Session Information
09 SES 06 B, Peer Relations, Classroom Interactions, and Individual Achievement and Motivations
Paper Session
Contribution
This paper reports the findings of a two-stage study examining the wider educational impact of the Certificate of Personal Effectiveness (CoPE). This is a secondary-level qualification offered in the United Kingdom by ASDAN – an educational charity specialising in offering alternative courses of study to the traditional academic GCSE qualifications. It is skills-led and portfolio-based, being undertaken by around 10,000 young people every year, usually between the ages of 14 and 16. It is pursued by a wide range of young people, but it is more common among those with various forms of educational disadvantage.
CoPE is based around the completion of a series of negotiated ‘challenges’ which the young people undertaken using a ‘plan-do-review’ process designed to develop their learning orientation in ways that are likely to improve outcomes (Watkins 2010). The challenges are situated within modules that emphasise a wide range of personal skills including verbal communication, teamworking, practical enquiry and visual presentation. Assessment is undertaken through the portfolio of evidence collected by the young person as they document their challenges.
The first stage of the study (Harrison, James and Last 2012) used multilevel logistic regression analysis of secondary data on over 500,000 young people from the National Pupil Database to demonstrate a statistically significant relationship between the pursuit of CoPE and improved educational outcomes at 16. These improved outcomes were most closely linked to those young people with the greatest disadvantage.
This paper takes this earlier finding as a starting point and strives to explain how this impact is exercised between CoPE and traditional qualifications. Drawing on qualitative focus group data in the previous study, it has been hypothesised that undertaking CoPE helps to boost young people's motivation for school, their self-esteem and/or their personal confidence. One or more of these factors are assumed to then filter into traditional qualifications and help to improve attainment more widely across the curriculum.
The research question is therefore: do young people undertaking CoPE experience a disproportionate change in one or more of these three factors in relation to their peers not undertaking CoPE? If the hypothesis is found to be supported, this would provide a viable causal relationship between pursuing CoPE and general educational outcomes.
While this paper works from a UK-specific example, it has a wider applicability for skills-led qualifications in other national contexts and more generally on how learning orientatations and attitudes impact on educational outcomes.
Method
Expected Outcomes
References
Harrison, N., D. James and K. Last. 2012. Can the pursuit of ‘GCSE equivalent’ qualifications positively impact on GCSE results? The case of ASDAN’s Certificate of Personal Effectiveness. Paper presented at the British Educational Research Association annual conference, Manchester, 6th September 2012. Watkins, C. 2010. Learning, performance and improvement (INSI Research Matters No. 34). London: London Centre for Leadership in Learning, Institute of Education.
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