̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge - Cambridge Assessment

New partnership to provide expertise on global education reform

ta385 — Tue, 06 Oct 2020 10:45:00 +0000

Cambridge Assessment and Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press have launched a new unit, the Cambridge Partnership for Education, that will draw on the collective knowledge and global network of the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge to support governments, schools, teachers and learners in creating quality public education systems.

Jane Mann, Managing Director of Cambridge Partnership for Education said: "Education underpins our economies and societies. It’s the single most effective solution for many of the problems we face including poverty, health, climate change and conflict. As the global pandemic intensifies these challenges, revitalising education systems will fuel individual, national and international recovery. Our new team is uniquely placed to achieve that mission with partners around the world.”

As the recent Cambridge report 'What have we learned about the COVID-19 impact on education so far?' showed, education systems in all countries were ill-equipped to adapt to a global pandemic, and existing inequalities in public education systems were exposed and increased. This year saw schools closed in over 190 countries, affecting over 1.5 billion learners. 24 million children may never return to the classroom.

Countries now need to evaluate whether the solutions put in place during the lockdown have had an impact, assessing what’s worked and what hasn’t, in order to start planning more effectively for medium and longer-term solutions.

̽��ֱ��pandemic has also caused economic downturns around the world, widening existing inequalities. Half of the global workforce is at risk, leaving many without the skills they will need to return to new jobs. Countries will need to invest in education and skills to rebuild their economies at a time when government spending will be under intense pressure.

̽��ֱ��new and expanded offer from the Cambridge Partnership for Education will help governments and non-governmental organisations reimagine and rebuild education systems, from research and planning to implementation and impact evaluation. The team brings decades of trusted experience working on education from every angle – curriculum, assessment, learning materials and teacher training – to help partners reach their goals, speed up progress and achieve value for money.

Peter Phillips, Chief Executive of Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, said: “For the first time, Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press, Cambridge Assessment and our ̽��ֱ�� will combine the full depth and breadth of our education expertise to partner with governments and non-governmental organisations. ̽��ֱ��creation of an integrated team and one single point of contact to access all of our capabilities and services meets our partners’ needs and means together we can improve education systems more effectively.”

Although the disruption caused by COVID has brought challenges in education into sharp focus in many areas, Cambridge was already supporting governments to develop their education systems well before the pandemic hit. ̽��ֱ��move towards competency-based education, new forms of assessment, digital literacy and initiatives to tackle the shortage of trained teachers, among other developments, have seen Cambridge partner with ministries around the world, reaching over 20 million learners worldwide in 2019 alone.

̽��ֱ��individual teams who will form the new unit have developed strong reputations for delivering excellence for clients across a variety of issues and local contexts. Recent achievements include an in-depth analysis of the national curriculum of Ethiopia, supporting improvements in English teaching with the Malaysia Ministry of Education, supporting the goal of a bilingual population in Panama, and pioneering a new Learning Passport with Microsoft and UNICEF which harnesses the latest technological capabilities to support education for displaced children.

̽��ֱ��Partnership will draw on the knowledge and expertise of more than 6,000 employees in 50 offices worldwide, from Cambridge to New Delhi, from Oman to Kenya.

Saul Nassé, Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment, said: “This is a challenging time for the world and a vital moment for education. We could not have predicted the stress education systems, governments and people around the globe would face in 2020. Our new unit brings together our collective strength and expertise in education at a moment when we can make a significant contribution to the world’s learning recovery.”

A new Cambridge Partnership for Education will help governments and organisations across the world reimagine public education systems for the future.

Revitalising education systems will fuel individual, national and international recovery

Jane Mann

Cambridge Partnership for Education

Students in Oman reading with their teacher

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Unexpected experiences: Sam Lucy takes us behind the scenes of the recent admissions process

lw355 — Fri, 25 Sep 2020 09:00:35 +0000

Assessing undergraduate admissions was likely to be a very different process in a pandemic, let alone with a changing landscape of cancelled exams and reassessments. One of the team at the forefront of overcoming these challenges was Dr Sam Lucy, Director of Admissions for Cambridge Colleges.

Computer tutor

lw355 — Wed, 17 Jun 2015 10:21:39 +0000

“We arrived to our destination and we looked each other.”

