Week Nine - Professional

St Patrick's Day Celebrations!

Look at both girls' faces! Says it all!

This week I had a group presentation on Tuesday in my assessment class. We have been working up to this presentation for quite a while now, with many smaller sub-tasks to complete before actually presenting to the class. We had been asked to create an assessment tool in our groups which would be suitable for educational purposes, and my group had decided an end of topic test on electricity would be suitable for both the Hong Kong Curriculum and also the Northern Ireland Curriculum. It was important to ensure that our test was reliable, valid and accurate, and that it could be used to inform the teacher of where individual children were in their learning and what needed to be done to improve the teaching of this topic. It was interesting to see how the Hong Kong Curriculum is much more specific than the Northern Ireland Curriculum, stating detailed and precise areas for learning such as ‘reading and calculating voltage, electrical conductors and insulators, and series and parallel circuits.’  However, our own curriculum places much more emphasis on children developing thinking skills and personal capabilities through the more general topic of ‘The World Around Us.’

The assignment made me appreciate the importance of using many different types of questions within an assessment tool as it is essential to increase its accuracy and reliability. Children are given different question types such as multiple choice, binary response, cloze procedure and extended supply response (open ended questions). In using these different types of questions the teacher is constantly considering Biggs’ SOLO Taxonomy, which looks for children to progress from surface level thinking through uni-structural and multi-structural questions, to deeper thinking through relational and extended abstract questions. The children are given the opportunity to show they fully understand the topic by using higher order thinking skills to answer some of the more advanced questions on the test. It was fascinating to see how the Northern Ireland and Hong Kong Curriculums differed in their levels of specificity; however they complimented each other well in making this assessment tool for this assignment. Through this group presentation and from looking more closely at the way the Hong Kong Curriculum is structured, I have recognised how valuable the Northern Ireland Curriculum is in promoting higher order thinking skills and developing children who can problem solve, predict outcomes, justify their reasons and think independently. I feel it is extremely beneficial for teachers to gain an insight into primary curriculums from around the world as it not only highlights improvements which can be made in our own, but also the strengths our own curriculum has.

The amazing dolpin show

On Monday we enjoyed a day out at Ocean Park which is a theme park situated near Aberdeen in the south of Hong Kong Island. It is the seventh most popular theme park in the world and I certainly enjoyed my day in the 27 degree sun! The park also has an unbelievable aquarium and panda habitat which is home to rare red pandas and giant pandas. Luckily we arrived at the panda habitat during feeding time so we got a great view of the amazing animals! The highlight of the day was the “Sea Dreams” dolphin show which tells the story of how animals and humans can live together in harmony.

The Giant Panda 'Jia Jia'

The other Panda 'An An'