News & Views item - April  2005

 

 

Australian Vice-Chancellors and Oxford's Sir Gareth Roberts, Chair of the Research Quality Framework Expert Advisory Group, Face Off Over Multiple-Choice Questionnaire. (April 28, 2005)

    Late last year Dr Brendan Nelson, Minister for Education, Science and Training, announced that he had appointed an Expert Advisory Group of thirteen to advise him on the formulation of a Research Quality Framework for Australian publicly funded research.1, 2, 3.

 

Then in March his department published and "Issues Paper" which was roundly condemned by Griffith University's Gavin Moodie who wrote in The Australian early in April that it was a "particularly egregious example of multiple-choice questioning that is poor assessment practice, poor public policy development and even poor market research".

 

 Now the broadsheet's Samantha Maiden reports that on April 20 the Australian Vice-Chancellors' Committee over the signatures of, ANU's Ian Chubb, Flinders University vice-chancellor Anne Edwards, University of Technology, Sydney vice-chancellor Ross Milbourne and Australian Catholic University vice-chancellor Peter Sheehan, wrote to Sir Gareth,

    During their discussions the committee expressed their concern about the way the issues paper appears to have been written so as to elicit 'tick a box' responses. One feature of the discussions - which highlights the perceived deficiencies in the approach employed in the paper - was the way some committee members agreed on an issue but disagreed on how they would indicate their position in the spectrum of responses provided. The committee was concerned that the 'tick a box' format would not produce meaningful results for some of the questions.

    As a consequence, we believe that any analysis of submissions in the issue paper should focus primarily on written comments, rather than ticks in boxes.

According to Maiden, Professor Roberts replied two days later dismissing the Vice-Chancellors' complaint with the peremptory, "As you know ... we agreed that the RQF [Research Quality Framework] issues paper should include propositions that provided forced field response categories as well as free text responses. It was also agreed that respondents could provide additional comments on any other matter."

 

Can there really be reasonable doubt that if not the EAG certainly DEST will focus on the tick boxes (and allotting quantitative evaluations?) with perhaps a cursory glance to the provided "additional comments on any other matter".

 

If that quote is representative of Roberts' approach to his and the EAG's role in devising an RQF, perhaps investigations regarding "Intelligent Design" may become an option for Australian Researchers -- something like The Final Solution to Australia's Research Priorities Problem.

 

forced field response categories indeed.

 


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