To a native English speaker, the mistakes in this sentence are clear. But someone learning English would need a teacher to point them out, explain the correct use of prepositions and check later that they have improved. All of which takes time.

Now imagine the learner was able to submit a few paragraphs of text online and, in a matter of seconds, receive an accurate grade, sentence-by-sentence feedback on its linguistic quality and useful suggestions for improvement.

This is Cambridge English Write & Improve – an online learning system, or ‘computer tutor’, to help English language learners – and it’s built on information from almost 65 million words gathered over a 20-year period from tests taken by real exam candidates speaking 148 different languages living in 217 different countries or territories.

Built by Professor Ted Briscoe’s team in Cambridge’s Computer Laboratory, it’s an example of a new kind of tool that uses natural language processing and machine learning to assess and give guidance on text it has never seen before, and to do this indistinguishably from a human examiner.

“About a billion people worldwide are studying English as a further language, with a projected peak in 2050 of about two billion,” says Briscoe. “There are 300 million people actively preparing for English exams at any one time. All of them will need multiple tests during this learning process.”

Language testing affects the lives of millions of people every year; a successful test result could open the door to jobs, further education and even countries.

But marking tests and giving individual feedback is one of the most time-consuming tasks that a teacher can face. Automating the process makes sense, says Dr Nick Saville, Director of Research and Validation at Cambridge Assessment.

“Humans are good teachers because they show understanding of people’s problems, but machines are good at dealing with routine things and large amounts of data, seeing patterns, and giving feedback that the teacher or the learner can use. These tools can free up the teacher’s time to focus on actual teaching.”

Cambridge Assessment, a not-for-profit part of the ̽��ֱ��, produces and marks English language tests taken by over five million people each year. Two years ago, they teamed up with Briscoe’s team and Professor Mark Gales in the Department of Engineering and Dr Paula Buttery in the Department of Theoretical and Applied Linguistics to launch the Automated Language Teaching and Assessment (ALTA) Institute, directed by Briscoe. Their aim is to create tools to support learners of both written and spoken English.

Underpinning Write & Improve is information gleaned from a vast dataset of quality-scored text – the Cambridge Learner Corpus. Built by Cambridge ̽��ֱ�� Press and Cambridge Assessment, this is the world’s largest collection of exam papers taken by English language learners around the world.

Each test has been transcribed and information gathered about the learner’s age, language and grade achieved. Crucially, all errors (grammar, spelling, misuse, word sequences, and so on) have been annotated so that a computer can process the natural language used by the learner.

Write & Improve works by supervised machine learning – having learnt from the Corpus of errors, it can make inferences about new unannotated data. Since its launch as a beta version in March 2014, the program has attracted over 20,000 repeat users. And each new piece of text it receives continues this process of learning and improving its accuracy, which is already running at almost equal to the most experienced human markers.

Briscoe believes that this sort of technology has the potential to change the landscape of teaching and assessment practices: “Textbooks are rapidly morphing into courseware where people can test their understanding as they go along. This fits with pedagogical frameworks in which the emphasis is on individual profiling of students and giving them tailored advice on what they can most usefully move onto next.”

He regards the set-up of ALTA as the “best type” of technology transfer: “We do applied research and have a pipeline for transferring this to products. But that pipeline also produces data that feeds back into research.”

̽��ֱ��complex algorithms that underpin Write & Improve are being further developed and customised by iLexIR, a company Briscoe and others set up to convert university research into practical applications; and a new company, English Language iTutoring, has been created to deliver Write & Improve and similar web-based products via the cloud and to capture the data that will feed back into the R&D effort to improve the tutoring products.

Now, the researchers are looking beyond text to speech. Assessing spoken English brings a set of very different challenges to assessing written English. ̽��ֱ��technology needs to be able to cope with the complexities of the human voice: the rhythm, stress and intonation of speech, the uhms and ahhs, the pauses.

“ ̽��ֱ��fact that you can get speech recognition on your phone tends to imply in some people’s minds that speech recognition is solved,” says Gales, Professor of Information Engineering. “But the technology still struggles with second language speech. We need to be able to assess the richness in people’s spoken responses, including whether it’s the correct expression of emotion or the development of an argument.” Gales is developing new forms of machine learning, again using databases of examples of spoken English.

