EDUCATION TRIBUNE |
Assessing school students Campus Notes
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Assessing school students
FEBRUARY and March are the most beautiful months of the year in most parts of India. But at a time when adults are enjoying the glorious weather, savouring the colour and fragrance of thousands of flowers and letting their hearts warm to the beauty of birdsong, schoolchildren are afflicted with what has come to be termed as examination fever. With their annual or promotion examinations due in March, they have no time for excursions into the countryside, friendly cricket matches on leisurely Sunday afternoons and the dozens of fetes and carnivals that are held during this season.
Schools and parents, jointly conspire to ensure that children keep their noses fixed to their books with no time for entertainment or co-curricular activities. Promotion examinations are primarily a diagnostic device to establish whether the child has acquired the necessary skills and ability to be able to cope with the curriculum of the next grade. But with parents becoming more and more ambitious for their children, as far as marks are concerned, promotion examinations have taken on an added dimension. In addition to this, many schools look upon the promotion examinations as a process to weed out children who just might, some years later, compromise their excellent board examination results, which seem to have become the sole reason for their existence. In fact, some schools go so far as to ask parents to sign affidavits at the beginning of each academic year, to say that if their child fails to get a minimum 50 per cent marks in each subject in the promotion examination, they will withdraw the child. As a result, though no child takes an extreme step because of a poor performance in the annual examinations at the elementary level, the system has, over the years, come to perpetuate a tyranny of its own. If you ask an academically average child what aspect of school life he dislikes the most or that he is most afraid of, the chances are that he will name the promotion examination. Perhaps this is one reason why the Right to Education Act prohibits the holding back of any child during the elementary years, thus making the promotion examination more or less redundant. That this clause, when implemented, will make for far happier children in school, is beyond argument, but there is also the fear that it will spew some problems that may be beyond the ability of most Indian schools to deal with. The promotion examinations, as discussed earlier, serve the purpose of establishing the ability and skills of the child to cope with the curriculum of the next grade. In very rare cases, when there was a gap between achievement and expectation, he was kept back and by repeating the curriculum which he had already studied, he did, more often than not, succeed in acquiring the skills that were wanting. Now, with the child being promoted, in spite of this gap, the gap will get wider with each passing year. The problem will be compounded even further by another clause in the Act, which provides for admissions at other than the entrance level, strictly according to age and not by ability. As a result, therefore, where schools had one or two children who were not ready for the next grade, there will now be an ever-increasing number of children in this group. Most teachers will agree that there are always a very large number of students in each class, who in spite of the cumulative assessment system, which many schools already have in place, drift nonchalantly through the year without doing a stroke of work. They only put their heads down in the last two months and manage to get themselves well enough equipped to move on to the next grade. Without the fear of being held back, these students will do no work at all and add further to the number of inadequately enabled children in each grade. Another aspect of promotion examinations, which seems to have been forgotten, is that while the examination serves to establish a child’s preparedness for the next class, it also serves as a benchmark, of sorts, for the teacher. The West, from where this provision has been taken, is witness to the lack of such a benchmark because it is common knowledge that children in Europe and America often reach sixth and seventh grades without having acquired, to any measurable degree, the ability to read and write. A school I know once got a very enterprising, very innovative Head of the Junior School. She had come with long experience in schools in the West and was consequently regarded with a great deal of awe and reverence. She introduced many wonderful and exciting innovations, among them the abolition of the annual exam at grades four and five. All went well till the grade four children graduated to the senior school. The senior schoolteachers were shocked to find that the ability of these students to read and write was limited and that they lacked the basic skills in mathematics. Needless to say, the annual examinations for grades four and five were re-introduced immediately. The Act does attempt to provide a solution to both the problems of bridging and accountability of teachers. It says that a teacher must “assess the learning ability of each child and accordingly supplement additional instructions, if any, as required”. But this