I wrote this in the first post on this blog… it gives an idea of what my PhD thesis will (or might) be about…
So… after several false starts I have just this week made a presentation of my PhD proposal, and am now truly on the road. I’ll use this space to explore ideas….
TITLE
Assessment of ICT at 16: its validity and relationship to students’ formal and informal learning.
AIMS
1. To critically analyse the ways in which students aged 16 construct their learning of ICT capability in formal and informal contexts.
2. To explore the relationship between formal and informal learning within the field of ICT.
3. To explore the methodologies of assessment of ICT capability at 16 and how this affects student perceptions of their capability.
4. To develop a theoretical base to evaluate the construct validity of assessment of ICT at 16.
ICT Assessment - valid, or what? 
This is a subject dear to my heart, although I teach at a middle school, so may not be of any help. I teach ICT to all pupils in the school, which gives me a great overview, and have just run a pearson correlation coefficient on some of my marks which comes up between 0.1 and 0.3 mostly. So I am wondering a)why am I doing any marking, and how can I tell which is teh ‘correct’ assessment tool to base any others on? This is further compounded by the fact that ICT is so diverse in nature, sometimes it’s about graphices, other aspects require strong maths understanding (spreadsheets, formula and graphs, for example), others a logical understanding, for example LOGO. This is all made more interesting by thae fact that ICT scores seem to be about one and a half levels below other subjects, and the ‘on screen tests’ mark one level lower. I don’t know any answers, but I would be interested to find out more. Let me konw if this can be of any use? Siobhan Allen
Thanks Siobhan, that is interesting – especially the lack of correlation. Are you calculating the correlation between one set of yoru marks and another?
I’m also interested in your observations of lack of parity between ICT marks and other subjects.