“ ̽��ֱ��data-driven approach is the only way to create tools like these,” adds Briscoe. “Building automated tests that use multiple choice is easy. ̽��ֱ��stuff we are doing is messy, and it’s ever- changing. We’ve shown that if you train a system to this year’s exam on data from 10 years ago the system is less accurate than if you train it on data from last year.”

This is why, says Briscoe, it’s unimaginable to reach a point where the machines have learned enough to understand and predict almost all of the typical mistakes learners make: “Language is a moving target. English is constantly being globalised; vocabulary changes; grammar evolves; and methods of assessment change as progress in pedagogy happen. I don’t think there will ever be a point when we can say ‘we are done now’.”

Inset image: Professor Ted Briscoe ( ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge).

Millions of English language tests are taken each year by non-native English speakers. Researchers at Cambridge’s ALTA Institute are building ‘computer tutors’ to help learners prepare for the exam that could change their lives.

Humans are good teachers because they show understanding of people’s problems, but machines are good at dealing with large amounts of data, seeing patterns, and giving feedback

Nick Saville, Cambridge Assessment

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Cambridge academics honoured in the 2015 New Year Honours List

pbh25 — Tue, 06 Jan 2015 13:25:29 +0000

Professor Sharon Peacock and Professor Graeme Barker are among those who have been given honours in this year’s New Year Honours list.

Clinical microbiologist Professor Sharon Peacock was awarded a CBE for her services to Medical Microbiology. Peacock is known for her work with the Wellcome Trust Major Overseas Programme in Thailand where for seven years she directed a wide-ranging programme of bacterial disease research. In the UK she has focused on the role of sequencing technologies in diagnostic microbiology and public health.

Peacock chairs the Cambridge Infectious Diseases Initiative and is deputy director of the Wellcome Trust Cambridge Centre for Global Health Research. She was elected to the Academy of Medical Sciences in 2013. “Delighted” to have won the award, Peacock said: “I have the privilege of working with an outstanding group of scientists at the ̽��ֱ�� of Cambridge and at the Sanger Institute, and this honour reflects their support and efforts. ̽��ֱ��award also reflects the importance of basic and applied microbiological research for individual and public health.”

Professor Graeme Barker was awarded a CBE for services to Archaeology. ̽��ֱ��former Disney Professor of Archaeology and director, McDonald Institute for Archaeological Research, is known for his research focussing on prehistoric archaeology, the relationship between landscape and people, transitions from foraging to farming, and the origins of human behaviour and migrations.

Barker has worked all over the world, including in the rainforest of Borneo, and the deserts of the Middle East and North Africa. One of his major contributions has been work showing how humans have adapted to climate change in the past, and the lessons that can be learned from this today.

Describing himself as “thrilled” to be awarded the CBE he said: “I changed to archaeology half way through my undergraduate degree at Cambridge inspired by meeting Colin Renfrew, then a research fellow, and was privileged to succeed him as Disney Professor in 2004. It has also been a privilege to work in archaeology, which has so much to tell us about what it means to be human. It is a team subject par excellence and in accepting the award I have felt very much that it celebrates the achievements of so many colleagues, and good friends from all parts of the world whose support has been so important to anything I have achieved.

Tim Oates, Group Director of Assessment Research and Development at Cambridge Assessment, was also awarded a CBE, for Services to Education.

Simon Lebus, Group Chief Executive of Cambridge Assessment said “We are all delighted that Tim has been so honoured; it is a signal recognition of the body of work he produced during his time as a Group Director at Cambridge Assessment.”

Oates, who joined Cambridge Assessment in May 2006, said “I would like to thank all those at Cambridge Assessment who enabled me to make this contribution to improving our education system.”

Trevor Llewellyn Richards, formerly Capital Project Liaison Officer at the ̽��ֱ��’s School of Clinical Medicine, was awarded a BEM for services to Biomedical Research and the Welfare of Animals in Research. Mr Richards was Director of Central Biomedical Resources from 1996 to 2012 and has been described as an “outstanding bio-facilities manager.”

Members of the ̽��ֱ�� have been recognised for their outstanding contributions to society.

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