Daisy Christodoulou

Daisy Christodoulou – Director of Education No More Marking

Christodoulou is an advocate of a knowledge-driven approach to curriculum, assessment to support this curriculum and pedagogy that is based around developing memory. She has also worked on assessment in the ‘life after levels’ world. She has dealt with the ‘adverb problem’ where a range of adverbs have been used to assess how students are achieving. She has outlined the problems of differing teacher understanding of these adverbs when marking, which leads to issues of impartiality, consistency and accuracy in marking. She has a developed a method called comparative judgment to avoid the adverb problem.

Christodoulou is also an advocate of different types of questions, especially multiple choice questions to help students remember information. She is also a critic of progress measures and target-based system. Her logic is that as soon as a measure becomes a target it loses all value as a measure. Teachers skew their curriculum content to the test, meaning the curriculum becomes content free and focused on teaching to the test, rather than assessment being about moving students forward.

Critics have suggested that multiple-choice questions do not allow the expression of more complex knowledge that extended writing allows.