students falling behind, page-54

Hi Jantimont,

Some more detail to hopefully address your questions.

most subjects (in the IB anyway) at the higher levels (11 and 12 particularly) still use textbooks - the science strands, the maths levels - the research is used in these subjects to apply theory to reality and so forth.

A lot of the research in the later years is in areas such as economics, geography, the arts, english literature with the focus each time being on applying theory to reality in a critical evaluation. For example in grades 11 and 12 in the IB students at higher level (HL) must complete an extended essay up to 3500 words that includes field research, academic journals and peer reviewed work.

In terms of content. maybe representing content as only changing was a little shallow. The international curriculum is concept based, so a typical unit will be defined by an over arching concept eg "systems". In a history unit this concept could be looked at through an event such as "Russian Revolution" then further broken down into smaller questions based around economic and political systems, then chopped up into inquiries into areas of the problems nations face in managing economies, why they would adopt one political/economic system over another and so forth. this is when the teacher would deliver content, all the time contextualising the content within the key concept. an assessment task for grade 9 level (so 13-15 year olds) could be the choice of questions like: "discuss how successful the october revolution was in establishing a dictatorship of the proletariat". this is where students would need to perform significant research. there is no correct answer only a position taken and defended by the students according to their research. in this way, the content is changeable for each student but the concepts remain the same. you get the idea.

similarly some content actually changes - particularly geography, the economic development of nations, political leaders, borders and so forth. so there is less focus in content.

yes there is a baseline knowledge that is necessary and this needs to be taught and more importantly assessed.


A huge problem though is that the notion of educational development as a sliding scale has been taken to the nth degree. unfortunately there is such a thing as failing but many schools are reluctant to do it, mostly because there is no real power for schools to enforce consequences like repeating a class or grade. take away the teeth and tiger is just a cat.

R