By: Dr Rabia Mukhtar
Education is a vehicle of social progress and transformation. Through education one acquires knowledge, skills, habits, values and attitudes. Schools are best platform for attributing education to young learners in real sense. To ensure positive achievements, schools need to track progress of learners through assessment processes. Academicians across developed and developing countries realize that real changes in school system cannot take place unless traditional evaluation and assessment pattern is not replaced by more valid, authentic ways of assessment. No doubt teaching has become more progressive, but evaluation remains same within the traditional pattern encouraging lower order thinking and a focus on form rather than meaning.
Exam preparations for such pattern force students to drill on a narrow set of skills which may turn to be harmful to their educational development and thinking. In our country, dropout rate of young learners in schools is too high. Many of them are not able to appear in the board examinations and many fail in these examinations. The school has an important role to play in relation to these aspects of students’ development. To reform and bring positive changes, National Education Policy 2020 has come up with a new assessment policy known as School Based Assessment (SBA). It is a scheme of gathering valid and reliable information by the teacher in the classroom, about the performance of the learner on an on-going basis against clearly defined criteria, using variety of methods, tools, techniques and contexts. It is proposed to be conducted throughout the country to assess the learning outcomes of all the children. Countries such as Hong Kong, Australia and England have long back included the SBA concept for assessment
The purpose of SBA is to empower teachers to improve the learning levels of the students. The aim of assessment is a shift from summative that promotes rote memorization skills to one that is more regular and formative. This culture aims at promoting learning and in turn promotes development of our students by testing and inculcating higher order skills such as analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual clarity.
In order to revise teaching learning process through this new assessment scheme, National Assessment Centre, NCERT, and SCERTs aim at completely redesigning progress cards of students. These progress cards will be holistic, 360 degree; multidimensional that would reflect in great details the progress as well as uniqueness of each learner taking into consideration all the main domains of learning like cognitive, affective and psychomotor. This in turn, will enable learners to know their strengths, areas of interest, and areas of focus and thereby help them to make optimal career choices. Board exams will also be made easier and will be designed to test primarily core capacities/competencies rather than months of coaching and rote memorization. Students will be allowed to take Board Exams on up to two occasions during any given year, containing one main examination and one for improvement if desired.
In order to make this new assessment scheme a success, this scheme needs to emphasize on regular attendance of students, developing students’ oral communicative skills, development of other characteristics like working in a group, doing field work, development of competencies such as problem-solution, investigation and analysis. It can be concluded that for successful implementation of any new assessment scheme the implementation should work in tandem with extensive school-based exploration of the problems and possibilities of new approaches to assessment.
Most importantly, we need to realize that these changes greatly depend on whether or not the teachers feel they have the time, knowledge, material, zeal and zest to achieve the goal. However its continuous progress will depend on the teachers’ conviction and support for it. It is a conventional wisdom that teachers are the best catalysts for any educational reform. They need to understand and appreciate the wellness of SBA. It cannot be achieved until and unless teachers understand the concept of SBA and are equipped with the right knowledge, skills, and attitudes to practice it effectively. Their competency and commitment are key ingredients in the success of any assessment endeavors. However Teachers need to be properly trained, motivated, encouraged so that they become school- based assessment literate and feel a stronger sense of efficacy and ownership for the new modes of assessment. As a teacher it is my whole hearted expectation that SBA will bring about noteworthy changes among students as well as teachers making them more capable to suit to the rapidly changing contemporary society. Coupled with proper policy implementation strategies, the new school based assessment initiative will surely become a success story in our schools.
Author is a teacher and can be reached at rabiawani@yahoo.co.in
