Assessing the Assessment

Jul 02, 2011 Editorial

The National Grade Six Assessment (NGSA) Examination results were announced last Thursday. And in what has become a national annual ritual, the media and the public have duly acknowledged, praised and honoured those children that made it in the top ten or twenty or top one percent. And in what has become our annual custom, at this time we also look behind the euphoria to glimpse the bigger picture.
The raw numbers are very sobering. This year almost 19,000 children wrote the exam so the bigger picture has to bring into focus the performance of the almost 18,800 that did not make it into the top one per cent. While we do not have all the details as this is being written, the numbers from last year indicate that that picture will still be very blurred. Pupils in 2010 who earned 50 per cent and more in Mathematics were 34 per cent; Science 33 per cent, Social Studies 34 per cent and for English just 23 per cent. The Ministry of Education acknowledged that these results indicate that the primary division of the education system has “severe deficiencies.”
When we consider that three out of four of the graduates from our 480 primary schools cannot score 50 per cent in English and two out of three cannot score as much in Maths, Science and Social Studies, that acknowledgement might be an understatement.
About eight years ago, the government introduced assessment exams at the end of Grade Two and Grade Four to detect earlier, the problems posed. The results were supposed to be fed back to the teachers in succeeding grades so that remedial measures for specific children might be undertaken.
While there have been some improvement, the changes are so infinitesimal that they might as well be due to random fluctuation. Maybe it is high time the assessments in the lower grades are themselves assessed to discern what exactly has gone wrong.
The Ministry of Education had this year also introduced a National Grade Four Certificate Programme that the children would have to pass before being allowed to sit the NGSA in the years ahead. We’re not sure exactly how this would operate since there is also the controversial overarching policy of not “failing” any child.
The Ministry has also introduced a welter of literacy programmes to boost the abysmal performance in English – as of now, to no avail. These results reflect the fundamental flaws in the present system – and these persist in the secondary level with the result that the tertiary institutions are forced to accept applicants that are patently unqualified for higher education. And our country’s developmental thrust falters.
The fundamental flaw, which we have identified every year for the past five years, is that the primary level (and also the secondary) is totally dedicated to transmitting information (we cannot say an “education”) by rote rather than through an interactive hands on process that makes the students think. In the recent interviews with the high flyers, they once again almost universally stressed the extra lessons that they were subjected to in addition to the drills from their regular schoolteachers.
Some of the best ‘drillers” now have schools of their own, with the expected “success”.
We mentioned the one out of three that obtain 50 per cent in science. But not a single one of even that fortunate third was allowed to conduct an experiment to obtain a glimpse of the scientific method.
And we complain about our students not wanting to study science in the secondary and tertiary levels. We should be grateful for the few that survive the drudgery of primary school science to still keep at it later.
Last week we learnt that the Ministry has partnered with UNESCO to run a pilot programme to introduce Micro-science kits into the primary schools so that the students may finally have some hands on experience with science experiments.
While we believe that the Ministry is on the right track, by continuing with the “teach to the test” methodology it will continue to destroy any enthusiasm for learning from the start.

1 thoughts on “Assessing the Assessment”

Oros September 28, 2016 at 10:13 pm

Some students don’t take assessments like this seriously but it’s good that there are those students who have shown about their capabilities that made them achieve that kind of spot during that assessment.