The Australian Government Primary Principals Association has been meeting this week, and reportedly has a brilliant new idea (M,P):
Scrap ‘flawed’ NAPLAN writing test for AI and wellbeing assessments, principals urge
And, from another report:
AGPPA President Pat Murphy said the association is calling for a need to review the writing in order to make it relevant for today’s learners. “The review should consider the need for higher-order skills students need in an increasingly AI-enabled world,” Murphy told The Educator. “In practice, this would involve moving towards a more balanced assessment model.”
Yep, more balanced between absurdity and straight-out stupidity. But perhaps this new stupidity is no surprise, coming from the clowns whose glossy strategic plan can fail to once mention “reading” or “writing” or “literacy” or “mathematics” or “arithmetic” or “numeracy”.
And then people wonder why primary schools are screwed.
Oh dear – absurdly wrong on so MANY fronts. Sensible AI thinkers emphasise the need for arts degrees and the ability to use words, as well as the basic grounding in any subject to be able to manage AI – not for specific AI skills, which after all is changing so rapidly (you can just see those tests being like CAS – 25 years out of date!).
And primary school principals have clearly not learned the lesson that the introduction of the calculator did not mean that times tables etc could be abolished. All they would have to do would be to ask a high school maths teacher, which is after all what they are supposed to be preparing for!
And if they find a student’s wellbeing isn’t great, what are they actually going to do about it? Will they provide a psychologist to help address it or just push the responsibility onto the teacher?