Child-Friendly Assessment

In one of my earlier post, I talked about the need for assessment of learning, and that assessment need not necessarily be a burden.  Just to clarify again, assessment starts the moment we first interact with the child and ends when the child left.  It’s a continuing process, and how you used the findings will determine its importance.

Assessment can be done through our daily observations, activities and interactions with the child.  However, our education system also demands a child to go through some form of written paper-pencil test which are most often standardized, and this is where the issues and gross misunderstanding of assessment arises.

A written paper-pencil test, especially those of the summative nature, are often large-scale, standardized, and more often than not, assesses only the recall and retrieval ability of the child.  Such assessments are a burden and can even have major implication on the self-esteem of the child.   It’s no wonder standardized assessment are often seen negatively because it assumes that every child learns in the same way, took away the autonomy of the child and the teachers, and reduces the whole being of an individual into statistics. 

But large-scale standardized assessment must not be confused with individual assessment (worth of a being) as it has its own objectives and usage.  They are meant to be quantified, and it has its due share of benefits. Large-scale standardized assessment, if designed objectively and executed methodically can yield several benefits, such as: ensuring accountability of the delivery system, monitoring performances at various stages/levels of the schooling system, informing educational policy and planning, facilitating better teaching-learning processes through instructional diagnosis and generating a discourse on quality of student learning.

Large-scale Assessment has often been misused that it has become an exacting experience for the students and the teachers.  Students are habituated to an assessment that can only lead to stress, marking, pass or fail, and a tension for their future. Large-scale standardized assessment must veer-off from that perception, and one way to do that is to adopt a child-friendly approach of assessment.

Child-friendly assessment is a concept that can be defined simply as the deliberate process of administrating a contextualized assessment in a stress-free environment through a friendly process. Child-friendliness must start from the conceptualization of the tools that we used for assessment, on how we present the reports and how we used it.

Child-friendly assessment is a deliberate process, and every aspect of it must be though-out before starting.  It begins from the tool development process till how we choose to present the data at the end.

Elements of Child-Friendliness in the Tool of Assessment:

• Tool must have Diverse questions types with more MCQs than constructed responses: MCQs can cover broad topics, can easily detect misconception and misunderstanding, are more reliable and ease the checking process; while we need few constructed responses to test the depth of understanding.
• Tool must take into account the aptitude and capabilities of the children: The structure, language used, and content of stems are derived from the existing syllabus considering its age-appropriateness.
• Tool must take into account the experiences of the child: The constructed responses must focus on the child’s narrative of their life experiences.
• Tool must respect and acknowledge the social and cultural context of the child: The tools are designed to ensure context appropriateness, and sensitively includes examples and contents from each area of where the tools are administrated.
• Tool must respect and accommodate the prior knowledge and experiences of the child: Besides asking questions that are directly related to the experience of the child, it also asks them question related to topics which they have covered previously.
• Tool must have simple language and design: The papers are designed in such a way that it minimizes room for confusion (eg. No questions are broken across pages, differentiation between number and stems, consistency in formatting and wording, and proper instructions), have illustrations and pictures to make it more attractive.
• An Exhaustive Rubrics for Constructed responses: The rubrics or answer key must consider the child’s point of views.  The tool developer must pilot their tools before finalizing it, exploring all possible ways a question can be answered.  The child’s point of view on an issue will come within a context, and such views must also be assessed from that point of view.

Elements of child-friendliness in Practices and Processes of Administration:

• Be very selective of the Assessor: Be very selective of who you select as assessors.  You don’t want random people to go to school to administer the assessment.  We want someone who is approachable, pleasant and friendly to children, and have had experience of working with children before, and have had basic introduction to the various concept of education.  We also want that person to be able to comprehend the process of tool administration and maintain data quality.
• Emphasis on training of assessors: Assessors must be thoroughly trained for every processes and practiced for a number of days. The training must include mock-sessions for every key process like how to introduce yourself to the schools and students, how to introduce your tool to the students, what to say to the students to assure the students and reduce their stress, how to build rapport with the students, etc.
• Rapport-building with the students: Make it compulsory for the assessor to focus on rapport building with the institution and the children before starting the assessment.
• Have a set of what to do and what not to do: Train your assessors on a set of good practices that includes what to do and what not to do, how to speak, how to behave, and even appearance.
• Focus on reducing the stress/tension in the assessment location: Train your assessors on how to assure the students that the assessment is not an assessment of their worth and talk about how one can change our destinies.
• Reading of Questions: In Primary school, the questions could be read-out by the assessors (just have a separate instruction manual on what to read and not to read, and which word to emphasize, based on the objective of each of the questions).
• Defined Process: Have a well-defined process for tool adminstration that is also documented as a manual and can be referred to by the assessors at all time and ensure that the assessors adhere to the manual.

Large-scale assessments are always expensive, as such it usually come with specific objectives.  They are mostly summative in nature, but many parts of the tools must be used formatively.  Doing assessment only for quantification purpose should be a crime, it’s not fair at all.  The data has so much potential to enhance the learning, so the findings must invariably go back to the teacher so that she can deal with the misconceptions and other challenges.

As we can seen from the above, standardized assessment can be versatile and can also be used for formative purposes also, however, standardized assessment has its own specific objective, as such, a teacher must refrain from using tools of such standardized assessment for assessing their own students, except for preparing them for such assessment. 

No one knows the students better than a teacher, and the teacher is the only qualified person to design a more contextualize tools. Consider the level and context of your child when designing, ask them question in a way they can fully understand what is being asked of them, focus on critical thinking and analyzing misconception, and most importantly, use the findings. 

It is in human’s nature to always want to know if they have achieved their objectives or not. Assessment is done basically because we have objectives.  And all our institutions that sets out with specific objectives, want to see if they are progressing as per their expectation, where and when they need to do course correction, and what remedial issues need to be taken.  Standardize assessment is here to stay, in school and outside school,  and we need to ensure that the tools we used and the processes we followed doesn’t add to more stress for our students.