As the BBC reports, 25 million papers are taken in an annual orgy of testing that, the committee argues, risks placing too much emphasis on too few types of test and on teaching to the test.

More damningly, the report states:

…that the single-level tests’ “one-way ratchet” system will lead to an “artificial” improvement in results, in which pupils will be “certified to have achieved a level of knowledge and understanding which they do not in truth possess”.

Barry Sheerman and his committee are stating, in part, that some types of national testing are circular - improvement in the tests is taken as validation of those tests and so students do more tests. We can’t really say if students have learned anything by the end of that process.

A key recommendation of the committee seems to be the that whilst testing per se is not damaging, the use of those tests to create schools performance table, is. The BBC piece notes the report argues that “…accountability should be based on a wider range of measures, including Ofsted reports.”

John Dunford, leader of the head teachers’ union ASCL expresses the frustration of many in the teaching profession with with the current profusion of tests, and how that information is used:

“The original purpose of examinations, to assess students’ progress, has become confused with school accountability and the performance management of teachers,”

The conclusions of the select committee and the opinions of the likes of Dr. Dunford we heartily agree with. This seems to boil down to an issue we’ve long recognised, and have had to take into account designing Maths-Whizz and in the valuable reports we put together for parents, students and teachers alike:

All you can say with honesty about a test is that it measures a student’s ability to take that test.

It sounds truistic, obvious, but when you think about it this argument is a dangerous one to follow to its extremes - after all, by what standards might we measure performance, what information is relevant to an understanding of ability and learning, if we take this statement at face value?

When students learn with Maths-Whizz animated exercises and test themselves with Maths-Whizz exam-style questions we know that there are two things at work:

• The student is, first, learning the subject - the basic maths he or she needs to develop educationally and to use in everyday life. 
• Second, the student is learning the technique for answering the question, whether that involves knowing what to write, when, or learning which button to click.

When the second skill takes precendence over the first, the system has failed to measure knowledge or performance in any meaningful way.

Of course, for many students rote learning of technique can make up for a lack of understanding. You can know how to perform long division - and use that skill to good effect in everday life - without understanding why it works, or how. Likewise, I don’t need to know the inverse square law in order to understand that gravity keeps me sitting here.

But - and this is vital - if our testing system ends up valuing method over knowledge, by design or by accident, then we need to re-evaluate the testing system. If the method of SATs tests is all about how to answer SATS tests, then we have a problem.

We like to think Maths-Whizz gives students the tools and the confidence to take their maths learning beyond the computer screen. After all, parents tell us all the time that our exercises and exam-style questions are making their children do better in class. We would be failing in our jobs if it turned out that all Maths-Whizz students could do was answer Maths-Whizz questions. Thankfully, the evidence is anything but.

In the end, though, we know full well that no child is going to understand all the implications and intricacies of maths just by logging into Maths-Whizz, just as no child is going to really understand gravity by watching electronic apples fall from electronic trees. Everything our students has to have a life beyond Maths-Whizz.

Polly Curtis reports:

Rather than an evening a term queueing for a five-minute chat with teachers, parents want more frequent access, or to monitor their children’s progress online, according to research commissioned by the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

The DCSF report, summarised here, suggests that parents’ working lives are getting in the way of engagement with their students’ education, especially homework.

DCSF secretary Ed Balls:

Parents tell us they like having informal contact with their child’s school - whether that’s a chat in the playground or the chance to go online and see their teenager’s latest marks and make sure they are going to all their classes.

The DCSF research was based on telephone interviews with more than 5,000 parents or guardians of children at state schools. This is part of the government department’s ‘Parent Know How’ scheme, which is looking at ways to help parents with support and advice. (Teachernet already offers some bullet-pointed advice for teachers on how to get the most out of parents’ evenings, here.)

The DCSF is approaching this from the parent’s direction. Meeting the needs of parents with online reporting is something we’re very interested in - after all, we already do this with our Maths-Whizz Tutoring, and components for the forthcoming Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools service (click here if you’re a teacher or school administrator to grab one of the remaining places on our summer trial).

We want to make sure Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools features in the government’s 10-year children’s plan, which involves (amongst other things) ensuring access to tutors for every child and online information for parents by 2010.

Despite this enthusiasm from government, access to live school work information has its downsides. The New York Times reported earlier this week on parents (sometimes known as ‘Helicopter Parents’) who use services like ParentConnect, Edline or PowerSchools obsessively to track their children’s performance and class attendance.

The rationale behind such programmes is sensible:

Citing studies showing that parental involvement can have a positive effect on a child’s academic performance, educators praise the programs’ capacity to engage parents.

But the implications aren’t always positive:

…sometimes there is collateral damage: exacerbated stress about daily grades and increased family tension.

The information parents receive means the likes of the seeminly terrifying Mrs Dobbins, featured in the article, can harangue their children as soon as they get home for poor grades or not showing up in class, even if the reasons are perfectly innocent. As a result, some students are getting stressed, and expressing that through the medium de nos jours - Facebook. As one student put it: “I get yelled at bcuz I failed a test.”

