The Higher Education Policy Institute has kindly published an article I wrote on the interim plans for reform of the National Student Survey. 

The proposed changes are contained in the OfS’s Phase 1 Report of its NSS Review which was sparked by a somewhat untoward statement by the DfE last year that the NSS was responsible for “dumbing down standards“. No evidence for this claim was offered and it was exactly the opposite of… well, everything that they and predecessor governments had ever previously said about NSS’s role in enhancing the quality of higher education.

Indeed, the credibility afforded to the NSS previously meant that it was a key metric used in the TEF (the Teaching Excellence Framework, as it then was, now called ‘the Teaching Excellence and Student Outcomes Framework’).  Its weighing as part of TEF was downgraded, however, when student opposition to the exercise led to widespread boycotting of the survey.

The main reason the government has gone sour on the NSS though seems to me to be that it doesn’t endorse their political narrative about higher education – or, even if it does, the signal is too noisy, too nuancy. For example, NSS doesn’t say that the only good education is one that results in a job. It doesn’t say that our universities are all world-beating while at the same time managing also to say that they’re full of woke academics and snowflake students. And it fails woefully to confirm that traditional redbrick and Russell Group unis are better than jumped-up polys. 

Indeed, the university with the strongest record of performance in the NSS since its inception is – wait for it – the Open University. What should we make of that? There are multiple explanations for its NSS success, not least the fact that the survey is taken as students approach graduation and for OU students, that’s likely to have been a long, hard slog of many years, involving considerable commitment and sacrifice. Anyone who wasn’t going to give a good report will probably have fallen by the wayside by that point or at the very least will be convincing themselves that it was all worth it after all. Another explanation is that the OU does an amazing job for its students far exceeding their expectations and therefore yielding high satisfaction. 

What it doesn’t tell us is anything absolute. No wonder the government has lost interest in the NSS – it doesn’t tell them anything clearly or that’s politically helpful and even what it does tell them is not what they wanted to hear.

By chance, the DfE does happen to be right that the NSS needs reforming. It’s just it’s not for the reasons they imagine. As my HEPI article explains, the problems lie in (i) imagining that NSS can ever be about informing prospective students helpfully, (ii) the snapshot data dip process of a survey and (iii) the over-emphasis on satisfaction as a measure of quality when it is in fact a function of expectation compared to delivery. 

The reform needed is to shift to a longitudinal national survey of student engagement that tracks shifting patterns throughout a student’s time at university. Engagement has been shown to be an indicative precursor of positive learning outcomes. If you can show that a student has been effectively engaged throughout their studies, you’ve got a good indicator of effective education.

Satisfaction measures are poor proxies that will never tell you much and will always be too easily gamed or misinterpreted. They do not, however, dumb down anything that wasn’t dumb already. 

The post What’s really wrong with the NSS? appeared first on Johnny Rich.

What links oxbow lakes, metacognition and employability skills? We’ll get to that shortly. 

But first, if you want to know what works in creating social opportunity through education, you’d be hard pressed to find a better expert than Lee Elliot Major, former chief executive of The Sutton Trust and now Exeter University’s professor of social mobility.

Yesterday he gave a lecture at the Institute of Education (well, virtually) in which one slide pretty much summed up the toolkit produced by the Education Endowment Foundation and the content of his own book (with co-author Steve Higgins) What Works.  (Thanks to Lee for permission to use the slide below.)

I am delighted to see metacognition making an appearance as not only highly effective, but highly cost-effective too. Indeed, along with feedback (the two need to go hand in hand), these are the most cost-effective tools in the teachers’ box.

As anyone who has heard me talk about oxbow lakes knows, I have long been a metacognition fan.

I promise, I’ll get to the relevance of oxbow lakes in a moment, but first, what is ‘metacognition’? I’m sure there are more complex explanations, but I think of it as knowing what you’re learning. It is an awareness of the subject such that the pupil can learn deliberately, consciously, and with an understanding that they are learning, what they are learning and perhaps even why they are learning. 

So why oxbow lakes? The National Curriculum for Key Stage 2 Geography requires students to learn about river erosion and so, basically, by the age of 11, English kids are officially expected to have learnt about them.

Strangely however, we don’t require children to lean about many things of potentially more practical use – such as Facebook privacy settings, pensions or laundry labels.

I’m sure oxbow lakes are important to some people, but it’s not like they’re a critical piece of knowledge for the next generation (and those those who do need the knowledge could acquire it later), so why do we demand pupils learn about them?

Well, I love oxbow lakes. I don’t think this is useless knowledge at all. After all, they teach pupils about time travel.

From one data point in the landscape, you can deduce what that landscape looked like thousands of years ago or predict how it will look like in a thousand years time.

By understanding the processes at work in forming an oxbow lake, you can see problems before they happen and even develop solutions to prevent those problems.

This is what we’re really teaching when we teach about oxbow lakes: analytical skills.

Analytical skills are key skills – useful in every walk of life. Definitely more important than laundry labels.

