More and more kids are leaving school with a qualification. In 2006 twenty-five percent left school without a qualification, in 2007 it was eighteen percent and last year 16%.
That’s a nine percent improvement over three years. If a similar improvement occured over the next three years by the end of 2012, the year National Standards are meant to be implemented, just 7% of students will be leaving school without a qualification. Still 7% too many, but in theory by the end of 2015 one-hundred percent of kids may leave school with a qualification.
What will be the impact of National Standards? It will be hard to tell. If the statistics continue to improve after National Standards are implemented, will it be because of the Standards or inspite of them? What value will the Standards add? It will be hard to tell.
Who cares, as long as achievement improves, I say. But how much has been spent on these National Standards that may well be unnecessary?
Personally I don’t think National Standards will do much harm, but then again I don’t think they’ll do much good either. They’re just another thing that will exist in education.
What will happen if achievement doesn’t improve, or even gets worse, once National Standards are introduced? Will Anne Tolley have the courage to dispense with them?
What is interesting is Anne Tolley on radio this morning trying to downplay the success of NCEA.
I guess her rationale is to blow out the NCEA candle, so that the National Standard’s candle burns brighter.
Excellent analysis.
In a way, National with their narrow focus on measurement is encouraging quite an interesting debate. They do seem to be struggling to back their beliefs with any actual data however.
The reason they cant provide data to support them is because the research shows it doesnt work!
Why don’t we just give everyone NCEA Kelvin then you can declare it the greatest thing to come out of the NZ education system?
Kelvin, I agree with you but would like to point out that you diminish the actual success of our teachers with faulty maths.
A reduction of 25% to 16%, although a reduction of 9 percentage points, is actually a 36% improvement from the base year (2006). By all means get Trev to check my calculation.
I listened to the interview on morning report with Anne Tolley and to say she was mendacious is maybe being kind.
Now why don’t you call John Tamihere on Radio Live and give him these stats. He is an NCEA basher writ large. He claims Cambridge and IB are superior yet recent stats show NCEA students are as successful at Uni as those students, and NCEA students are in that system by default while Cambridge and IB students are usually specially selected as the “brightest” kids.
Cactus Kate: It is, with room for improvement. Kids are now staying in the system longer than they used to, due to the lack of alternatives like apprenticeships, yet only 16% now leave without a qualification. I hate to think how many kids left without School C when I was a kid (don’t ask). Kids just turned 15 and left.
And, (my teacher wife has just said) these days those sometimes very restless kids can’t even been whacked to keep in line!
Luc, Interesting to note Prof Liz McKinley from Starpath (Auck Uni Research Project) said something to me about 2-3 years ago along the lines of, success at NCEA is a greater indicator of success at Uni than Cambridge Exams. They weren’t quite sure why at that stage, but would be interesting to follow up. I’ve had a Starpath report sitting on my desk for a few weeks now. I guess I should read it, I may find the answer.
Cactus Kate – a dopey post. As a principal I was prick for setting high achievement standards and demanding teachers get kids over the line. It didn’t work, and I learned from it. Anne Tolley is about 7 years behind me in terms of learning from mistakes. Setting a target is the easy part. Creating the conditions where excellent teachers can weave their magic is the hard part, but the most effective i raising achievement.
Kelvin, firstly, NCEA can never work until parents think that it works. I did level 3 in 06, and I think it may have changed since then, but until parents and their kids believe that internal assessments are fair and consistent between different departments and schools, until parents can easily tell how well their kid did in their exams and think that NCEA challenges all kids, NCEA will never work, and by extension, be popular. Unit Standards/Achievement Standards need to sorted out and the whole thing simplified.
Secondly, there is no point in claiming NCEA is workung because more kids are getting qualifications, if that was the point wouldn’t it have been cheaper to make a 4th form certificate or something. What matters is not what qualifications/certificates you have but what you know and can do. From my experience, having NCEA Level 1 meant jack s@#t in the real world.
