WARNING! This website is no longer actively maintained. It is an archive of 2 years work by Doug Belshaw who now blogs at dougbelshaw.com...
The Guardian reports today on the findings of an ESRC report into the cognitive and conceptual development of Year 7 pupils. They claim to find that children are “now on average between two and three years behind where they were 15 years ago”. 
This makes me laugh. There is absolutely no way that society or education is the same today as it is 15 years ago. Of course there are similarities and, to many, things will seem the same, but even a gradual evolution of the business of education can produce wholescale changes in teaching and learning. One should always beware when an article includes sentences such as, “…it was an objective research method, free from any process of adaptation to changing circumstance.” This quite obviously cannot be the case. With the tools we give children through education comes a way of conceiving the world. If you standardise a test (i.e. ensure it produces a nice ‘bell’ curve) based on children who find it easier to conceptualise certain ideas and forms because of certain cultural or social reasons, then whenever that test is repeated - whether contemporaneously with a different set of children from varied backgrounds, or later in time - you are going to get different results. There is more than one variable here.
Claiming, therefore, that children’s cognitive development is “on average between two and three years behind” what it was in a previous generation is spurious. Especially when the author of the report (Michael Shayer) says of it:
We can speculate, but there’s no hard evidence. I would suggest that the most likely reasons are the lack of experiential play in primary schools, and the growth of a video-game, TV culture. Both take away the kind of hands-on play that allows kids to experience how the world works in practice and to make informed judgments about abstract concepts.
So, in fact, this merely shows the difficulty of administering tests which produce reliable, valid and coherent results across samples. It doesn’t show that pupils are somehow “backwards”, less well-informed or that teaching performance has declined.
The media coverage of the report may have one positive effect, however. The author of the Guardian article believes that:
Those likely to be particularly discomforted by Shayer’s findings are people who swear by the validity of GCSE and Sats results.
If the curtain is lifted on the fact that these tests do almost everything except demonstrate the current and potential ability of pupils, then the report will hopefully have served a purpose. Using outmoded testing procedures when society and culture has changed is at once anachronistic and harmful to the life chances of learners. 
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I’m not sure I’d be quite so quick to dismiss this one Doug. I’m no expert on this, and I’ve never been completely convinced by the arguments of those who push for cognative ability testing in schools, but it seems like there is something going on here.
It seems that to accept the idea of decreasing ability you first have to buy into the Piaget model. I don’t know enough about this to make a call, but I do know that it has its critics. Whether or not you accept the idea that cognative ability is falling, I don’t think you can dismiss the idea that pupils are less equipt to deal with this kind of test, which suggests the way they are dealing with and processing information is changing. This is bound to have implications for us as teachers.
The comment that most stood out for me was:
I’m certainly realising quite quickly in history that a lot of the interesting discussions and the issues pupils want to discuss are having to be shelved because ‘they have to know the answers’ to pass the exam. In that respect I can’t help feeling the testing system in actually getting in the way of their education, rather than being part of it.
I certainly agree with that statement, Dave! I’ve been reading some quite critical stuff of the whole idea and concept of ’school’ in the light of what’s now available with technology and what we know about individual learning.
A lot of the time when we’re testing I don’t think we actually know what we’re actually testing. Whilst we might claim we’re testing, for example, numerical ability, we may actually be testing ‘cultural literacy’ (or some other intangible construct) to the same degree.
Oh, dear, I’m about to sound like Disgusted of Tunbridge Wells…
I’ve been teaching for 30-odd years, and yes, I do think standards have dropped over the years.
For around 20 years, I taught in primary schools, and I know that I had to lower my sights periodically to take account of this, for example, in the books I asked the kids to read. I tried having my 11-year-olds read Rosemary Sutcliff’s “Eagle of the Ninth” a couple of years ago, and they almost all found it so challenging that I had to give up… And that’s a book I could have easily used ten years earlier…
That’s an interesting point Mike. On the flip side, would you also agree that they are also (by and large) more ICT literate (for want of a better expression) than the cohort from 10 years ago?
Not that I think for a second that somehow excuses the point you make. As a history teacher who orginally trained as a Librarian I think the written word is one of the most powerful tools we have at our disposal. But isn’t this exactly the reason that we need to adapt our teaching to take into account that the pre-school learning experience is now very different to the one ten years ago?
It’s true that children today do know more about some things we knew nothing about when I was at school, but I don’t think it balances out…
Looking at history, my subject, it seems that more and more has been cut out so that it’s hardly taught at all in primary schools. This was, apparently, necessary so that more time could be devoted to the “basics” of literacy and numeracy.
Now, I find fewer and fewer truly literate teenagers, and math teacher friends tell me that an ever-larger percentage of students leave school functionally innumerate…
Sure, they can txt at incredible speed. They’re aces at MSN messenger. They can even produce the odd PowerPoint presentation, but I can’t help feeling something’s missing.
They’re having a debate about this over at the Education Forum at the moment. The balance of opinion over there appears to be that yes, standards have slipped, and that it’s all somehow the fault of the capitalist system and Blairite betrayal. So, nothing new there, then…
I sometimes feel like I’m the only literate teenager in my area.