Examining GCSE Design and Technology - Insights from the Nuffield Design and Technology Project

This article looks critically at the ways in which design and technology is currently examined at GCSE level. It identifies two key elements, technology for citizenship and designer maker capability, and explores how these might be assessed. It discusses the issue of group work in examined projects and questions the place of written examinations in assessing deigner maker capability. It presents a preliminary analysis of 1998 higher tier examination papers in terms of eight question types discussed in the Nuffield D and T KS4 Teachers' Guides. Finally, the article makes a plea for an assessment scheme that matches the requirements of teaching designer maker capability and technology for citizenship

The use of a web site and associated published materials to support the development of a community of practice for primary design and technology teachers

This paper will describe the development of a design and technology web site specifically for primary teachers. The web site has been developed in the context of the Nuffield Primary Design and Technology Project over a period of time when the government has pursued strategies which promoted literacy and numeracy (at the expense of the more practical and creative elements of the curriculum) and provided resources to enable teachers to become proficient in the use of information communication technology. The paper describes the following:the development of an initial web sitethe use made of this web site (through web site statistics)the development of resources in association with DATA (the Design and Technology Association) to provide innovative curriculum materials for teachers at a time when commercial publishers were not willing to do thisthe revision of this web site to accommodate provision of teacher materials and professional supportthe use made of the revised web site in the first six months of its life i.e. October 200 I-March 2002 (through web site statistics)the use made of the materials and the web site in continuing professional development activities carried out by the Nuffield Primary Design and Technology Project and its impact on practice.Finally the paper identifies areas for further research

The personal response to designing and making: investigating PGCE students' feelings as they move through a designing and making assignment

The purpose of the study reported in this paper was to investigate the way in which feelings of trainee teachers on a one year post graduate certificate of education (PGCE) initial teacher education (ITE) design and technology (D&T) course changed as they moved through a designing and making assignment. This paper is in four parts. The introduction presents a brief overview of the literature reporting pupils’ emotional response to the secondary school curriculum in science and attitudes toward technology. Second, it describes a pilot study in which a cohort of secondary design and technology PGCE trainee teachers were required to record their feelings in response to a designing and making assignment. Third, the paper presents a preliminary analysis of the data, commenting in some depth on the response of four purposefully sampled trainees. Finally, it considers the possibility of this approach being used with pupils in schools

Preparing D&T for 2005 - Moving Beyond the Rhetoric The DATA Lecture

Progress so farMany of us here will remember the difficulties of the first five years of National Curriculum design and technology. A programme of study for each level of attainment, four attainment targets, a programme of study that seemed to match the attainment targets but not quite, an attainment target that managed to prevent teachers teaching (AT! Identifying needs and opportunities), models of delivery that were complicated and required teachers to operate well outside their areas of expertise. The intentions were good but chaos reigned supreme. We have come a long way since then. The clarification through the revised Orders of 1995 helped considerably although some regarded these as over prescriptive. The period of relative calm between 1995 and now, (no major changes to the design and technology Orders compared with the several different vers

Resources for Technology Education in Scottish Primary Schools

This paper describes a joint initiative by the Scottish Consultative Council on the Curriculum and the Nuffield Foundation to involve Scottish teachers in the development of materials to support technology in Scottish Primary School

Capitalising on the utility embedded in design and technology activity : an exploration of cross-curricular links

Despite international support for cross-curricular activity involving design and technology, science and mathematics classroom practice in secondary schools has been unable to respond positively or effectively. This paper explores the ideas of purpose and utility as drivers to enable collaboration between teachers from these subjects and suggests ways in which this collaboration might take place

A small-scale preliminary pilot to explore the use of Mode 2 research to develop a possible solution to the problem of introducing one-year PGCE design and technology trainees to design methods that are relevant to the teaching of designing in the secondary school

David Hargreaves (1998) noted that, in the world outside education, knowledge is not created in a university by researchers and then applied somewhere in the real world by practising professionals: it is developed where it will be used. It will be developed in order to get something done, a form of research called Mode 2 (Gibbons et al, 1994). He proposed that ‘knowledge creation and dissemination in education must now move into Mode 2: teacher-centred knowledge creation through partnerships’. In this paper we identify two problems by means of a literature survey and through a partnership between a curriculum developer and a university-based researcher, clarify its local manifestation and explore a possible solution that might be further informed by an extension of this research method. The problems identified by the literature survey are (a) the wide variation in designing experience within one-year postgraduate certificate of education (PGCE) design and technology students and (b) the poor development of designing skills in secondary school pupils within the subject design and technology. The partnership developed and implemented a piece of work new to the PGCE design and technology curriculum at a university in the south of England to give trainees experience relevant to their own development as a designer and to show how this might be related to developing design skills in school pupils. This was in addition to the design-based projects trainees had been required to develop and present in previous years. The trainees’ response to the work and its relevance to the Key Stage 3 work they undertook on teaching experience were then identified by a short interview with a selection of the students. The implications of this feedback for an extension of this work are discussed within the intention of improving the design teaching expertise of PGCE students at this particular university

Questioning the design and technology paradigm

In this paper I present a brief background to the questioning of the design and technology paradigm made by Andy Breckon before using the work of seven acknowledged experts in the field of design and technology education to scrutinise the validity and practicality of this questioning. The experts are David Layton, Richard Kimbell, Robert McCormick, Patricia Murphy, Mike Ive HMI, Malcolm Welch and Stephen Petrina. Next I consider the nature of design and technology within the school curriculum as if it were a brand competing for attention with other brands in the curriculum. I then use the experience of the Young Foresight Initiative to consider specifically Andy’s position on design and technology innovation. Finally, I sum up by identifying future directions for the subject that have emerged from considering Andy’s paper