Is this an issue that requires further investigation? Of course - we don’t want Maths-Whizz students terrorized by parents for failing an exercise or not meeting allotted targets. After all, we know that students sometimes learn most effectively through reinforcement and correction of mistakes.

Many of our customers are active parents, but we’d like to think that they are still a long way from the helicopter cariacature. In fact, the driving force in Maths-Whizz is really the student, and many customers attest to this.

A little parental prodding and cajoling to study is no bad thing, especially when the weather’s as good as it is now in the UK, but we find that it is the students who are instrumental in deciding when, and how, they use Maths-Whizz. The reporting tools we offer parents allow them simply to keep track of this and give them starting points to talk about their children’s studies.

It’s likely the DCSF and news outlets yield more such findings about parents evenings, student tracking and the like. This is all grist to the mill for us, and valuable information that helps us shape our Tutoring programmes. Maths-Whizz Tutoring for Schools will be tested in Beta this summer and feedback from teachers, students and parents will help us shape it to perfection for release this autumn.

The social networking website that threatened to take over the world in 2007 now features a Whizz Education company site where you can become a fan, view Whizz videos, check out Whizz company pics and chat away about Maths-Whizz Tutoring and Maths-Whizz Teachers’ Resource with other fans until the cows come home.

If you haven’t heard of Facebook, you won’t get a grounding on this blog, but if you have heard of the site and (even better) you’re a member, why not become a fan of the site. Search for ‘Whizz Education’ in the search panel, or try this link to get started.

On the Whizz Education page, you can view Whizz blog posts and before too long you should even be able to play and explore interactive flash games, puzzles and maths challenges all without leaving the cosy embrace of Facebook.

The Whizz Scientific Calculator is as it appears in our Key Stage 3 animated exercises in our Teachers’ Resource and our online Tutoring service; it features power functions, logarithms, trigonometry buttons and fraction conversion and all that jazz. Do your homework, work out your tax, write rude number-words or calculate the budget deficit (though you may need a larger screen for the last one).

Visit the Whizz Calculator Widgetbox page to put the Whizz calculator in your blog, on your website or even in your Facebook page or Google homepage. Click the ‘Get Widget’  button, select where you want to put your own Whizz Calculator, and copy the code as appropriate.

You can also add the Whiz calculator to your iGoogle page instantly with this link.

This is transcript and audio from a call four-year-old ‘Johnny’ made to 911 (the US equivalent of 999) when he was struggling with his maths. It’s no wonder he needed help from America’s finest; we wouldn’t expect our students to attempt such subtraction questions until Year 1 (roughly age 6) at least…

This video, and more, available on the Whizz Education YouTube Channel.

21. Kevin Spacey and a bunch of improbably attractive MIT maths students take Las Vegas by storm with their clever card-counting ways.

The Oxford Murders. Fissure-faced screen legend John Hurt plays another prof (this time at the eponymous university) who helps solve a murder conspiracy apparently linked by maths symbols.

Watch, and - maybe, just maybe - learn.

Rather than offer endless examples of trains setting off from stations, apples in baskets, bars of chocolate and slices of pizza, teachers might well be encouraged to have their students think of problems less in practical terms and more in terms of non-specific abstractions.

The study in question, conducted by researchers at Ohio State University, presented university students with a set of mathematical rules, expressed either with abstract symbols or with concrete examples (tennis balls, and so forth):

“Then the students were tested on a different situation — what they were told was a children’s game — that used the same math.

“The students who learned the math abstractly did well with figuring out the rules of the game. Those who had learned through examples using measuring cups or tennis balls performed little better than might be expected if they were simply guessing. Students who were presented the abstract symbols after the concrete examples did better than those who learned only through cups or balls, but not as well as those who learned only the abstract symbols.”

The implication here is that abstract examples are transferable; students who study concrete examples are less able to ascertain the underlying principles, or apply those principles to other problems.

The article goes on to say that this issue is as relevant for younger brains as those of university age, and that this has implications for how elementary, or primary, maths is taught:

“…researchers suggested that their findings might also be true for math education in elementary through high school, the subject of decades of debates about the best teaching methods.

“The researchers said they had experimental evidence showing a similar effect with 11-year-old children. The findings run counter to what Dr. Kaminski said was a “pervasive assumption” among math educators that concrete examples help more children better understand math.”

Whilst not all researchers in this field might agree with the implications for primary education, the principle seems sound. After all, it is quicker to write an equation than it is to count out apples or cut up loaves of bread.

But, and here’s the caveat from this corner, it is natural to analogise in education. In other words, we readily use specific examples from life to extrapolate to the general. In some disciplines (like economics or history) particular examples can be less instructive when looking at the general issue. But it is just as true that 2 and a half apples are equivalent to 5 half-apples as it is true that 12 quarter-loaves are equivalent to 3 whole loaves.