The problem is, we don’t tell pupils that that’s what they’re learning. We tell them it’s Geography.

How much more effectively would pupils develop the analytical skills if we made the learning explicit and deliberate? Metacognition, innit?

Embedding metacognition can be as simple as saying upfront that we’re about to practice some analytical skills and, to do it, we’re going to use the example of oxbow lakes. Sadly, our education system is not designed to encourage that.

We also need to build in reflection on – and feedback about – those skills after they’ve been exemplified and, obviously, we need to reapply them in different contexts in order to develop them further ensuring they are transferable.

If each time we develop those skills, we do so consciously – metacognitively – the connections will be made in the pupils’ minds.

The oxbow lake example is my perennial response to pupils who ask “Why am I learning this? I’m never going to need to know this?”

The answer is always to think more clearly about what we really learn when we learn.

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A funny thing happened recently. Sam Gyimah, the UK Universities minister tweeted a picture of himself on the train “adding the finishing touches” to a speech he was giving to university leaders later that day. A Twitter user joked that he might want help: “Can I pay someone to write my essay for me?”

Mr Gyimah’s timeline was immediately flooded with responses – mostly from Twitter bots – offering to help with his assignment in return for a fee, guaranteeing a top grade and that the ‘essay’ would be free from plagiarism.  

The original tweet was a witty reference to research published earlier in the week which found that as many as one in seven students worldwide has bought an essay or paid someone to do their assignments for them – ‘contract cheating’ as it’s called. 

This figure has been increasing since the 1970s and the internet has made the process simpler, more anonymous and easier to promote.

‘Essay mills’ – the shady organisations offering contract cheating services – have gone high tech to promote themselves, vying to answer the desperate calls for help by students on social media.

It’s easy to pin the blame on the students who cheat. Their schools and universities certainly will blame them when they’re caught, and the academics I’ve spoken to tell me it’s pretty insulting to think that most cheating isn’t easy to spot. Most universities have a zero-tolerance approach to cheating – and so they should.

But, although we should want to stop the use of essay mills – as with drug addicts craving a fix – we need to recognise that students are the victims, not the crooks. Most contract cheating arises out of desperation: an unmeetable deadline, a sense of inadequacy, failure to understand their subject, competing pressures… not least the huge pressure to succeed in the face of rising student debts. Such anxiety should be met with sympathy and better pastoral and academic care. Desperation should not be ignored until the only course left is punishment.

Like drug pushers, loan sharks and penis enlargement ‘cures’, the essay mills prey on this desperation and it is they, not students, who should be recognised as the criminals profiteering from fraud. 

Yet, they are not. Shockingly, essay mills are not illegal in the UK. Sure, they’re on shaky ground if they incite their customers to pretend the work is their own, but most try to avoid that by calling them ‘sample essays’ or ‘study aids’. Any idiot can see through this lie, because the mills also go to great lengths to assure customers that essays will be unique and will get through software like Turnitin that spots plagiarism. Many even offer the option of an essay that won’t be too good. Why offer such guarantees unless they know students intend to submit the work as their own? 

It’s also worth asking what such guarantees are worth. Even if the essay mill tries to offer a good service, they can’t be sure what they’re selling. Most don’t care though. After all, if the product isn’t what you were told, what are you going to do about it? You can’t sue. You can’t even tweet about it. Worse still, you open yourself to blackmail by the essay mill. 

Even if at first the cheating seems to go unspotted, it devalues the student’s qualification because they won’t genuinely have acquired the knowledge and skills that their degree certificates are supposed to represent. That in turn will damage the reputation of all students’ qualifications. For the sake of higher education, for academic integrity and for all students, this must change. 

That’s why a campaign is quickly gaining support to bring about that change. An official petition to ban essay mills already has thousands of signatures and many prominent supporters. It only needs a few thousand more before the Government is required to respond. 

In an international, internet age, no legal ban can completely scour the scourge of essay mills, but it can turn them from opportunists into outlaws. If the practice and promotion of essay mills were illegal, it would push search engines and social media companies to forbid their advertising and delete their accounts. It would allow the seizure of their profits and the prosecution of the individuals concerned. Most of all, it would send a message to students neither to buy essays from the mills nor to write for them, however desperate they find themselves.

A ban will only be successful if universities and academics also bear their responsibility to offer students a better alternative. In the face of desperation a student should feel they can turn to their tutor or student welfare team for support – in terms of tuition, time or even finance – rather than being driven to cheat or break the law. 

Any law on essay mills would have to be carefully worded, but that’s true of any new legislation and in an increasing number of other countries – Ireland, Australia, the US and New Zealand – governments are finding both the guts and the right words to stop this travesty. The UK should follow suit.

A footnote: in the end, Sam Gyimah’s speech made two references to essay mills. Who knows? Maybe, by trying to market their dodgy trade, those bots played a part in ensuring the Government starts to recognise this growing problem. Signing the petition now will help them do something about it. 

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