[Maths-Education] Her Majesties Voice

[Alison Price]

Dear Graham
I agree that it is not a satisfactory answer, however I believe that 
there is some evidence that those with hearing impairment generally find 
female voices easier to hear than male - though I cannot give you a 
reference for this
Alison Price




MugwumpM1 at aol.com wrote:

>***********************************************************************************************************
>This message has been generated through the Mathematics Education email discussion list.
>Hitting the REPLY key sends a message to all list members.
>***********************************************************************************************************
>  
>
>
> ------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
> Colleagues in the UK will be used to the National Curriculum Key Stage 
> 3 Sats.
> The KS3 Maths has the curious 'aural'.
> Several weeks ago, when feeling particularly perverse, I thought I 
> would ask the powers that be why it is that we have only ever heard a 
> female voice reading out the questions. These good people go to 
> extraordinary lengths to have bias free questions - ethnicity, age, ..
> Yet the taped aurals keep arriving with a female voice. So I asked why 
> this was the case and here is the reply. Am I mistaken to believe that 
> this is a completely useless answer?
> The chaps email is Andrew.Bayley at naa.org.uk 
> <mailto:Andrew.Bayley at naa.org.uk>
> {I am Graham Curson}
>  
> Dear Mr Gurson,
> Thank you for your recent enquiry concerning the choice of voice for 
> the KS3 mental maths test.
> Our primary consideration when developing the KS3 mental maths test is 
> effective delivery, ensuring that the questions are presented in a way 
> that is accessible to pupils sitting the tests.
>
> Further to that, continuity is helpful for pupils and teachers, as 
> they will have used practice papers and a degree of familiarity is 
> generally considered welcome.
>
> The issue of the gender of the announcer has not been raised before by 
> schools so we have taken it that schools are satisfied with the 
> current arrangements.
>
> Should we be in position where we needed to review our existing 
> arrangements for mental test delivery we would consider the gender of 
> the announcer, however, our overriding concern would be effective 
> delivery of the mental test to a national cohort of over 650,000 pupils.
>
> I hope this answers your question, but if you have any further 
> question, do please let me know.
>
> Yours sincerely,
>
> Andrew Bayley
> Project Coordinator
> KS3 maths
>
>------------------------------------------------------------------------
>
>+++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
>An international directory of mathematics educators is available on the web at www.nottingham.ac.uk/csme/directory/main.html
>______________________________________________
>Maths-Education mailing list
>Maths-Education at lists.nottingham.ac.uk
>http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/maths-education
>  
>

-------------- next part --------------
An HTML attachment was scrubbed...
URL: http://lists.nottingham.ac.uk/mailman/private/maths-education/attachments/20061019/a32b359b/attachment.html