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How have standards changed in science at GCSE and A level over the last two decades?

How have standards changed in science at GCSE and A level over the last two decades?. Robert Coe. From the Daily Mail 27.11.08, based on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s report ‘The Five-Decade Challenge’. Achievement at GCSE. GCSE grade. Yellis test score. Comparing against Yellis test.

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How have standards changed in science at GCSE and A level over the last two decades?

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  1. How have standards changed in science at GCSE and A level over the last two decades? Robert Coe

  2. From the Daily Mail 27.11.08, based on the Royal Society of Chemistry’s report ‘The Five-Decade Challenge’

  3. Achievement at GCSE

  4. GCSE grade Yellis test score Comparing against Yellis test Year 2 Year 1 • Plot grade against Yellis test score • What is the average grade achieved by students of the same ability in different years? • Yellis test is the same every year • Correlations typically 0.6 – 0.7

  5. Overall GCSE grade, controlling for ability

  6. Science GCSE subjects: average ability

  7. Science GCSE subjects: high ability

  8. A-level grade, controlling for ability

  9. Sciences among the hardest A levels

  10. How ‘difficult’ is science GCSE/A-level? • What does the syllabus require? • How challenging are the questions/tasks? • How does it feel to study it? • What does the award of a particular grade correspond to – in terms of: • Some construct of ‘science learning’? • Specific competences? • Rank order of performance? • General ability?

  11. Laws of Declining Standards • Students seldom learn what they are not taught • Many claims of decline in standards amount to observations that curriculum emphasis on a particular skill has declined • Standards can decline and increase simultaneously • Different, but not explicitly clarified, definitions of standards make this possible

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