Kelvin
Your header states “NCEA is working” and you rationalise this solely with statistics that more students are “leaving school” with a qualification. QED – more qualifications = that it is working. Is this your sole basis for NCEA actually working? Seems to be. If so my original comment you termed “dopey” was a natural extention of your “dopey” logic that everyone will one day leave school with NCEA by 2015.
In the same breath you boast that you were “a prick” for setting high achievement and demanding teachers get kids over the line but “It didn’t work”?
Typical of any teacher you equate the number of heads with a certificate with success of a system without worrying much as to what the qualification can lead to beyond the whole education system when your job is over. Therefore you think that giving more students qualifications before they leave school without a necessary high or specific achievement level is the answer to the problem.
With due respect to what you achieved as a Principal of Kaitaia Intermediate School, no one seems to have called you out yet that you appear to be in the realms of rhetoric when it comes to secondary education where NCEA is actually measured and children are at the greatest risk of dropping out. That is, you talk a good game without that game being tested outside a relatively tiny Intermediate school that you stayed at safely for years as Principal without testing your true ability and then rolled at age 41 into Parliament on the List. In any profession we would deem you untried.
Rather like a Palmerston North accountant doing GST returns and farm accounting with a net profit of $100k from a turnover of $400k claiming he’s better than an accountant in London who does complex M&A work worth millions of pounds because he grew his practice from a loss making exercise to a profitable one quicker than the London accountant.
National is proposing that instead of worrying about everyone leaving school with a piece of paper that appears in terms of the Nation’s productivity statistics, not be doing a hell of a lot, that the focus is now more on higher achievement levels. Well I hope that it is, you never know with the Torys.
Numbers in tertiary institutions continue to increase (which you would happily view as roaring “success”) yet New Zealand’s productivity has declined. That is, NZ’s workforce has increased in qualification and skill but it doesn’t appear to be doing a hell of a lot for the country. That’s a fail. Something is wrong.
Your challenge currently appears to be the same as every school leaver and to actually extend yourself from: the safety of Kaitaia Intermediate, your ability to talk a good game when it comes to education, your trained and charming Maori oratory skills, and to look at what would produce the best results in terms of application of that education which should be , GDP growth and productivity in the labour force leading to higher wages and living standards for New Zealanders.
I would be very surprised 60% of schoolteachers were able to pass the basic their/they’re/there test. My son’s teacher probably wouldn’t, if the school report is anything to go by. Oh and Kelvin NCEA is only “working” if people get ahead as a result of qualifications. So what can you get with NCEA level 1,(apart from a piece of paper that says you have NCEA level 1)? Most Maori dont get NCEA level 2, some get NCEA level 1, the rest drop out and you say it is working? Its a pity the kids with low level NCEAs arent working.
My concern is that more people are “achieving” in NCEA, not because the system is working, but because it’s dumbing down the standard required. In my line of work, we see quite a high percentage of kids coming from school who are completely unprepared for the real world, where just turning up and participating isn’t enough. They’re shocked to find that endless do-overs until achievement aren’t the norm.
Cactus Kate
Are you saying that:
• Statistics showing that more kids leaving school with an NCEA qualification is a bad thing?
• It is the responsibility of teachers to raise the country’s GDP growth and productivity in the labour force leading to higher wages and living standards for New Zealanders?
• That I shouldn’t have set high standards at Kaitaia Intermediate School?
• Only Principals of large successful schools should have an opinion on education?
• I’m a small town Maori nobody who should know his place?
Kate, your first post WAS dopey. And snide.
Your second post continues the condescendingly vile bent you appear to be on while posting – “charming Maori oratory skills”? That’s the sort of sniggering behind the hands, racist nastiness we could do without.
Kelvin has actually made a difference in a somewhat difficult isolated region to childrens learning and achievement, which has to be at least as important as torys pontificating on blogsites.
Kelvin,
re: your points on Kate’s points
1. Yes,if it is essentially meaningless then it is pointless. Kate’s point remains, why not give it to everyone and stand and give ourselves a resounding round of applause.
