We’re back with 5 To Try this week. I’ve tried to branch out a little bit, a bit of mixed media going on.
1) DOCUMENTARY SERIES – The Ascent of Man – BBC iplayer – https://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer/episodes/b00wms4m/the-ascent-of-man
File it under “they don’t quite make them like they used to”. Not sure how long it’s been there but, a colleague alerted me to the fact that what is quite arguably one of the greatest documentary series ever is available on BBC iplayer. Hosted by Mathematician and Philosopher Charles Bronowski, 1973 series tracks the development of human society through scientific and mathematical discovery. It is absolutely breathtaking, Bronowski’s monologues a brilliant, to the point the book adaptation of the series is essentially just his monologues to camera transcribed. Breathtaking television, just watch it.
2) MANIFESTO – Fair Education Alliance, Fair Education Manifesto 2023 – https://www.faireducation.org.uk/fair-education-manifesto
The Fair Education Alliance is a coalition of 250 organisations from education and business, who have come together to address widening inequality gap within education. This report is a highly interesting read, with a number of suggestions and proposals to support with retention of staffing in education, to improving early years services and . The statistics at a glance on page 12 has some increasingly shocking statistics, highlighting a number of places where the gap between poorer and better off pupils are at the highest point for over a decade – including primary settings, university and GCSE, where disadvantaged students achieve on average 1.34 grades lower than their better off counterparts which horrifyingly rises to a 3.1 grade difference at A Level.
3) BLOG POST – Checking Instructions – Ditching ‘Everyone Happy?’ by Peter Foster – https://curriculumteamleader.wordpress.com/2023/09/30/checking-instructions-ditching-everyone-happy/
I am so guilty of the “Everyone happy?” or “Any problems?” statements – this is going to change what I do so much. It’s not worth me saying more here, a recommended read for any teacher, regardless of experience. It’s very rare that you read something and straight away just go “I am going to be able to do this next lesson” – this is one of those reads.
4) OFSTED REPORT – Independent Review of Careers Guidance in Schools and Further Education and Skills Providers – https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/independent-review-of-careers-guidance-in-schools-and-further-education-and-skills-providers/independent-review-of-careers-guidance-in-schools-and-further-education-and-skills-providers
I’d like to think careers and guidance has come a long way since I was in school. In secondary we were cycled through a 4 PC computer room attached to a food technology classroom to do a Kudos quiz – and that was essentially it (outstanding episode of Channel 4’s Teachers centred around this though!).
At college I know I received more, but my lasting memory is the careers advisor handing a prospectus for a local ex-Polytechnic whilst sitting on high grade AS results and a high grade A Level Maths final grade from year 12, despite an earlier wide discussion of options, when he found out where my family lived. This isn’t a woe is me, nor a slight on the University (where I did eventually study for my PGCE), the irony is, yes it wasn’t the ‘best’ postcode, but I had an incredibly supportive career driven family, an academic father and a lot of social capital. Even still, everything about me was essentially ignored following a discussion, the second a postcode came into it.
I digress. The Government’s push for a more cohesive and robust careers and skills advice, centred around the Gatsby Benchmarks is an incredibly positive one. Ofsted have recently released their independent review of careers advice in schools, FE and Skills Providers. There is a lot to take in, still room to improve, issues regarding access regarding schools which I have come across in my roles in FE. Definitely
5) JOURNAL – Bem, D. J. (2011). Feeling the future: Experimental evidence for anomalous retroactive influences on cognition and affect. Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, 100(3), 407–425 – https://www.sas.upenn.edu/~astocker/lab/teaching-files/PSYC739-2016/bem2011.pdf
I’ve read about this study a lot and the fallout that followed from it in the area of Psychology. It’s a prominent study often referenced in education specific books, but also in more ‘mainstream’ forms such a journalist and BBC Radio 4 host Tom Halford’s book “How to Make the World Add Up: Ten Rules for Thinking Differently about Numbers” (a fantastic read for anyone who has to deal with statistics) – as I was writing about Hypothesis Tests and Errors, I had to prevent myself from going into the rabbit hole of this study, but I also realised I had never read it at source. So I decided to rectify this, and nothing quite prepared me for what I read.
There are numerous experiments that are referenced, the most basic of which asks the respondent to choose where they think a particular image is, on the left or right. Whilst this on the surface looks like ‘guessing’ or a test of ‘clairvoyance’, the image (which position is designated randomly) hadn’t been designated until after the choice was made by the respondent, essentially testing their ability to predict the future. In this first test, Bem found a statistical significant difference between the expected (for random guessing) and observed results – although only for pornographic images?!?! (You know when people question what academics are actually doing – sometimes I get it). There is an outstanding double entendre on page 409, relating to this as well.
The part of the study generally discussed is the section on Retroactive Facilitation of Recall. Bem himself states on page 419;
“The results show that practicing a set of words after the recall test does, in fact, reach back in time to facilitate the recall of those words”.
This is mind blowing, it is suggesting “revise after a test and improve your test result”. The author, a respected Scientist is outright saying it. More shockingly, the statistics back him up, and on the surface there was nothing wrong with the methods, they are/were the accepted standards (some commentators have subsequently claimed some flaws and some have even claimed p-hacking, but everything met the required rigour of publishing and peer review). This led to a movement to step away from the traditional statistical methods of significance levels and p-values, Psychology journals now generally require methodology and process be submitted prior to results, and publishing decisions made before results are known.
The results here led to a group of Psychologists attempting to replicate 100 major findings from 2008’ and found only 36 of the studies could be replicated in laboratory conditions. For those of us involved in education, this is the silent part we often don’t have information of. A lot is made of ‘effect size’, how big of a practical effect does the findings of the study have over the null conditions. I have numerous books in my collection that highlight studies with the effect size of the intervention in big bold letters, and there’s the infamous Bloom’s 2-sigma coaching study – however very little is made of ‘replication’. This is indicated by ‘Power’. Essentially this is the likelihood of getting a ‘True Positive’ in replication. If you have a ‘Power’ of 0.5, this means only 50% of the time will even ‘true positive results’ be replicated. Even if an intervention has an insanely small ‘p-value’ (I will discuss this more soon) and an insanely high ‘effect size’, if the ‘power’ is low, it ceases to be a practical intervention strategy as you are unlikely to see those effects in practice.
I’ll be dipping more into this in a post later this week. In the meantime, enjoy the 5 To Try.