A Critical Examination of the Beliefs about Learning a Foreign Language at Primary School



3.7.6 Assessment Issues

A number of problems surrounding the assessment of learning outcomes during
the Pilot Scheme have already been discussed in Chapter One. An important
lesson from experiences past and present would seem to be that without clear
aims and objectives and methodologies to suit, any valid evaluation of a project
will be problematic and any potential benefits of an early start will be difficult to
establish. A crucial consideration in assessing and evaluating learning
outcomes therefore would seem to be the question of the aims of a project.
A wide range of aims in the Pilot Scheme, to identify 'on what conditions it
would be feasible to contemplate the general introduction of a modern language
into the primary school curriculum' (Schools Council, 1966: 3), to ascertain
'whether or not an earlier start provided identifiable advantages over starting at
11' (Schools Council, 1966: 5) and to find out 'whether it was educationally
desirable to teach a modern foreign language to pupils of a wider range of age
and ability' (Burstall et al., 1974:11) must be held partially responsible for the
'failure' of the Pilot Scheme. The identification Offavourable conditions cannot
be equated with what is educationally desirable and what might be
educationally desirable does often take place under less than favourable
conditions.

The evaluation of the S∞ttish National Pilot focused on two case studies or
project clusters only, and while these were not considered а-typical they
nevertheless represented only a small sample of the large number of schools
involved on a national scale. Consequently, the number of pupils and teachers

190



More intriguing information

1. The name is absent
2. The name is absent
3. The name is absent
4. Why unwinding preferences is not the same as liberalisation: the case of sugar
5. Housing Market in Malaga: An Application of the Hedonic Methodology
6. Labour Market Institutions and the Personal Distribution of Income in the OECD
7. Philosophical Perspectives on Trustworthiness and Open-mindedness as Professional Virtues for the Practice of Nursing: Implications for he Moral Education of Nurses
8. Pupils’ attitudes towards art teaching in primary school: an evaluation tool
9. The Integration Order of Vector Autoregressive Processes
10. The name is absent
11. Expectation Formation and Endogenous Fluctuations in Aggregate Demand
12. Examining Variations of Prominent Features in Genre Classification
13. CONSIDERATIONS CONCERNING THE ROLE OF ACCOUNTING AS INFORMATIONAL SYSTEM AND ASSISTANCE OF DECISION
14. Standards behaviours face to innovation of the entrepreneurships of Beira Interior
15. Robust Econometrics
16. MANAGEMENT PRACTICES ON VIRGINIA DAIRY FARMS
17. Life is an Adventure! An agent-based reconciliation of narrative and scientific worldviews
18. The name is absent
19. The name is absent
20. The name is absent