one of the worst teams ever to visit – it is hard to get a bead on how good the Australians are.’

Had I offered Lalor’s article up for discussion at the breakfast table, I suspect my family would have focussed on, and loved discussing, England’s performance. My interest however was on the last sentence: ‘it is hard to get a bead on how good the Australians are.’

My take on why it is hard to know how good the Australian team is (and please bear in mind my only knowledge of cricket is from half listening to the armchair critics on Boxing Day) that we can’t get the measure of the capability of the Australian cricket team because we didn’t see them tested.

This piqued my interest because it’s exactly to same issue we face when students get full marks or nearly full marks in any assessment. Whilst it’s great for student self-confidence, getting all the questions right only tells teachers what students can do. Teachers however need to know what students can’t do. It’s what students can’t do that tells teachers what their students need to learn next.

Take a look at this short video. You will see what I mean. You will see how we use information about what students can’t do to help teachers identify their students’ zone of development. It is this information that helps teachers differentiate their teaching and teach to students’ point of need.

Brightpath formative mathematics assessments

I often lecture in educational assessment. In the course, I have traditionally used a tennis an analogy to explain that we get our best assessment information when we can see where students fall away from tests. It goes like this: if you watched a game a tennis between Novak Djokovic and me, you wouldn’t know how good Djokovic is. Watch a game between Roger Federer and Djokovic, and you know how good they both are. You need to be giving you students assessments that they sometimes get right and sometimes get wrong to determine where they are in their learning.

Perhaps I should update the analogy for my 2022 classes and instead refer to the 2021/2022 Ashes! Let’s see what happens in Sydney.