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.  

Religion VS Education: Contradiction or Complementary

Every society need a moral compass to tell its member what is right/wrong, what is good/bad, what should be done under certain circumstances, etc. It acted as a guideline for the member of the society.

Religious beliefs and practices are one such moral compass or guidance in our life. And in any society, we need some sort of moral compass to tell us what is right, what is good, what is desired and what is dignified for the common good of the society based on general belief.  If any society don't have such moral compass, chaos will surely follow.

Moral compass are of course based on the society's general beliefs on what is good or desirable for them as a society. And what the society think is good or desirable changes as they move on and deal with new circumstances, new understanding and inventions, etc. But such beliefs, can also be institutionalized into a rigid frame that makes it hard for it to catch-up with the changing needs, thus they can become the unreasoned or out-dated beliefs, and to stick to that beliefs can hinder our progress as a humanity. Religion is one such institutionalized belief system.

Every religious practice or belief are not necessarily unreasoned, afterall they are based on what the society thought was good for the member of the society at the time of institutionalization. Take for example, the concept of love and peace are taught by all religion, and they are as desirable today as it was then. On the other hand, some religious practices demands that we stone to death a certain people, which are cruel and barbaric. So despite what our religion said about such thing, we decided to ignore them because, as a human, we have the capacity to logically think and reason the implications, and therefore, make independent decision about such issues.

The issue is, most often, religion demands blind faith, and blindly follow the moral compass it made for us centuries ago.  Such moral compass have not been updated to the needs and desire of the society, so it usually come across as unreasoned, even barbaric. The primary aims of education is to take us beyond such unreasoned beliefs and practices. Education too is suppose to provide us a moral compass in the form of reason, logic and rationality that will guide us through life. But considering the current status of our education, is it able to provide us that?

If we are to view the role of the teacher as a facilitator, it doesn't matter how much religion is practiced, education will achieve it's aims. If we are to view the teacher as a mentor/guide/master etc, they might hamper the process of logic and reason, but as long as the student continued their education, and that our curriculum really encompass all the elements of the aims of education, nothing will stop education from achieving it's goal.

Better Citizenship and Disciplining in Schools

When visiting schools and interacting with teachers, one of the questions that keep coming is regarding disciplining of students inside the school. Looking at the need for disciplining of students (whatever the reason might be) and the aims of education especially in the creation of a better citizens, one of the question that arises is: Does disciplining (a strict one) will create a better citizens out of the students by conforming them all to a desired ways?  

One of my views is that, strict disciplining will lead to conformation, which the parents also expected the teacher to do out of their children, will lead to a better citizen who would cast their vote every election, follow traffic rules, and conform to the law everywhere without ever questioning.  

On the other hand, the creative children that we want to raise are taught to be a free thinker, questions everything, and act accordingly.  Free thinker will not blindly follow the rule, free thinker will have the audacity to question the rule...

One of my experiences is that people who are more highly educated and more aware of their rights are more likely to not cast their vote on election days with the excuse that there is little or no choices, or that they break and then questions the law itself.  

Another way to view is that we can say such people are contributing to the nation building though their criticism and actions, which are not always desirable. But then again we can argue that, each rules and laws are enforced only after a proper, if not thorough, thought with a certain goal of common good.

But in the end, we have to have trust on our children and hope that they will, through their free thinking, think of the common and greater good, and contribute to the nation building through their free will.

THE TEACHERS’ PERSPECTIVE: FROM A THEORETICAL POINT OF VIEW

It might be wrong to make theoretical assumptions without a proper research, but we can definitely argue about the level of seriousness of the teachers regarding the in-service teachers’ training.  And I think we can safely argue that at least half of the teachers are not serious about the training; and I think, we all can make certain valid assumptions on why the teachers are not serious.  A few arguments could be made that (a) the teachers had attended such training for so many times without any visible or observable benefits, (b) the frequency of the training made them took it for granted, (c) based on their previous experience, they have no or very less expectation from the current training, etc. 

There are two concepts from psychology that can help explain the above behaviours/perception of the teachers, and understanding those concepts will also help us in understanding what we can do. The two concepts are (i) self-efficacy (Bandura, 1977, 2004) and (ii) learned helplessness (Peterson & Seligman, 1993; Fogle,1978).

Psychologist Albert Bandura has defined self-efficacy as one's belief in one's ability to succeed in specific situations. One's sense of self-efficacy can play a major role in how one approaches goals, tasks, and challenges. So, how do our teachers see themselves, their performance and effectiveness, and the challenges they faced every day in the form of their students whose learning need to be facilitated in such a way that we can fulfil the aims of our education?  The aims of education is not only about moving from one grade to another, and then find a job.  Education has a much broader objectives such as those value laden qualitative concept like justice, liberty, equality, democracy, good citizenship, etc. which are practically impossible to be achieved.  Unless one understand that we are not going to achieve those goals overnight, and we can only work towards the achievement of such aims, one is bound to doubt our capabilities in the process.  Besides, the teachers’ effectiveness is measured through observable results inside the class-room, and if the students are not learning or progressing as expected, the teachers are going to doubt their own ability to help the students learn.   

The other concept, Martin Seligman's concept of Learned Helplessness says that people who had tried and failed many times before have an attitude of hopelessness and passivity towards everything, including their jobs, based on their past experience. Such people will fail to respond even when there are opportunities available to them to improve.  Such people have seen and experienced many things, and their attitude is based on their personal experience.  Many teachers started out their teaching careers with high hopes and many interesting teaching methods and/or passion.  They started with much enthusiasm and inspiration, trying to improve our education system.  But in the first few years of their careers, they have seen and experienced an inflexible and unresponsive system, an unappreciative colleague and seniors, etc. and as such, they gradually lost their enthusiasm and inspiration, and become a part of the system that they wanted to change so much.  They tired and made many attempts and efforts to change or help the system, but their efforts were not appreciated or not even acknowledge, and thus ultimately they are forced to give up. Their passivity is learned and thus real, and you have to ‘move a mountain’ to earn their trust and be able to inspire them again.

In both the situation mentioned above, the solutions psychologists gave are very simple, though it is difficult to achieve.  People who have self-efficacy issue must be made to realize that self-belief and self-confidence come from our understanding of our own capabilities and capacities.  Teachers need to be encouraged and motivated from time to time, not just financially, but also verbally; and ISTT is one good opportunity for us to encourage and motivate the teachers, and take full advantage of the opportunity. 

Regarding those teachers with an issue of ‘learned helplessness’ must be assured that they have our full support in their desire to provide quality education, and bring change.  The only thing we can do for them to put their belief back in what they have already given up is to build trust and let them see our seriousness and commitment towards our goals.

And one precautionary note is that, we should try to avoid directly criticizing and belittling the work being done by the teachers during the training, doing so will serve none of us any good.

The Integration of Work and Education

I had earlier reviewed Marjorie Sykes’s The Story of Nai Talim about Gandhi's idea of education which I dismissed with one word: “romantic”!  I said the idea was romantic because the education system started by Gandhi’s failed to survive the economy of post-independent India which is an infant version of our current overtly commercialized capitalism.  Besides, I thought of the possibility of having such a school in the city and considering the kind of space it required, I thought it was practically impossible. 

Now looking back on my argument, I was too focused on the infrastructure aspect and not on the ideology of education.  If we take a good look, there is an integration of work and education at all level, and it cannot be separated.  The only thing absent is that raising the consciousness that the thing that we do everyday involved as many knowledge as available to use, the only thing is we are not aware of the knowledge we use, and we don’t know how to categorize them.

For example, a farmer integrated many knowledge in his day life.  He knows about the season, the rains, the pattern of cloud, how crops grows, what crops will be good in the type of soil, how to tilt his land and what to do with pest.  In other words, he knows botany, holti-culture, geography, language, applied science, etc. 

What we can do about the integration of work and education in our school is that, we don’t need a field where they can grow crops, or rear cattle, all we need is a room where we can store all sorts of things and give the freedom to children to do whatever they want to do with it.  For e.g. in the book “To the principal with love”, the author mentioned that we can collect old and used cycles and cycles part and store them in one room, children should be free to bring their own cycle and repair it, or build a new one from the parts that are available.  They should be allowed to tinkle with it, play with it.  We can do the same for computer parts for those of our children who want to be a computer/ hardware engineer, old (but clean) clothes for those of our children who want to be a designer.