Posts Tagged ‘a levels’

While I’ve been aware that PW, or project work, is a subject taken for ‘A’ levels, it’s only been recently when I realized how big a deal this subject is when news about the (controversial) results for this subject this year appeared in The Straits Times. I’ve already offered my ramblings on the variance of grades several days ago; this time I’ll blog about the groups and their projects themselves.

Here’s the thing. I get approached at least several times a year by Junior-College students asking to interview / get ideas / feedback for their PW and especially when they’ve chosen gaming topics. Occasionally the requests get channeled through the faculty’s public relations department. More commonly, I get approached cold turkey though. Not surprisingly, most of the topics the ‘A’ level students choose are the common and popular ones, specifically gaming addiction, or violence.

I’ve got no clue if the ‘A’ level PW students go through any sort of prep lessons on how to gather data and especially when the gathering is public. But in my opinion, their method of seeking assistance and querying for most of the proposals and initial queries I’ve received could really use some work. In one recent case, the students wrote me cold turkey using a Hotmail address with a funky-sounding address, did not identify their project title nor say who they were (they stated only they were from so-and-so JC), did not say how they got my contact details, and did not spell-check their email. And in the first email, they jumped straight into the questions.

Just to clear things up from the onset, I helpfully obliged with their questions. I’m happy to assist in this sort of thing. Like what my Godmum once told me (though in reference to lecturers agreeing to be character referees when fresh graduates look for their first jobs):

“If you as teachers don’t help students, who else do they approach?”

However, that help goes with the caveat that students do really want to learn how to do research and data gathering in the right way. And I’m not referring to the really heady procedures for ethical research you need to abide by when you do higher degree or professional research, but just the simple and common-sense things. For example…

• Always identify your person(s) fully, i.e. by name
• Identify your teacher-supervisor in your JC and his/her contact point. This is for respondents to verify with your school if they wish to that you’re not persons masquerading as marketeers gathering free and professional data.
• State your project title.
• Declaration of how the data will be used. (e.g. “We will be collating your interview data alongside others to help guide our research directions” or “We may quote your input as a learned expert in this area.”)
• Ask your questions only after you’ve initiated contact and received the person’s consent to participate. Pushing your questions immediately in your first email is a huge NO-NO.

To be fair, a lot of times these simple guidelines are even broken in degree research. Over at Hardwarezone for instance, every other week there’ll be one student in a university faculty starting a new thread asking for input for his gaming survey, with few of the details above apart from a vague description of why he needs input (e.g. “We’re doing an erm project on player behavior.”) And I’m positively certain that some of the Polytechnic students doing public data gathering will stumble here too.

I remember while doing my doctoral research at Curtin I had a thick wad of papers and forms to fill up with the Ethics Office before I was even allowed to ask my first question, and you’d get into a lot of trouble if your instruments in practice aren’t compliant with your promises on paper. In all cases, it’s all a learning process. The immediate payoff is that your participants will at least recognize the seriousness of what you’re doing in your project, and that’s certainly a great start.:)

There’s been more than a few letters and news articles in The Straits Times recently about the grading of an important subject in the ‘A’ levels curriculum, for example here, and here. The long and short of it is this: the ‘A’ level results this year revealed extremes in how Junior-Colleges fared in this subject, with one JC scoring 7% distinctions and another 98% distinctions.

Parents, and persons posting into the ST discussion threads have been shocked / surprised / flabbergasted at how big the variance is, and there’s been more than a few explanations and theories thrown up on what really or possibly happens in Project Work that’s resulted in this variance.

Well, the intent behind this post isn’t to offer a substantial take on this, since I’m not involved in ‘A’ level Project Work. But I do have experience - 10 years worth of it - working with student project groups, internal and external moderation of projects, and/or with overseas examination syndicates. Whenever we saw such variance, alarm bells went ringing immediately well before even results get released. We’d checked through exam stats, talk to the people, lecturers, internal moderators on the ground, negotiate and review the results with the external exam syndicates.

Why? Because all things being equal, it’s impossible to experience this kind of variance unless between the two institutions, all their students in one are only Einsteins and in the other, students who just didn’t do any work. All those years of experiences have taught me (and the other academics who worked with me in examination moderation) that when it comes to project and group work, students are typically compacted around ability ranges regardless of where they come from. There’s a lot of redundancy for students to be more/less around the slightly good to average to slightly poor range, and only the really better ones get better grades than that. So, to see an institution scoring 98% distinctions - well, something feels missing.

In any case, this sort of awareness is good. If nothing else, at least it lets people better understand how intricate and complex assessment systems can be.

Oh yeah; the picture here was taken a few years ago with one of the project groups I was supervising at Curtin University. These groups were comprising final year students in the School of Information Systems doing their Bachelor degrees. Bleh - can’t remember what their names are now.:(