OBE Levels: Useful tool or meaningless nonsense?
Everyone understands how a percentage system of marking. It makes sense.
If you have a body of knowledge, say Physics, and you randomly ask 100 questions about Physics then if the student can answer 50 correctly then the student gets a mark of 50 from 100 or 50%.
Parents understand, kids understand and prospective employers understand
If you don’t understand this then you are either not very bright or are a graduate of an OBE school of mathematics.
Levelling, on the other hand, is much more difficult to comprehend.
Levels are the "grades" awarded under the system of outcomes based education in western australia.
Levels are a set of numbers ( 1 to 8 ), but they are not real numbers, they are supposedly a cognitive developmental stage that someone at the curriculum council just made up one day (someone who probably never made it as a teacher).
Interestingly enough no-one has been game to admit that they were the one who dreamt up the levelling system. Considering the amount of time, money and effort that has been spent on explaining the “benefits” of leveling you think the individual who came up with it would show more pride in their remarkable “achievement”.
The process of using levels involves coming up with a “fine grained assessment item” (that’s edubabble for test or assignment) for students to do and then looking at the various outcome statements and the associated level descriptions each outcome statement.
Now this sounds pretty easy but here is an example of an aspect of an outcome statement:
Students understand the scientific concept of energy, give examples of energy sources and describe patterns of energy use around the home and in the community. (1)
And here is one example of a level descriptor:
The student understands that energy interacts differently with different substances and that this can affect the use and transfer of energy. Students begin to explain their observations of the physical world in terms of an abstract idea or non-observable event. They describe multiple effects of energy use and describe advantages and disadvantages of different sources. They explain how different substances can affect the way energy is transferred or changed. They analyse unfamiliar events and describe abstract ideas and interactions and explain changes caused to objects. (2)
For science there are five outcomes with at least two aspects to each outcome with eight level descriptions of each. That gives a teacher at least 80 paragraphs of nonsense to wade through to give each student a level.
The teacher then has to “make a consistent judgement” (that’s decoded as “take a guess”) as to what level the child has attained.
Herein lies another prolem, each of the statements is open to interpretation and no firm rules exist on giving "half marks" for a level.
This is why critics of OBE levels say they are subjective, teacher will often give completely different levels for the same piece of student work.
Many teachers joke about pulling out the levelling dice or using the levelling dartboard to mark students work as this would be as accurate as using the woeful level descriptors provided by the curriculum council.
Now would you rather have your child’s teacher focusing on teaching your chld well or wading through the nonsense quoted above?
The new minister of education has abolished these levels for year 11 and 12 due to public pressure, he should now turn his attention to removing levels from all year groups.
(1) and (2) Source: http://www.curriculum.wa.edu.au/ProgressMaps/science.htm
