Low-order skills dominate Leaving Cert

By Niall Murray

Memory and understanding tasks that rely on rote learning strongly dominate higher-order skills in Leaving Certificate exam questions, researchers found.

Almost 60% of tasks analysed in written exams for 24 subjects from 2005 to 2010 —incorporating nearly 15,000 command verbs — required low-order skills under the heading of ‘remember’ or ‘understand’.

As a review of the two-year senior cycle leading to Leaving Certificate gets underway, the scale of reform that may be necessary is underlined by the finding of Dublin City University (DCU) and Trinity College Dublin (TCD) researchers that at least half of exam tasks in one-in-four subjects were tests of memory.

Although they found evidence from student interviews of real learning and engagement with the curriculum, they concluded it was not adequately measured in the exams.

Denise Burns of the Centre for Evaluation, Quality and Inspection at DCU’s Institute of Education is lead author of the report on a study conducted when she worked at TCD.

The research article in the Irish Educational Studies journal is co-authored by DCU colleagues Gerry McNamara, Joe O’Hara, and Martin Brown, and Ann Devitt of TCD’s school of education.

Of 24 subjects analysed, only in English, maths, accounting, construction studies, technical drawing, music, and applied maths did less than half of written Leaving Certificate exam tasks require lower-order skills of memory and understanding.

They were more likely to involve intellectual skills requiring students to ‘apply’ knowledge, to ‘analyse’, ‘evaluate’, or ‘create’.

By contrast, 94% to 97% of questions in agricultural science, biology, and religious education used command verbs in the lower-order categories, the study showed.

“The very heavy focus of ‘factual’ knowledge (73%) in biology would raise questions as to the appropriateness of the subject as a basis for pursuing third-level programmes in life sciences which emphasise the use of the scientific method,” the authors wrote.

The question of predictability in the Leaving Certificate was undermined by previous external research carried out for the State Examinations Commission (SEC), although it highlighted the need for higher order processes to be assessed.

The study’s interviews with 30 students two months after sitting the Leaving Certificate revealed memorisation as a strong factor in how they answered in the exams, as well as their preparations.

“In line with the folk rhetoric around the Leaving Certificate being about memory recall, the students predominantly described their thought processes during the examination as recalling from prepared essays and notes.”

“Microscopes had not come up in a long time so no-one thought they would come up”, one student told them. Others described going into exams with prepared essays, one explaining that “the question on Irish music is the same every year”.

One referred to having an ‘essay pool’ with 30 essays on several English topics, and a geography student said they “did 100 essays in January and learned them off.”

Although such practices may not have required higher order thinking on exam day, the authors said such skills may have been deployed in preparing an essay in advance.

“This very common theme of memorising essays would indicate that even though in theory an examination question may require higher order processing, in practice lower order skills, that is, memorisation, is the core skill deployed by students in the examination,” the research article said.