WEBVTT 00:00:00.000 --> 00:00:05.100 Thank you very much, Bene't, and thanks to Cambridge Assessment for inviting me here today. 00:00:05.580 --> 00:00:14.720 I'm going to be less neutral than you were, Richard, so by all means feel free to throw tomatoes in my direction if that should be appropriate. 00:00:16.320 --> 00:00:21.020 Like Richard, I'm also not an expert on critical thinking. 00:00:21.840 --> 00:00:29.240 What I know about is policy, and I spend an awful lot of time talking to people who are affected by government policy. 00:00:29.240 --> 00:00:31.240 including teachers. 00:00:31.240 --> 00:00:34.740 I imagine that those of you in the room who are teachers 00:00:34.734 --> 00:00:39.634 will probably recognise some of the issues that I'm going to talk about today. 00:00:40.874 --> 00:00:47.494 Beth talked about critical thinking having been squeezed out of other subjects 00:00:47.494 --> 00:00:52.954 and A-levels not providing the right vehicle for teaching critical thinking skills. 00:00:52.954 --> 00:00:57.134 And I think that's really at the heart of the problem that we have. 00:00:58.174 --> 00:01:01.754 Curricula and exams have entirely lost critical thinking 00:01:01.754 --> 00:01:04.274 as a central element of teaching and learning. 00:01:04.734 --> 00:01:09.474 As a result, I would argue that we've resorted to critical thinking as a separate 00:01:09.468 --> 00:01:14.868 separate discipline, but this is the wrong way to solve the problem. It shouldn't and possibly can't 00:01:14.868 --> 00:01:20.448 be effectively taught as a separate discipline. And instead, we need to make critical thinking 00:01:20.448 --> 00:01:25.388 and problem solving central to the way that every subject is taught and assessed. 00:01:26.848 --> 00:01:32.348 Now, there's no question that critical thinking and problem solving are extremely important, 00:01:32.348 --> 00:01:39.128 and as Richard alluded to, this is just sort of the reality of the 21st century economy and society. 00:01:39.468 --> 00:01:44.208 the Leach Review of Skills projected a 50% increase in the share of high 00:01:44.202 --> 00:01:51.982 skilled occupations by 2020. And as we've heard, employers want thinking skills. They 00:01:51.982 --> 00:01:56.182 want the foundations on which they can build. They can add specific training, but they need 00:01:56.182 --> 00:02:01.342 that basis there in order to be able to do so. It's also just the truth about the economy 00:02:01.342 --> 00:02:05.802 that we're going to find ourselves in over the next 50 years, and probably accelerated 00:02:05.802 --> 00:02:11.582 by the recession that we may or may not just have come out of. There just aren't any more 00:02:11.582 --> 00:02:12.422 jobs for life. 00:02:12.422 --> 00:02:14.422 It's no longer the case that we have this sort of 00:02:14.422 --> 00:02:17.622 carriage clock syndrome of training for a particular job, 00:02:17.622 --> 00:02:18.942 doing it for 40 years, 00:02:18.936 --> 00:02:25.736 and then retiring. People are increasingly going to need to change jobs, increasingly 00:02:25.736 --> 00:02:30.456 going to need to change careers, and we need to make sure that young people have the basic 00:02:30.456 --> 00:02:33.896 toolkit that will enable them to reskill in the future. 00:02:35.036 --> 00:02:41.536 Now, our research into A-level and GCSE exams has featured analysis by leading academics 00:02:41.536 --> 00:02:48.276 across the core subjects and also comparing English exams, both with their past incarnations 00:02:48.276 --> 00:02:51.516 and their international equivalents. 00:02:51.516 --> 00:02:53.676 And what that analysis has shown is that 00:02:53.670 --> 00:02:59.210 critical thinking has largely been lost through prescriptive, restrictive exams that don't 00:02:59.210 --> 00:03:04.690 allow room to think, with questions that are based on process and that reward application 00:03:04.690 --> 00:03:08.310 instead of being based on knowledge and rewarding reasoning. 00:03:08.950 --> 00:03:14.210 And in a lot of cases, the superficial content has been retained, but the core of the exam 00:03:14.210 --> 00:03:15.690 has really been hollowed out. 00:03:16.710 --> 00:03:18.750 This sort of takes two different forms. 00:03:18.750 --> 00:03:23.750 In the maths and sciences, it's primarily a case of prescriptive questions, 00:03:23.750 --> 00:03:28.410 and students being often led through questions in very small steps that prevent 00:03:28.404 --> 00:03:32.184 them from sort of looking at a problem as a whole and trying to figure out the best way of going 00:03:32.184 --> 00:03:37.844 about solving it. One of the academics we've worked with, Professor Rosemary Bailey from Queen Mary, 00:03:38.484 --> 00:03:44.424 said the following, sitting a mathematics A-level paper now is more like using a sat-nav system 00:03:44.424 --> 00:03:49.884 than reading a map. If you read a map to get from A to B, you remember the route and learn about 00:03:49.884 --> 00:03:56.104 other things on the way. If you use a sat-nav, you do neither of those things. In the arts and 00:03:56.104 --> 00:04:00.104 In the United Nations, we've identified a slightly different problem, 00:04:00.104 --> 00:04:03.144 which is largely around prescriptive mark schemes. 00:04:03.138 --> 00:04:12.278 Directed questions encourage students to respond in a certain way, and assessment objectives determine what markers are and aren't allowed to reward. 00:04:13.498 --> 00:04:24.058 Now, these over-prescriptive exams are encouraging teaching to the test, and in particular, removing the incentive for the student or the teacher to develop higher-level abilities. 