is easier said than done. The basic problem in this is that in India, we make very little difference between learning a curriculum and learning the skills required to learn a curriculum. Most of the time, the teachers teach the curriculum and the child learns the skills as a side result. Remedial teaching in any form, whether it is private tuition or extra classes in the school, does nothing more than go over the curriculum again, and yet again. Teachers are not equipped with the expertise either to identify or to teach skills that would bridge the gap between ability and expectation. The only area where the concept of bridging is used is in learning centres where special educators are teaching children with learning disabilities. Most schools, I suspect, will just drift along, especially in view of the fact that the Act maintains a deafening silence as to what will happen to these children on the completion of their elementary education. Going by what is happening in the West, where most children drift along till they complete the mandatory age in school and then drop out, we may also see this phenomenon repeated in India because many children will find themselves incapable of coping with the secondary stage of school education. I am, however, feel sure that some schools will work sincerely to develop a mechanism for effective bridging. The process of bridging, as the Act itself implies, has little to do with the curriculum. It consists of testing the child’s ability and skills, identifying those that are weak and then working to strengthen these specific skills. Since the problem will have come from the West, it will probably be the West that will provide us with the solution. For instance, in Canada, there are a number of private agencies which work conjointly with the school education boards to provide specialised and excellent bridging services. The child is tested, in a scientific manner, his weak skills identified and specially designed software provided to the teacher to help the child to develop these skills. However, all this comes at a cost. The testing is expensive, the software is expensive and the training of the teachers is expensive. As a result, this application, too, like all other meaningful innovations in school education, would be limited only to the most elitist schools in the country. The only saving grace is the hope that even if only a few schools are able to do this, it might eventually mark a shift, no matter how small, from mere learning to learning how to learn. Whatever its defects, the promotion system did have a very obvious advantage. The yearly grind did inculcate in our children the ability to work hard, an ability which put them a rung above others when they went abroad to study, an ability which stood them in good stead at their work place. Whatever psychological disadvantages that the fear of being held back may have had, were far outweighed by the fact that it was an extremely strong and effective motivating factor. There is no denying the fact that our entire school education system needed an overhaul. Drastic changes were long overdue. The curriculum needed to be changed and the examination pattern itself needed to be revised. But I fear that in our desperate desire and need to change, by abolishing the promotion system altogether, we are perhaps committing the very foolish mistake of throwing the baby out with the bath water. An eminent educationist and author, the writer is Principal, Yadavindra Public School, Mohali
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Campus Notes GURU Nanak Dev University will conduct MET, PAM-CAT-2010 test for admission to MBA and MCA courses on July 4, 2010. The test will be conducted for admission to MBA and MCA courses run by Guru Nanak Dev University, Amritsar; Panjabi University, Patiala; Punjab Technical University, Jalandhar; and their affiliated colleges. Dr Inderjit Singh, Registrar of the university, Dr K.S. Kahlon, Head and Professor of Computer Sciences and Engineering, would be coordinators for the test.
Exam timing changed
The timing of examinations for LLB (TYC) parts I, II and III (annual system) and LLB (FYC) parts II, III and IV (annual system) of Guru Nanak Dev University scheduled to be held from May 2010 has been changed. The examinations will now be conducted from 9.30 a.m. to 12.30 p.m. instead of 1 p.m. to 4 p.m. The spokesman of the university said the venue for these examinations, however, would remain unchanged.
Heritage Village
Dr Gurmeet Singh, a Professor in the Department of Punjabi, GNDU, has been appointed as coordinator for Heritage Village being established on the university premises in collaboration with the Amritsar Administration.
Yoga camp
A nine-day yoga camp organised by Mata Nanki Girls Hostel of the university concluded here in which over a hundred students and hostel residents of the university participated. Dr Kuljit Kaur, Warden, Girls Hostel-I, and Dr Sukhleen Bindra, Warden, Girls Hostel-III, were the chief guest on the concluding day. The camp organiser and Warden of Hostel-II, Dr Viney Kapoor, while addressing the students laid stress on adopting yoga in daily routine to maintain good health. The participants also appealed for arranging regular classes in the university hostels. |
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Director, Career Guidance India (CARING) |