When data is king

Issue 4: 7/10/2022 From the Principal

A well known phrase that gets thrown around quite often is that in the new world “Data is King.”  Many would argue that in schools this is not necessarily the case, and that the superficial school league tables often published by governments and newspapers around the world do not tell you all you need to know about a school.  It is true that parents should choose a school for many other reasons than because it has particularly high examination scores, that there are other aspects to a school environment that make for the best learning environment for your child: great pastoral care, a wide range of extra curricular opportunities and caring, engaging teachers to name but a few.  Having said that, there is room for data to make a difference in creating the optimum school learning environment for children and next week all our year 7, 10, 12 & new students to years 8 & 9 will be sitting for some short Cognitative Ability Tests (CATS) to help us generate data to inform us of their strengths and weaknesses as learners.  You can learn a little more about these standardised assessments here.

In essence teachers are provided with feedback on ways in which the students best learn, and they can then take this into account for their planning and delivery of lessons.  In the older year groups a predicted IGCSE and IBDP score is also generated, and this helps our teachers form part of the evidence for when they are asked to predict scores for our students when applying for universities.  This all comes with a health warning though!  These assessments, whilst measuring a students cognitative ability at a singular point in time, does not take into account other factors that lead to great student examination results: resilience, hard work, organisation skills for example.  Secondly,  it is also one fixed point in time: neuroscience indicates that intelligence is flexible and even old people like me can improve !

The students involved will have been given their schedules today. Ask them next week how they found them and give you examples of the sorts of questions they were asked to tackle. They always make for great dinner table conversations!

Mark Williams
Secondary Principal (International Stream)

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