[JonnyBGood]

Originally Posted by Tomkat

I completely agree. As surprising as some of you may find, I don't like the way that kids are assessed almost entirely quantitatively. I have pupils who are ace with computers, and really know their stuff. They should automatically be given A* or whatever, because their ICT knowledge is pretty advanced. Without all the extra crap of "plan your work", "annotate your work", "evaluate your work", "ensure you complete x, y and z to get high marks" they'd be there. The problem lies in trying to assess everyone equally, and the only realistic way of doing this is through outcomes.

We're told to teach the skills and knowledge (in terms of objectives), yet at the end of the day we're (as teachers AND pupils) judged on the outcomes - what the kids produce. So of course we'll push for the outcome, skipping the "how/why" phase usually. Which is terrible, but it's how our National Curriculum is set up

Someone linked me to this the other day. Although it's aimed at a different topic it's worth reading in terms of the relevance of some the remarks made.