This aspect of ICT is a separate strand, but in planning would be integrated with other strands and substrands. It is also explicitly referenced in some substrands.
ICT engenders a culture of development and improvement. Since almost everything pupils do with ICT can be regarded as work under development, it is relatively easy to encourage pupils to try out different approaches to seek something better. The incentive is there to explore different options, compare a new outcome with its predecessor, and debate alternative strategies for solving a problem or creating a design. Annotating and displaying successive improvements during the development stage helps pupils to document how they have evaluated and modified their products.
Pupils should select and store evidence to show development in the content and quality of their work. The evidence might be electronic or paper notes, digital images, video and audio tape, and sequences of project files on disk, linked by a contents list. Notes should justify why ICT was used or why particular programs or options were chosen, and how these improved the work at various stages. A bank of work in progress allows pupils to refer quickly to previous approaches to inform their current work, or to return to a previous project to improve it with the benefit of hindsight.
Pupils need to understand what constitutes improvement or better fitness for purpose to develop a quality outcome. For example, a search for information on a topic may at first yield too many items of interest. By clarifying what they are looking for, and using ICT judiciously, pupils can focus on the most relevant items. Evaluation of the retrieved information and creation of sharper criteria for focusing the search lead to further trials and refinement, or even to different approaches to the search.
You can help pupils appreciate the importance of fitness for purpose by giving them regular examples of how ICT is used in school and beyond. Encourage them to consider the advantages and disadvantages of different ways of searching, analysing and reporting information for particular purposes, or of communicating with a remote audience. Pupils need to understand why and when tools such as spreadsheets and techniques such as graphical representation are useful.
As pupils gain familiarity with a greater variety of tools and techniques, you need to help them recognise when and when not to use ICT facilities to perform certain tasks. For example, pupils need to appreciate the advantages and disadvantages of using props such as wizards in their work and to recognise when it would be appropriate to design their own automated procedures. Make sure pupils are aware of uses of ICT that are feasible but inappropriate, for example:
Another aspect of developing pupils' ability to improve their work is to make sure that, whenever they use electronic devices or software to represent, measure or process data, they check regularly that:
You should teach pupils to be sensitive to errors when they are working with ICT including calculators, digital meters and scales. For example, encourage pupils regularly to:
Evaluating has one substrand in the ICT Framework, which is:
