Justine Ferrari | January 14, 2009

NATIONAL Curriculum Board head Barry McGaw will spearhead an international project to devise a new method for assessing school students, measuring the skills they possess rather than their ability to memorise facts.

The multi-million-dollar project was launched in London yesterday by three of the world’s leading technology companies — Cisco, Intel and Microsoft. They said the aim was to resolve the gap between what was taught in schools and the skills required in the workplace. 

The project aims to develop a computer-based assessment system that could be adopted around the world and would test students’ knowledge in cross-disciplinary problems, spelling the end of closed-book exams testing students’ memory. 

In a policy paper released at the Learning and Technology World Forum in London, the companies argue that reforming student assessment is the key to transforming education to bring it into the 21st century. 

“Businesses, entire economies and society generally have made dramatic changes over the past decades, much of it enabled by the widespread use of ICT (information and communications technology),” the paper says. 

“Yet most educational systems operate much as they did at the beginning of the 20th century.