2. Yes, you have to start somewhere why not start with lazy, bumsore, incompetent teachers. For more than half of the year our schools lie idle. In Sth Korea school buildings are utilised for more than 18 hours per day. ie far more productive.
3. We only have your word for the setting standards at Kaitaia Intermediate. Until parents believe in the system or their children then any expectations will fail to be met. Given the demographic of Kaitaia a high standard there probably is something a teacher and/or student would step over easily at almost any other place in new Zealand
4. Good point you raise there. But I actually disagree, principals, or Headmasters as they used to be called shouldn’t be asked for an opinion on anything other than about their school. They are simply unqualified to comment on any else. Having been to school, then to university, then to teachers college, they then opted to go back to school. Essentially anyone who is a teacher and has been for any length of time has never, ever left the school system and their only interaction with the outside world is the paying of bills or shopping. None have even learned what the cost of capital is, how capital is created, what actually makes a good employee or a bad one. I maintain that unless you have paid provisional tax, terminal tax, fringe benefits tax and made the staff’s wages from your own pocket then you should STFU about anything outside your own little world of “academia”.
5. Well done, you made a point we can all agree on.
What is it with teachers that they spend their entire life always wanting to tell other people what to do.
No wonder teachers want to join the Labour party and become MP’s. They can appear smart, the can earn more as an MP (including the troughing) than any teacher can possibly make, and they still get to tell people what to think and do.
Whaleoil, Nice rant.
Kelvin,
Thank you. Typical response from a teacher confronted with a student smarter than them.
Kelvin,
What planet are you on?
This week it’s been reported that 1 in 5 leave school without even attaining the lowest NCEA grade.
So in your view a 20% failure rate means it’s working successfully?
Unbelieveable.
If any business or service was running with a 20% failure rate they wouldn’t last long, as this is perceived as unsuccessful
Re: Kate’s point, i’m reminded of this article from last month:
SOME OF NCEA’s most popular maths tests are so easy that students still at intermediate school would pass them, teachers say, while some of the literacy tests require “minimal reading and writing”.
The secondary school teachers’ union is so concerned about the “very low level” of these tests – called standards in NCEA – that it has produced a paper demanding the government raise the bar…
…It highlights a set of core literacy and numeracy standards that teachers believe are far too easy and “not likely to match the community’s expectation”.
Three particular maths standards, passed by more than 73,000 Year 11 students last year, are considered so easy that students three years younger would be expected to pass.
http://www.stuff.co.nz/sunday-star-times/news/616289
Oddly at the end of the article is “It was reported last week that teachers believe NCEA is too hard,”
Sh1t – the NCEA rationale comes out – it is about awarding qualifications rather than rewarding achievement. Trumpeting that as ’success’ just confounds me, and has raised my ire much more than anything else in political debate recently. Are you really that dense, Kelvin, to believe that awarding qualifications that have little meaningful merit is a measure of the success of our educational system? Sh1t sh1t sh1t; I knew that the last term of Labour Govt had us in bad hands, but I didn’t realise that it was that endemic.
It is little wonder that i am having to teach my first year university students how to comprehend and write basic written English, despite their NCEA ‘qualifications’ (and, I should add, at the expense of the content that I should actually be teaching them). If National Standards spell an end to this type of thinking (and I’m not sure it will), then I am all for it. The devil is, of course, in the detail however.
W/O – Lots of schools are in use long hours – for community ed and night classes. But now cut by your government.
WhaleOil,
I think that perhaps you should stop being a prick about the most under-valued yet by far most valuable members of our workforce.
Sorry to post twice but I am just so sickened by the attitude. The most inspirational and influential people in my life so far have been my teachers, and if you weren’t so ignorant you would probably be able to acknowledge the same.
I hate our country’s attitude which seems to want to change a new system if it doesn’t fit in to place perfectly after a relatively short amount of time. Sure, improvements can and consistently are being made to NCEA, but the fact that it is new and can be improved or that parents aren’t used to it yet is no reason to change it. I think it’s quite a firghteningly impatient approach we take.
