Dress rehearsal

The Junior Certificate, no longer a high-stake exam, represents a chance to teach the skill of learning, rather than the skill of taking exams, says Clive Byrne

CONGRATULATIONS and best wishes to the thousands of Junior Certificate students who received their results yesterday.

There is considerable debate about reform of the junior cycle and what it is Ireland wants from its education system. At the moment, what our students experience at junior cycle is falling short of what many of them need.

Will the proposed reforms go far enough? Could the Junior Certificate be adapted to make learning more enjoyable and engaging for students?

Government policy is to keep students in the system for as long as possible. At present, about 90% of those pupils who start school aged four or five stay in school to complete their Leaving Certificate. It is clear that we no longer need the Junior Certificate to be an end-of-school qualification for the vast majority of students and, given that it is no longer a high-stakes exam, why not be more courageous with the reform agenda?

The Economic and Social Research Institute, in a longitudinal study of more than 1,000 students, found that, in their first year of secondary school, most students make little, if any, progress in reading and maths. By second year, the study found that many students have become disengaged, and even though they remain in school they do not progress and rarely reconnect with school.

In third year, in preparation for the Junior Certificate, most of the emphasis is on exam preparation. The Teaching and Learning in Schools report speaks highly about the relationship between students and teachers in Ireland.

According to the ESRI study, students view a good teacher as one who teaches to the test, so success in the Junior Cert exam is embedded in third year and the emphasis on exam success becomes the key driver of the senior cycle.

If minimising the course content seems the easiest way to maximise success in the exam, it is no wonder that Irish students had the highest number of skipped items in the last PISA study, where students were required to work things out for themselves.

It seems the major rationale for the Junior Certificate nowadays is as preparation for the Leaving Certificate, definitely a high-stakes exam given the importance of the points system for entry to third level. However, employers and universities regard the existing assessment system as being too narrow and not capable of capturing broader aspects of learning.

Despite students achieving creditable results, they are not benefiting fully from the skills and competences the curriculum hoped to develop. Teachers continue to teach to the test and students are learning for the exam.

Imagine if, instead of preparing students for the Junior Cert exam, we focused them on learning — on how to learn well, on how to build on what they have learned, and how to learn in an environment where they can garner information from many sources.

As long as a large component of any exam tests memory, we will still have a system focused on memorising to the detriment of higher-order thinking.

Teaching students to learn rather than teaching students to pass exams needs to be the new focus forjunior cycle reform. Learning to learn and loving to learn should be our mantra.

Research tells us that the quality of feedback given to students as they are learning is what matters most. The TALIS study indicates that Irish teachers are not good at giving feedback.

Giving good feedback rather than a mark and a “must do better” is the key to connecting students to their own learning and to making them more challenged and independent. This skill is underused by our teachers, but using assessment resources provided by the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment, school leaders can support staff to develop and expand their use of feedback. But parallel with improved feedback is the need to take the focus off the terminal exam.

Moving from a situation where the results and progress of a student are generated from the State Exams Commission to one focused on feedback relying on the professional judgement of teachers will require a leap of faith. Parents will need to be reassured. Teachers are reluctant to make professional judgements on students for high-stakes exams, but the Junior Certificate is not a high-stakes exam any more.

Given the need for consistency, it is reasonable to suggest that the SEC will continue to set exam papers, but there is no reason that these papers can not be taken in school and evaluated by teachers, thereby ensuring that students and their parents get richer feedback on progress.

The original idea behind differentiating exam levels into higher, ordinary, and foundation was to enable students to succeed at their particular level, but this system disadvantages working-class boys. Schools which stream students by ability are disadvantaging those in the lower streams, with no comparable gains for those students in the higher stream, according to the ESRI. But if there was a common paper for all students, the negative consequences of labelling could be eliminated.

Educationalists had great hope when the Junior Certificate was introduced, but there needed to be an alignment rather than a disconnect between the aims of the syllabus and the model of assessment.

The existing exam has strangled the new curriculum and the learning outcomes originally intended. If different models of assessment and feedback were in place, there would still be pressure on students to do well, but they could only do well by engaging with different forms of learning and by being assessed using a wider range of skills and competences. This is where we want to be as a society.

Professor Áine Hyland said in her report on entry to higher education that “assessment is the tail that wags the curriculum dog”, but it is more than that. Emphasis on a written, terminal exam is the tail that wags our entire education system.

So as we seek to bring about junior cycle reform, let us be more courageous. Enable students to work hard, but also to work wisely and to work well.

Let us examine whatever subject numbers in a school setting, relying on the professionalism of teachers to make judgements about student progress in an atmosphere where learning is fun, feedback is encouraged, and collaboration, exploration, and independent learning is the hallmark of a reformed cycle.

* Clive Byrne is director of the National Association of Principals and Deputy Principals, and a nominee of Education Minister Ruairi Quinn to the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment