The purpose of Assessment:
Education is concerned with preparing citizens for a
meaningful and productive life, and evaluation should
be a way of providing credible feedback on the extent
to which we have been successful in imparting such an education. Seen from this perspective, current
processes of evaluation, which measure and assess a
very limited range of faculties, are highly inadequate
and do not provide a complete picture of an individual's
abilities or progress towards fulfilling the aims of
education.
But even this limited purpose of evaluation, of
providing feedback on scholastic and academic
development, can be achieved only if the teacher is
prepared even before the course of teaching begins,
armed with not only the techniques of assessment but
also the parameters for evaluation and the various tools
that will be employed. In addition to judging the quality
of the students' achievements, a teacher would also
need to collect, analyse and interpret their performances
on various measures of the assessment to come to an
understanding of the extent and nature of the
students' learning in different domains. The purpose
of assessment is necessarily to improve the
teaching-learning process and materials, and to be able
to review the objectives that have been identified for
different school stages by gauging the extent to which
the capabilities of learners have been developed.
Needless to say, this does not mean that tests and
examinations will have to be conducted frequently. On
the contrary, routine activities and exercises can be
employed effectively to assess learning.
Well-designed assessment and regular report cards
provide learners with feedback, and set standards for
them to strive towards. They also serve to inform parents
about the quality of learning and the development and
progress of their wards. This is not a means of
encouraging competition; if one is looking for quality in
education, then segregating and ranking children and
injecting them with feelings of inferiority cannot do it.
Last, credible assessment provides a report, or
certifies the completion of a course of study, providing
other schools and educational institutions, the
community and prospective employers with
information regarding the quality and extent of learning.
The popular notion that evaluation can lead to
identifying the needs of remediation, to be attended
to with remedial teaching, has created many problems
in curriculum planning. The term remediation needs to
be restricted to specific/special programmes that enable
children who are having a problem with literacy/reading
(associated with reading failure and later with
comprehension) or numeracy (especially the symbolic
aspects of mathematical computation and place value).
Teachers require specific training for effective diagnostic
testing that can be of assistance in remediation efforts.
Similarly, remedial work would require specifically
developed materials and planning so that the teacher is
able to give one-on-one time to work with the child beginning with what she/he knows and moving to
what she/he needs to learn, through a continuous
process of assessment and careful observation.
Indiscriminate usage of the term distracts from the
general problems of effective pedagogy, and makes
the child solely responsible for her/his learning and
also learning 'failure'.