So Starpath saying that NCEA is a better predictor of success at Uni, than say Cambridge, is wrong?
your contributor whaleoil seems to think that teachers do not have lives and that they are not qualified to comment on the world in general.
I could not be bothered to find out what this individual’s background or profession are, but using his logic, what qualifies him to comment on education? (Unless he is a disgruntled ex teacher who failed to make a success of it…)
And Sam. Has the standard of University lecturers dropped so much to employ someone of your abilities. One assumes that you base your observations on the fact that you have asked all the struggling students what qualifications they achieved (NCEA/Cambridge etc). And Sam, I understand NCEA was introduced in the 1990s)
Nicola,
If teachers are the most inspirational and influential people you have met you really need to get out more.
I could introduce you to literally hundreds of people who would be described as failures by the “illuminati” such as Kelvin and his cloth capped ilk.
However they would probably have paid more in tax in one year than a teacher would earn in a life-time of cloistered existence in our schooling system. Every single one of them are more inspirational and influential and the whole entire population of teachers put together.
logie97: we have full access to NCEA data for our students, and investigate the relationship between this and success in our highly competitive first year programme (we are currently revising our open entry policy, so we need to understand the characteristics of the more successful students in first year – we have found that NCEA is not a reliable indicator of anything in particular) – what’s your point?
NCEA was introduced in the 1998, incrementally, as I recall – what’s your point?
What do you know of my abilities?
If I remember correctly Cambridge High School (in the Waikato) was the first school to achieve 100% ’success’ under the NCEA (and under Labour).
Its only when you look at the detail – kids getting marks for collecting rubbish and attending detention that you can see how they simply lower standards (or expectations) so kids can pass.
Its becoming more and more a useless piece of paper. Yes – the best and brightest will always do well – but for the rest its a useless piece of paper.
Kelvin – nice point about Cambridge. It’s just like National bringing back knighthoods. They can’t get enough of that colonial milk… Of course the rest of us have grown up.
Whaleoil (interesting handle – not a greenie I take?) – if you think teachers have such pathetic, sad and unimaginative lives – poor things – where they have no idea about the world – you go do the job, and let’s see how enlightened and inspiring you are?
Logie97 – I agree, what qualifies this poster to speak on education – surely the same argument applies – if teachers can’t have an opinion on the world, then those not within in the system should not comment on it either?
Which brings me to our esteemed Minister of Education – such a qualified and credible choice! After all, her kids have been through the system, so she knows everything there is to know about education….(Whaleoil – you wouldn’t be the Minister of ed in disguise by any chance? )
At the end of the day, our system needs to respond to the needs of our future by preparing our students now – more people attending uni – great – more kids with quals – great – but lets not forget the massive inequities in our system. Engaging students to want to make a difference for themselves, and then ultimately for our future, is not rocket science. What is unfortunate is that the resources are not always placed where they should and things like NCEA (or Nat stds) are rolled out too quick with no appropriate buy in or professional development to support them.
What never fails to amaze me is – and this does not matter which party it is – someone lobbies govt and the next minute schools are meant to deal with it (many examples here – from dog biting to cell phone use). Without consulting those at grass roots. BUT, changing it when its new – thats not smart. Change govt and change systems – for goodness sake, let something get entrenched, properly review it then make a call. To be at the whim of a political cycle is crazy – and perhaps one of the reasons the bureaucracy in this country tend to override democracy!
Interesting that not ONE blogger has attempted to defend adding another layer of National testing to the already over-strtched education budget. I guess thats because to do so would raise accusations of hypocrisy when attacking NCEA as an irrelevant measure of ability whilst trying to promote your own totally unproven and unstandardised test yourself.
I find the regular criticisms of NCEA baffling. Are standards so objectionable? Why?
This prejudicial view that NZ education is poor is utterly without basis, data or proof. It’s blind and stupid ideology.
