Education expert cautions Michael Gove over heavy reliance on exams

Michael Gove wants to make exams the integral assessment
 element of new incarnations of GCSEs and A-levels.

An American scientist cited by Michael Gove as the intellectual inspiration for his shift towards a more exacting exams regime has warned that excessive reliance on tests can hamper children's education through a focus on narrow, rote learning.

Daniel Willingham, a cognitive psychologist at the University of Virginia who has incorporated laboratory findings about the way people learn into a book, Why Don't Children Like School?, was mentioned three times in Gove's recent setpiece speech about his educational philosophy.

Gove described Willingham's ideas as "quite brilliant" and has eulogised a central argument in his work: that it is pointless to teach children concepts such as critical thinking and analysis unless they first have a sufficient grasp of the basic facts of a subject, something best achieved by repeated drilling.

As an extension of this, Gove wants to make exams the integral assessment element of new incarnations of GCSEs and A-levels.

Willingham said Gove seemed to have grasped his ideas about learning. However, he warned, there was a danger in relying too heavily on exams. "My biggest concern is that if you institute a new, more rigorous programme of testing in Britain, how teachers will take that as affecting their mission and how they ought to think about their job in the classroom.

"Even though Mr Gove went to some pains to say, look, this doesn't mean, sit kids down, get them to learn facts, that's exactly how teachers in the States took it when testing was instituted in this country in 2002."

The US exams came about through the No Child Left Behind Act, which mandated countrywide standards for certain skills. Willingham said: "Part of that was mandating the more frequent testing of students. The thing about testing is, yes, we'd love to test critical thinking, if we knew how to test critical thinking. But we really don't. So what we tend to do is test factual knowledge."

While factual knowledge was vital, Willingham said, it was best taught in a wider context of understanding, and an over-emphasis on tests, particularly if these were seen as the only gauge of progress, could encourage schools to teach students by rote.

"What worries most is what happened in the States: teachers knew these tests were coming, and teachers knew these tests were mostly going to be based on facts. So they felt: I need to give these kids lots and lots of facts, at the expense of critical thinking and of presenting these facts in a way that was richer, a way that the kids would have remembered the facts better anyway."

Willingham said Gove appeared to grasp this point but could still see his intentions undermined by the wrong sort of exam system: "There's every indication from the speech that he understands the dangers of how his words might be interpreted, that people will take this to mean, we need rote memorisation, we need facts at the expense of critical thinking," he said. "He went to some pains to say that's not what I mean. But if people see a test as having very high stakes, there's a chance they might take it that way anyway."

There were similar potential problems, he said, in using league tables, another policy described by Gove as central to his education ideas. "Usually, these sorts of ratings come with lots of caveats, and people forget the caveats. People see a number and they think, ah, this is the best high school. It's more complex than that."

A Department for Education spokeswoman said teachers would be expected to "deploy entertaining narratives in history, striking practical work in science and unveil hidden patterns in maths to hold students' attention and fix concepts in their minds". She added: "Exams help children to develop greater creativity by requiring students to show they have absorbed and retained knowledge and can deploy it effectively."

- The Guardian