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Session Submission Summary

The first year at school

Tue, April 16, 5:00 to 6:30pm, Hyatt Regency, Floor: Bay (Level 1), Bayview A

Group Submission Type: Refereed Round-Table Session

Proposal

Aim of the symposium
In keeping with the aims of the conference, we do not see education’s prime purpose as being for economic growth although it is necessary for progress. We see education as a good in itself and as providing the basis of fulfilling lives as individuals acquire the key skills of reading and basic mathematics opening up life-changing possibilities for greater understanding, life time fulfilment and the ability to become more meaningfully involved in society and the democratic process. We should aim for sustainable development.
The symposium builds on the work on an international study of children’s first year of school (iPIPS) and brings together four separate projects within the overall study, which are important in themselves, but together they make a major contribution of our understating of this under-researched area.
The iPIPS project
The iPIPS (International Performance Indicators in Primary Schools) project ( www.ipips.org) began in 2013. It is an international monitoring system, designed to establish what children know and can do when they start school, and the progress that they make in their first year of formal education. We know that children’s early development and progress during their first year of school are crucial for later success in life and yet effective monitoring systems for this phase of education tend to be less well developed and used compared with later phases.
The aim of iPIPS is to improve the education of children starting school across the world through the use of high quality data. Policy-level reports and journal articles have been published for England, Scotland, Russia South Africa, with others expected shortly for Brazil and Lesotho. The reports for England and Scotland include detailed analysis of data from Australia and New Zealand. In these countries, individual child reports are provided to teachers for formative use, and aggregated information shared with district officers. The evidence shows that iPIPS has impacted on policy and teaching practice across these countries by providing policy and teacher-relevant information helping design curricula, inform pre-school policy and focus scarce resources.

The assessment that is used within the monitoring system was created by Peter Tymms and developed with Christine Merrell. This Baseline Assessment has a 25-year pedigree of excellence in terms of its psychometric properties, child-friendliness and educational value. It has, so far, been used to assess more than 3 million children. iPIPS employs an innovative system that uses App technology to administer interactive and adaptive assessments; paper and pencil options are available. It is administered to one child at a time. Accurate benchmarks of attainment for children starting school on an international platform are generated with a facility to provide feedback to teachers. There are five components in the assessment:: cognitive development; personal and social development; physical development; behaviour; and contextual information. It has been adapted for use in many different countries and 13 different languages by local academics.
Where others have struggled to create workable assessments with strong psychometric properties for this age-range, iPIPS has been proven to operate in such diverse environments as private schools in England, the Favelas of Rio de Janeiro and state schools remote schools in Russia. Our success and expertise in meeting the challenges of assessing young children led to our being asked to write a chapter for UNESCO explaining how create assessments for young children.
The four papers draw on different traditions. The first general paper on the First Year at School draws on the educational effectiveness literature and theoreticians such as Jaap Scheerns. It is founded on published papers written over the past 25 years, building up a picture of our existing knowledge and pointing to lacunae, which should be the subject of further work. The second paper focuese on aspects of behaviour that are important for later outcomes (inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity), and which has its roots in the psychological and psychiatric literature. The third paper, which comes from Russia is based historically on the writings of Vygotsky and more recently on school effectiveness research. The fourth paper takes a systemic view of a whole city and the progress of children with it, specifically the association between children’s development and their home background in Rio de Janeiro; a city with significant challenges associated with poverty.

All the papers are original. They relate to studies of the first year are school in a variety of different international contexts. We learn about the key nature of the first year at school, about the importance of inattention and hyperactivity/impulsivity as psychological constructs, crucial to children’s success at school and their relevance at different ages, the mistaken assumption that rural school as less valuable than urban schools, at least in rural Russia and links between socio-economic status and children’s progress in Rio de Janeiro with its areas of significant poverty. The papers showcase the potential of iPIPS to increase our understanding of the importance and impact of the first year of school on children’s development from an academic perspective as well as its potential to provide actionable information to teachers and policy-makers.

Sub Unit

Chair

Individual Presentations

Discussant