I’m positive NCEA could be improved. I know it frustrates some that they can’t say their kid’s smarter than the next door neighbour and it’ll never be as good as whatever the Empire’s offering, but the fact remains that by credible international measures, NCEA has improved NZ students’ peformance in relative and absolute terms.
I seem to be regularly saying this around the blogs. Look simply at PISA then explain what the problem is?
Kate, a qualification is a measure of educational attainment. They’re not given out freely, but through assessments. You mightn’t like the assessment but it’s valid and reliable. Moreover, qualifications are a reasonable proxy for human capital development, they’re imperfect since what you can do and what you do do are different, however unless you’re going to propose a fundamentally new and internationally accepted methodology, I’ll stick with the OECD’s.
Charlotte says NCEA is unsuccessful because not enough students are passing, then others (Cactus Kate, StephenR, Whaleoil etc) say NCEA is unsuccessful because too many students are passing.
We can’t have it both ways.
Someone asked, why don’t we just dumb NCEA right down so everyone can pass?
The flipside to that question is why don’t we make it so hard that no one passes?
However, if NCEA (or National) standards are so high that everyone can aim for them but never reach them, why have a standard at all? All students could then aim high for the unattainable standard, and just do the best they can.
Both dumbing down standards so that all pass, or raising standards so that all fail, are extreme and unhelpful, but what is an acceptable pass/failure rate? How difficult or easy should school work be?
We already have Achievement Objectives at each Curriculum Level? Are those Achievement Objectives too hard or too easy?
If we don’t want school so easy that all pass, and we don’t want it so hard that all fail, it must mean we accept that some must pass and some must fail.
What percentage of New Zealand’s students are we prepared to condemn to academic failure?
As probably one of the only posters here to actually have NCEA level 1, 2 & 3, I can say there is one thing I’d like to see changed. There should be more pass marks given instead of just an A, M or E. Someone who gets a low-level A and a high level A basically wrote two very different papers (one would have got about 35% and the other 70%; don’t quote me though, I could be off on the numbers), yet at the end of the day they got the same mark. There should be A+, M+ and E+ also added to the marking schedule so students get a more accurate representation of what they got.
P.S bikerkiwi – No one got credits for picking up rubbish or going to detentions at my old school! Don’t try and imply it happens at most schools ‘cos it really doesn’t.
Cal, fair enough. The more precise the feedback to a student the more use it will be to him/her and potential employers.
Having a national education system is a really, really hard task. There are a huge amount of differing abilities within our education system, and in society as a whole, and how do we create a system that caters to the geniuses in our society as well as those who cannot pass NCEA L1? I challenge anyone (particularly WhaleOil and CactusKate) to come up with a system that actually works for everyone.
NCEA does go some of the way. It caters for lower achievers with the Achieved mark and then higher achievers with Merit and Excellence (particularly if you are a boy). The problem is that there is not enough motivation to achieve higher than an achieved. Last year, you became able to achieve with Merit and excellence. This was a positive step. It gave people the chance to show (in plain english) that they were capable of achieving at a higher level. What could we do to improve this? Encourage people to strive for higher marks.
I’ll just throw this one out there for debate:
One option is to introduce two different qualifications, one that is, in simple terms, harder and requires more work, than the other (and also comes with more academic prestige). And hopefully create a culture in our schools to strive to be in the top qualification group. Some people would call this discriminatory – and it is. That’s the problem with achievement of any kind – not everyone can have it. There would need to be many factors taken into consideration, such as students improving across a year and changing into the other qualification etc. What would be done to make sure that everyone has the opportunity to achieve higher levels? Details only, but these could be big problems. There would have to be an incentive for being in this ‘higher’ course.
Maybe a solution to this is a state funded roll out of IB and CIE/IGCSE into Secondary Schools around the country. Lets face it, in an international context both of those qualifications mean much more. It could be the solution to the bored intellectuals sitting in classrooms around the country.
