Visual Communication Research 2019

Today I had an awesome conversation with Ed Strafford, who works in the ministry of education. Below are the questions, notes and key outcomes from this conversation. (Questions are rough drafts that I ad-libed as we spoke.) Do you know if the MoE has made any recent changes to policy and/ or resources they provide for learning diversity in the classroom. (Specified teaching for different ways of thinking/ learning) Many of the teachers I’ve talked to have said they’d love a wider range of more detailed resources. With the recent NCEA review, is it likely the MoE will work on this in the next 10 months? For the context of a university project, is it relevant to be addressing similar problems that the MoE has already recognised in their review? Or does that just justify the importance of the problems?  At this stage I’m not sure whether I should direct my project towards a scalable public audience (potentially a resource that could work for the MoE), or a more specific ind...

Key Quotes: Inconsistencies between how standards are assessed at different schools make internals an unreliable measure of a student’s ability. By halving the number of credits required and completely removing external examinations, NZQA would reduce level one from an already basic stepping stone towards the much more challenging level two qualification, to a qualification that is so simple they might as well pass everyone who shows up on the first day of school. It’s going to be a lot less stressful to figure things out here then it is at university or in your first job. The Ministry of Education, however, is considering drastically altering level one to the point where these learning experiences will completely disappear. Instead of solving problems like low pass rates by lowering the standards for passing and managing stress by removing any sign of a challenge, NZQA and the Ministry of Education should be looking at addressing real issues in a way that...