We are pleased to announce that we are renewing our partnership with Oak National Academy in England to provide an updated high-quality Computing curriculum and lesson materials for Key Stages 1 to 4.
New curriculum and materials for the classroom
In 2021 we partnered with Oak National Academy to offer content for schools in England that supported young people to learn Computing at home while schools were closed as a result of the coronavirus pandemic.
In our renewed partnership, we will create new and updated materials for primary and secondary teachers to use in the classroom. These classroom units will be available for free on the Oak platform and will include everything a teacher needs to deliver engaging lessons, including slide decks, worksheets, quizzes, and accompanying videos for over 550 lessons. The units will cover both the general national Computing curriculum and the Computer Science GCSE, supporting teachers to provide a high-quality Computing offering to all students aged 5 to 16.
These new resources will update the very successful Computing Curriculum and will be rigorously tested by a Computing subject expert group.
“I am delighted that we are continuing our partnership with Oak National Academy to support all teachers in England with world-leading resources for teaching Computing and Computer Science. This means that all teachers in England will have access to free, rigorous and tested classroom resources that they can adapt to suit their context and students.” – Philip Colligan, CEO
All our materials on the Oak platform will be free and openly available, and can be accessed by educators worldwide.
Research-informed, time-saving, and adaptable resources
The materials will bring teachers the added benefit of saving valuable time, and schools can choose to adapt and use the resources in the way that works best for their students
Supporting schools in England and worldwide
We have already started work and will begin releasing units of lessons in autumn 2024. All units across Key Stages 1 to 4 will be available by autumn 2025.
We’re excited to continue our partnership with Oak National Academy to provide support to teachers and students in England.
In this blog post we explore good practices around creating online computing questions, specifically multiple choice questions (MCQs). Multiple choice questions are a popular way to help teachers and learners work out the next steps in learning, and to assess learning in examinations. As a case study, we look at some data related to learner responses to computing questions on the Oak National Academy platform.
The case study illustrates the many things MCQ authors have to think about while designing questions, and that there is much more research needed to understand how to get an MCQ “just right”.
Uses of multiple choice questions
Online auto-marked MCQs are now being integrated into classroom activities, set as homework, and used in self-led learning at home. Software products involving MCQs, such as Kahoot and Socratic, are easy to use for many, and have become popular in some learning contexts. MCQ may have become more prevalent due to increased online teaching and the availability of whole curricula through platforms such as the Oak National Academy.
Think about the thinking processes the learner will use when answering the question, and make sure the processes are productive for their learning
Don’t make the question super easy or too difficult, but make it challenging — the difficulty needs to be “just right”
Keep the phrasing of the question simple
Ensure that all answers are plausible; providing three or four answers is usually a good idea
Be aware that if learners pick the wrong answer, this can reinforce the wrong thinking
Provide corrective feedback to learners who pick the wrong answer
What I find particularly interesting about Andrew’s advice is the need to make the difficulty of the MCQ “just right” for learners. But what does “just right” look like in practice? More research is needed to work this out.
The anatomy of a multiple choice question
When talking about MCQs, there are technical terms to describe question features, e.g.:
Incorrect answers are called distractors (or lures)
A distractor is defined as plausible if it’s an answer a layperson would see as a reasonable answer
Plausible distractors are called working distractors
Over this period of four months, learners on the platform made more than 29,000 question attempts on the thirty-five questions across the nine lessons that make up this data representation unit. Here is a breakdown of the questions by topic area:
As shown in the table, more questions relate to binary arithmetic than to any other topic area. This was a specific design decision, as it is well-known that learners need lots of practice of the processes involved in answering binary arithmetic questions.
Let’s look at an example question from the binary arithmetic topic area, with one correct answer and two distractors. The learning objective being addressed with this question is ‘Perform addition in binary on two binary numbers’.
As shown in the table below, in four months, 1170 attempts were made to answer the example question. 65% of the attempts were correct responses, and 35% were not, with 21% of responses being distractor b, and 14% distractor c. These distractors appear to be working distractors, as they were chosen by more than 5% of learners, which has been suggested as a rule-of-thumb threshold that distractors have to clear to be classed as working.
However, because of the lack of research into MCQs, we cannot say for certain that this question is “just right” — it may be too hard. We need to do further research to find this out.
Creating multiple choice questions is not easy
The process of creating good MCQs is not an easy task, because question authors need to think about many things, including:
What learning objectives are to be addressed
What plausible distractors can be used
What level of difficulty is right for learners
What type of thinking the questions are encouraging, and how this is useful for learners
In order for MCQs to be useful for learners and teachers, much more research is needed in this area to show how to reliably produce MCQs that are “just right” and encourage productive thinking processes. We are very much looking forward to looking at this topic in our research work.
To find out more about the computing education research we are doing, you can browse our website, take part in our monthly seminars, and read our publications.
Working with Oak National Academy, we’ve turned the materials from our Teach Computing Curriculum into more than 300 free, curriculum-mapped video lessons for remote learning.
A comprehensive set of free classroom materials
One of our biggest projects for teachers that we’ve worked on over the past two years is the Teach Computing Curriculum: a comprehensive set of free computing classroom materials for key stages 1 to 4 (learners aged 5 to 16). The materials comprise lesson plans, homework, progression mapping, and assessment materials. We’ve created these as part of the National Centre for Computing Education, but they are freely available for educators all over the world to download and use.
More than 300 free, curriculum-mapped video lessons
In the second half of 2020, in response to school closures, our team of experienced teachers produced over 100 hours of video to transform Teach Computing Curriculum materials into video lessons for learning at home. They are freely available for parents, educators, and learners to continue learning computing at home, wherever you are in the world.
You’ll find our videos for more than 300 hour-long lessons on the Oak National Academy website. The progression of the lessons is mapped out clearly, and the videos cover England’s computing national curriculum. There are video lessons for:
Years 5 and 6 at key stage 2 (ages 7 to 11)
Years 7, 8, and 9 at key stage 3 (ages 11 to 14)
Examined (GCSE) as well as non-examined (Digital Literacy) at key stage 4 (ages 14 to 16)
To access the full set of classroom materials for teaching, visit the National Centre for Computing Education website.
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