The biggest thing that needs to happen is a cultural shift in schools from one that is “I’ll only do what I need to do to pass” to “I need to achieve because I want to succeed”. How do we do this? I guess by upskilling teachers, getting them onside, helping them achieve themselves and become, as Nicola so aptly put (and WhaleOil bitched about), inspirational leaders of our society. Because teachers hold the future in their hands.
(Jeez. This must be my longest Red Alert post ever.)
biker – Cambridge was a joke. The school has turned around heaps and still has (as far as I know) excellent pass rates. Remember, the scandal happened around the beginning of NCEA – there had to be something like this happen to fix up any problems in the system.
I agree in Cal’s point that there needs to be more marks available. Maybe we should do A, B, C, D, E & F. With the NAME system (Not achieved, achieved, merit etc.) there’s a huge amount of difference in one mark category – particularly in an English-rich or creative subject where the marking can be somewhat subjective (there is no way around this, you cannot have objective marking of some aspects of an English essay or Music composition!). Having done NCEA, I had one teacher who would put in a plus or minus just to tell us how we did. It was very helpful and the difference between an A- and A+ was HUGE!
And so far everyone is missing the scholarship exams which sit on top of the system and push even the most talented academic students very very hard with useful financial rewards for the top achievers.
Kelvin, you are still missing the point here. It is not about how many get or don’t get qualifications, it should be about how many students can demonstrate that they have met certain learning objectives. The problem with NCEA is the lack of meaningful correlation between achievement and qualification, and I would suggest that this is due in part from having the focus on the number of qualifications awarded rather than an examination of what they are awarded for.
Learning objectives are key, and should be set at the level that we want our kids to leave school and enter the workforce or tertiary education with – the argument for National Standards is very strong at that point – as we should realise that secondary education is prepatory for taking part in wider society – thus standards should be set by that society.
Trev, very good point. I hadn’t thought of them, I can vouch for the fact that they push students very had.
We need to create a qualification around Scholarship that’s somewhat easier to understand than “I got scholarship in English, Art History and Physics,” which is somewhat ambiguous to employers about what the achievement level actually is.
Sam – NCEA is doing what you are suggesting. There are huge amounts of learning objectives that you have to achieve to pass. That’s what makes it a qualification. You have to pass literacy and numeracy (which although basic, are there to make sure everyone in our society can do basic maths and english) and then achieve 80 credits from a range of subjects. What I think needs to be done is to actually have different credit levels for each mark that you get. Say for something big thats worth 6 credits, you get 3 for achieving, 4 for merit and 6 for excellence. This would need to be judged on the difference of quality between marks of course. Then there is an incentive to work hard.
Andy – don’t think you are right. Kids who get scholarship will fly through further academic qualifications and which employers look at school level grades when someone has Masters or PhD.
It’s good to see that once the ranters and spleen venters get bored and move on to some other topic thhat some thoughtful contributions are made.
Sam and Andy B, thank you for your contributions.
I would like to think that regardless of which side of the political spectrum a person sits on, that at the end of the day we all want every student to be able to achieve beyond his/ her potential so that s/he may be able to contribute to the economic, cultural and social well being of themselves, their family, their community, their hapu and iwi, and our nation.
Some people would prefer a greater emphasis on say economic wellbeing than, cultural and social. Fair enough. Others would probably want to include environmental wellbeing as well. Fair enough.
So now that the trash talk has dissipated lets have the discussion around what needs to happen in the education realm to make sure our kids get the most out of it.
The qualification system – does it need to change or be refined?
Teacher quality – what does teacher excellence look like? Is there a core level of excellence, with different qualities needed depending on the school a teacher is at? How should we deal with incompetence? How should we deal with competence?
What are the in-school barriers to student achievement? What are the in-school drivers of achievement?
What are the out-of-school barriers to student achievement?
What are the out-of-school drivers of achievement?
What are the rational solutions to these issues?
What prevents a cross-party educational direction for New Zealand education?
How can we include all stakeholders in discussion around a future direction for New Zealand education, that focuses on what makes kids achieve as far as possible, as fast as possible?
NCEA – the thinking person’s education.