Teasing out the principles behind equivalent numbers may not be as straightforward when you’re thinking about bread and fruit, but at least you have a jumping-off point, a handle for the young mind to grasp. We explore the world at first using all our senses - touch, vision, hearing, smell and even taste - and many students (and adults) continue to understand the world in terms of physical analogies. As an educational researcher commented in the NY Times piece: “Some children need manipulatives to learn math basics… but only as a starting point.”

Indeed, it would be absurd for an accountant to have to count out pound coins and pennies whenever she audited a company - she has to be able to abstract and apply general mathematical rules to specific problems. Taking aside facetious thoughts that some banking experts might have failed basic counting and adding up, it seems only right that educational methods help train young brains to think abstractly.

Ancient Greek mathematicians famously had difficulty thinking of numbers larger than ten thousand (known, then, as a ‘myriad’) and solved the problem by just multiplying myriads. It is thought the base 10 number system has arisen because, in short, we have ten fingers and thumbs. Both these examples hint that we have historically started with concrete examples and moved to the abstract as science and mathematics have matured. Science often works by collecting testable, real-world examples and building those into a framework that extends from the specific to the more general. If maths is said to be the science of patterns, this method can apply to numbers as well as it can to biology or physics.

This process of moving from concrete to abstract is reflected in the Maths-Whizz curriculum. We begin, at Foundation (roughly age 5 equivalent), by giving examples of ducks getting on and off buses, with eggs in baskets and buckets of water. Moving into Key Stage 2 our students have greater understanding of the number system and confidence with numerals and symbols. We can start to present worded problems, pencil-and-paper style problems, and basic algebra.

Finally, at Key Stage 3 we encourage students to create their own equations from given scenarios and extend given equations into new scenarios. The topics added at year 7 - Probability; Equations Formulae and Identities; Integers, Powers and Roots; Sequences, Functions and Graphs - reflect this new emphasis.

Even if we represent those scenarios visually - goats and fences one such example - Maths-Whizz students must always be able to give more formal, abstract answers. Our exam-style tests that follow each of our animated exercises are valuable tools for consolidating and reinforcing maths, even maths learned with jumping dogs and flying cakes…

 We’ve created a new Whizz Education YouTube channel to help spread the word about Maths-Whizz - both in schools and at home, offline and on-.

Visit http://www.youtube.com/user/whizzeducation and have a look around.

We’ve uploaded a handful of videos about different flavours of Maths-Whizz, including the film that accompanied our award-winning entry to the BETT 2006 educational technology fair.

There’s also a Whizz Education favourites list, including Ken Robinson’s 2006 talk on schools and creativity (mentioned here earlier), the Maths episode of the completely educationally accurate schools TV programme ‘Look Around You’, and a rather funny (if not completely suitable for younger children) clip from Blackadder II.

Visit the Whizz YouTube channel to see some of our videos, or to fritter away some time with our video Favourites. We’ll keep this page regularly updated, adding more Whizz videos and more favourites all the time.

One 2006 speaker - Sir Ken Robinson - gave a well-received talk on creativity in education (’Do Schools Kill Creativity?’) that has been doing the rounds on the education blogosphere since. Robinson discussed how we have to foster creativity in the next generation to equip children with the skills to face a rapidly-changing world.

Watch the video for yourself at the Whizz YouTube channel: www.youtube.com/whizzeducation or read on for our take on Ken Robinson’s talk.

There’s a lot to agree with in Ken’s talk. He makes an impassioned case for creativity as a key mental function; this is something we’ve always recognised and tried to incorporate into our teaching method.

The sheer variety of Maths-Whizz exercises, characters, settings and answer methods means students are encouraged to think differently about the maths they learn.

One key thing that stood out in Ken Robinson’s talk was the recognition that creativity involves being prepared to try something new - to fail - and try something else. Maths-Whizz teaching and help methods encourage this. Because confidence and attitude is vital to early maths learning, parents and teachers have to be wary of students unlearning creativity, forgetting how to ‘have a go’.

Some of the best teaching in Maths-Whizz comes when students fail - we have often tried to design exercises that help students find the answers, rather than leading them to the answers. We hope this goes some way to helping students hold on to their creativity and confidence in a subject too rarely associated with creative thinking. But if anyone ever needed confirmation that maths is creative, they can look to the mind-bending beauty of fractals or the process of discovering elegant new proofs in algebra.

The service, called Britannica WebShare, enables us at Whizz, Maths-Whizz customers, and Whizz blog readers alike to access full Encyclopedia Britannica articles that we link to, on just about any subject, from Shakespeare (who died on this day) to the Shah Jahan (who built the Taj Mahal).

When we link to Britannica articles or running features our readers will be able to access those same articles and features as if they were paying subscribers to Encyclopedia Britannica.

In addition, Britannica WebShare have put together a number of interactive ‘Widgets’ - fancy tools for exploring subjects covered in the venerable encyclopedia. We can install widgets to let you to read through the encyclopedia without even leaving the cosy confines of the Whizz Blog.

See how it works - here’s a widget all about Volcanoes.