00:04:24.658 --> 00:04:31.178 If anything, thinking outside the box is likely to decrease your marks on a typical A-level paper, rather than increase them. 00:04:31.178 --> 00:04:37.878 And so we've seen the development of critical thinking as a separate discipline. Now first, 00:04:37.872 --> 00:04:46.492 I'd like to question what I see is this slightly specious distinction between critical thinking, problem solving and even creativity. 00:04:47.272 --> 00:04:58.012 I think we're fundamentally talking about similar and related higher level cognitive skills, which all involve learning how to reason and how to express oneself. 00:04:58.612 --> 00:05:00.872 This, as we've heard from Richard, is what employers want. 00:05:00.952 --> 00:05:02.652 These are the skills that people are going to need. 00:05:02.652 --> 00:05:06.732 structuring arguments, writing essays, solving problems, 00:05:06.732 --> 00:05:10.092 analyzing texts. 00:05:10.092 --> 00:05:12.612 Now, I would argue that critical thinking 00:05:12.606 --> 00:05:17.906 shouldn't be taught in isolation, primarily for the reason that you can't learn other 00:05:17.906 --> 00:05:23.766 subjects properly unless you learn them in a way that has critical thinking at its heart. 00:05:24.566 --> 00:05:28.866 So critical thinking as a separate discipline is really something of a sticking plaster, 00:05:29.346 --> 00:05:33.706 and it does have some effect, but it's ultimately trying to deal with the symptom instead of 00:05:33.706 --> 00:05:39.826 resolving the underlying cause. Moreover, I think there is some evidence to suggest that 00:05:39.826 --> 00:05:44.066 critical thinking can't be taught properly in isolation. 00:05:44.066 --> 00:05:47.346 If you look at the skills described in the Cambridge assessment definition, 00:05:47.340 --> 00:05:52.440 and taxonomy for example these skills are really at the heart of academic 00:05:52.440 --> 00:05:56.580 study itself to be interwoven with subject content not just something that 00:05:56.580 --> 00:06:01.320 you can sort of layer on top and the art the idea that you can transmit skills 00:06:01.320 --> 00:06:06.060 without knowledge is I would say a fundamental misunderstanding of the way 00:06:06.060 --> 00:06:11.160 that education works and there's also a couple of sort of practical implications 00:06:11.160 --> 00:06:14.600 and teaching critical thinking is a separate discipline creates the danger 00:06:14.600 --> 00:06:17.640 as shown in some of the feedback from teachers 00:06:17.640 --> 00:06:19.600 in Beth's recent paper, 00:06:19.600 --> 00:06:22.080 that students will see critical thinking 00:06:22.074 --> 00:06:27.974 thinking in an instrumental way or focus really on passing the exam and that the real benefits 00:06:27.974 --> 00:06:33.834 of using these skills across subjects and in every element of learning will be missed. 00:06:33.834 --> 00:06:37.834 There is also some evidence and Steve I'd like to see very much the evidence that you 00:06:37.834 --> 00:06:42.514 refer to but equally there's evidence on the other side both empirical and from educational 00:06:42.514 --> 00:06:46.194 psychologists to suggest that the problem with teaching any kind of thinking skills in 00:06:46.194 --> 00:06:51.374 isolation is the transfer from the abstract. 00:06:51.374 --> 00:06:55.654 Jet-based platforms, however, have been proven to work. 00:06:55.654 --> 00:06:56.814 In particular, 00:06:56.807 --> 00:07:00.847 draw your attention to Michael Shea and Philip Adie's work on cognitive 00:07:00.847 --> 00:07:04.887 acceleration. And higher level cognitive skills cross 00:07:04.887 --> 00:07:09.027 subject boundaries, and Shea and Adie's programmes lead to improve results 00:07:09.027 --> 00:07:12.847 not only in the subject through which the cognitive 00:07:12.847 --> 00:07:15.247 skills are taught, but also across subjects. 00:07:17.227 --> 00:07:21.087 So I think it's clear that the thread through subject knowledge 00:07:21.087 --> 00:07:24.907 and creative thinking has been eroded, and that the assessment driven approach 00:07:24.907 --> 00:07:31.547 an obsession with weighing the pig is inhibiting critical thinking and creativity. It shouldn't 00:07:31.541 --> 00:07:36.101 whether you're studying English, maths, science, language or humanity, critical 00:07:36.101 --> 00:07:40.601 thinking skills can and should be central to the way in which it is taught 00:07:40.601 --> 00:07:46.301 and assessed and the benefits will go across subjects. At Reform what we've 00:07:46.301 --> 00:07:51.541 proposed is a radical shake-up of exams. We want to see more intellectual rigor, 00:07:51.541 --> 00:07:56.681 we want to see less prescriptive questions. Trusting markers to actually 00:07:56.681 --> 00:08:00.361 mark would be an important step forward. 00:08:00.361 --> 00:08:03.221 Reversing changes like modularization, 00:08:03.221 --> 00:08:06.281 which encourage teaching to the test, and most important 00:08:06.275 --> 00:08:11.335 of all, giving teachers and students the freedom and incentive to learn to think. 00:08:12.215 --> 00:08:16.475 Our proposed mechanism for doing this, which I'd be very interested in your thoughts on, 00:08:16.815 --> 00:08:23.775 is to give university subject specialist academics a much greater role, effectively 00:08:23.775 --> 00:08:29.475 putting them in charge or giving them a quality assurance role over the exams at a Saturday 00:08:29.475 --> 00:08:34.375 level. I think that by doing this, we can reverse the decline that we've seen and put 00:08:34.375 --> 00:08:38.935 critical thinking back at the heart of teaching, learning and assessment. Thank you.