A couple of weeks ago there was a great conference in Wellington about how to make inclusive education happen. That means schools that works for every student. The focus was on disabled children or those who learn differently but the conclusion of several of the keynote speakers is that you can’t have an inclusive education without having an inclusive society and that means one based on social justice with no groups (ethnic, cultural, socio-economic, impairments etc) pushed to the margins for their difference, and therefore not accessing the normal education that their age peers have.
It is stated in section 8 of the 1989 Education Act about the right of every child to attend and be taught at their local school. It really comes down to values of diversity, respect for difference etc. We need a child-centred education system that values each child and teachers trained and who expect to teach a class of students with a variety of learning styles and abilities without negative judgement. With no student excluded from learning with their age peers. There is no one size fits all answer as each child is a human with particular support needs (as are adults – we are not the same and don’t learn in the same way). There is some great research from Otago University which followed disabled children as they transitioned from primary to secondary school and found it was often a lack of professional development about disability or poor attitudes by staff that set up the children to be excluded from learning. Yet by interviewing the children they found that had great expertise and ideas on how schools and teachers could improve, if only we listened to them.
Jude MacArthur has also written a useful resource for the IHC called Learning Better Together that outlines some of the principles (and the accompanying DVD interviews some inspiring principals).
And re NCEA specifically, many autistic students find formal exams very stressful, even terrifying. They are succeeding in NCEA because their considerable abilities can be tested through internal assessment. There are also simple things that schools can do to make things easier for autistic kids like having quieter environments and making things more predictable. These changes also tend to help all kids.
And we need our autistic students to succeed in school because many of them are likely to contribute significantly to NZ’s economic and creative future.
Autism is a disorder of neural development characterized by impaired social interaction and communication, and by restricted and repetitive behavior. These signs all begin before a child is three years old.[1] Autism affects information processing in the brain by altering how nerve cells and their synapses connect and organize; how this occurs is not well understood.[2] It is one of three recognized disorders in the autism spectrum (ASDs), the other two being Asperger syndrome, which lacks delays in cognitive development and language, and Pervasive Developmental Disorder-Not Otherwise Specified (commonly abbreviated as PDD-NOS), which is diagnosed when the full set of criteria for autism or Asperger syndrome are not met.[3]
Autism has a strong genetic basis, although the genetics of autism are complex and it is unclear whether ASD is explained more by rare mutations, or by rare combinations of common genetic variants.[4] In rare cases, autism is strongly associated with agents that cause birth defects.[5] Controversies surround other proposed environmental causes, such as heavy metals, pesticides or childhood vaccines;[6] the vaccine hypotheses are biologically implausible and lack convincing scientific evidence.[7] The prevalence of autism is about 1–2 per 1,000 people; the prevalence of ASD is about 6 per 1,000, with about four times as many males as females. The number of people diagnosed with autism has increased dramatically since the 1980s, partly due to changes in diagnostic practice; the question of whether actual prevalence has increased is unresolved.[8]
Parents usually notice signs in the first two years of their child’s life.[9] The signs usually develop gradually, but some autistic children first develop more normally and then regress.[10] Although early behavioral or cognitive intervention can help autistic children gain self-care, social, and communication skills, there is no known cure.[9] Not many children with autism live independently after reaching adulthood, though some become successful.[11] An autistic culture has developed, with some individuals seeking a cure and others believing autism should be tolerated as a difference and not treated as a disorder.
Good summary
I’m appalled by the lack of rigour applied within the NCEA system. Examples: 1. Child writes a semi-literate essay for literacy assessment. Teacher rejects it with “N” and re-writes one-third of essay for child. Child copies teacher’s rewritten paragraphs word-for-word and resubmits. Child achieves “M” – Merit. 2. Child, knowing that the “achievement” at Level 1 is 80 credits, goes for 80 credits and no more. In other words, child works for bare minimum achievement, and will be soundly rewarded for that. Bare minimum. Child can’t write, read or add, regardless of how many credits the school has given. It’s a disaster.