Reforming the Federal School English Olympiad: on designing a uniform framework of Olympiad tasks

Importance. Contests in various disciplines, termed in the Russian educational discourse as the Olympic Movement or Olympiads, exert a significant influence on discovering gifted students and assisting the development of their giftedness. The Federal School Olympiad held in a number of school subjects including English plays an especially important role here. Achievements in such contests frequently enable school leavers to be admitted to leading selective universities of Russia. The Olympic Movement successfully developing and a plethora of preparation materials available, we single out a number of the so-called black swans – factors that affect negatively the organization, preparation and implementation of the Olympiads. The aim of the study is to identify and analyze the so-called “black swans”, that is, negative stimuli that had a significant impact on the further evolution of didactic and methodological thought in preparation for competitions.

Materials and Methods. Our research employs the concept of black swans introduced by N. Taleb. In the context of education, black swans are uncertainties and accidents that pose existential risks for preparing school students for the English Olympiad. The relevant literature was selected through the medium of the PRISMA method and then subjected to content analysis to discover key thematic clusters of research directions in the field. To obtain empirical data, semistuctured interviews were conducted with students of leading Moscow universities who have the experience of participating in the English Olympiad.

Results and Discussion. The key contradictions which are black swans for the English Olympiad have been identified. Those are: a considerable gap between proficiency requirements stated in the Federal School Educational Standards and the one targeted by the Olympiad; ambiguity of task instructions; giving zero points for insignificant imperfections; poor construct, content and face validity of a number of tasks; introduction of new, unannounced task formats; poorly formulated assessment criteria and scales; unclear principles of selecting assessment panel members. We formulated a number of recommendations which, in our opinion, may contribute to effectively addressing and eliminating those contradictions.

Conclusion. With all the evident strengths, the English Olympic Movement is experiencing quite a crisis and needs transformation. Formulated recommendations may well result in quite effective reformative measures that will eliminate the black swans and improve the content, organization and reputation of the Olympiad contributing to a unified yet reasonably flexible framework of the contest design and implementation.