Exams are supposed to be the ultimate leveller - a standardised, anonymous way of working out just how well a student understands a subject. That line of argument poses a problem: exams have now been cancelled for the second year in a row. Does that mean that we have no fair way to objectively assess what students are capable of?

But, then again, how fair are exams, ever? Are some children at a disadvantage in the exam hall, not because they haven’t swotted up on Shakespeare or aren’t au fait with algebra but because they struggle with handwriting or getting their thoughts down on paper in time?

David Putwain, from the School of Education at Liverpool John Moores University, researches exam anxiety and says it’s perfectly possible for young people to have the information they need for an exam, but for their individual differences in speed and capacity to affect their retrieval of it.

“We need to think about this in terms of cognitive load,” he suggests. “This is the balance between the amount of mental computation you need to do a task versus the demands made by the task capacity you’ve got. The idea has been around for donkey’s years and it recently made its way into Ofsted’s inspection framework criteria but no one has picked up on it in terms of exams.”

Cognitive load is linked with working-memory capacity - the function that “holds stuff in mind while you need to think about something else”, Putwain continues.

“It’s also the part of cognitive function that draws information out of long-term memory, so working-memory function and capacity is critical to any cognitive task,” he explains. “We know that there are individual differences in working-memory capacity. Some people naturally have a slower working memory or some have not got as large a working-memory capacity. In the latter instance, those people can perform a task as well as an individual with a greater working-memory capacity but they take longer to do it.”

This is echoed by the research findings of Ellen Braaten, an associate professor of psychology at Harvard Medical School and co-author of the book Bright Kids Who Can’t Keep Up. Her work has found that some children simply have slower processing speeds - that is, how long it takes to perceive information, process it and formulate a response - than others. And slow processing doesn’t necessarily go hand in hand with special educational needs.

“When I first started researching processing speed, it used to be that, if kids did poorly on simple processing tasks, you might think they had an attention problem,” she says. “But that’s not always the case. In our studies, about 60 per cent of the kids with slow processing speed have ADHD, which means that 40 per cent of them don’t.”

Braaten believes that, as a society, we’re in thrall to quick thinking, feeling that everything has to be fast. “This ability to do things quickly, to take in stuff and regurgitate it, is something a lot of kids struggle with,” she says.

“It’s more of a problem in today’s educational environment than it was in previous generations. We’ve got into a situation where we think that knowing lots of stuff at an early age is the key to success, as opposed to being good at social and emotional problem solving, or being creative or learning from experience. There is an idea that more is better: more extracurricular activities, more team sports. Some kids can handle that kind of pressure but some of them can’t. Success at any cost is really difficult for kids who can’t keep up.”

So, how can we measure children’s processing speed to understand which pupils might be struggling here? “In our research lab and when we do a neurological evaluation of a child, we’re mainly measuring their ability to produce something very simply,” Braaten says.

The child is given a task, such as copying a code or naming as many animals as they can in a minute. “We then compare their answers to those of other kids their age and ask how far that child varies from the average child.”

There are clearly exam implications for children with slower processing speeds, she continues: “If you are slower at reading, you are not going to finish the test in time - not because you don’t understand the question but because you don’t have time to read the question accurately and do what’s needed.

“Those who have trouble with speed aren’t being accurately measured in terms of their ability, they are being measured on their speed. Anxiety can kick in, which can also slow the process down.”

GCSE and A-level exams: Drilling for deeper knowledge

So, what can be done to help? It all boils down to what exactly it is the exam should be measuring, Putwain says: “If it’s about allowing someone to demonstrate their knowledge and skills, then it makes perfect sense for someone with slower processing speed to be given longer to do it.”

There is also the option of overlearning, he continues, which essentially means “drilling” in the information until it becomes automatic. “This reduces the demand on working-memory capacity but the extent to which you can learn material to the point where it becomes automatic varies from one subject to another,” Putwain says. “Fact-based recall can be done straightforwardly. That’s also the case for questions that require a procedure: you can practise one type of maths question until the procedure becomes so ingrained that you can slot into it very quickly. But it becomes more difficult in interpretive tasks for the likes of English literature or history, where you’re asked to offer a viewpoint on a particular passage or historic event. Having an interpretation question in an exam requires, for want of a better phrase, someone to think very fast on their feet.”

Putwain has a six-step intervention aimed at reducing exam anxiety, which combines cognitive behavioural therapy and study-skills training. The latter, he says, is helpful when it comes to reducing cognitive load.

“It’s the idea of planning what you want to learn, monitoring it while you’re learning, testing your learning and then resetting your next goals,” Putwain adds. “It’s trying to get students to think about revision in that cycle.

“Many of them don’t necessarily know different ways of revising. They stick to certain methods without evaluating whether they’re working or not. It’s about putting their revision to the test and scheduling ‘booster’ sessions to keep it fresh. There’s also the idea that retrieval practice - the concept that retrieving information from memory consolidates it - is a good way to strengthen memory and that automatisation process.”

Braaten, meanwhile, has other suggestions. “Even little things like giving kids the option to write answers in the test booklet or to cut down on time spent writing by using a keyboard [can help]. Some kids are much quicker at writing their answers on a keyboard than writing longhand.”

Ultimately, she says, we need to move away from the mentality that slow equals bad, particularly as this quality can bring benefits of its own in other settings. “There are lots of jobs that demand a slow, carefully thought-out process,” she says. “If you’re designing a car or a bridge, you don’t want to rush through it - you want to take time to think through things. Pathologising kids because they’re slower at dealing with this superfast-paced world we live in isn’t really fair.”

Christina Quaine is a freelance journalist

This article originally appeared in the 19 February 2021 issue under the headline “Tes focus on... exam fairness”