Nothing gets attention unless it is assessed.
The statement was made by the Uganda National Examinations Board chief executive Dan Nokrach Odongo after watching a play and listening to four pep talks by leading sportspeople and a musician in Nairobi for two weeks.
Odongo was among more than 100 delegates from Africa and around the world who had attended the 39th conference of the Association for Educational Assessment in Africa and on the last day, got chance to watch a play by Riara Springs Academy, entitled, "The eyes have it."
They also listened to Catharine Ndereva, marathon runner, Douglas Wakiihuri, a long-distance runner, Douglas Wakiihuri, singer-songwriter Suzanna Owiyo owiyo and Collins Injera, talk about the struggles they went through before reaching the pinnacles of their sporting and music careers.
The renditions got the admiration and applause of the assembled delegates, with one exclaiming: “How do you assess all these talents?”
Implied in a haunting rhetorical statement by Odongo are three issues about educational policy, curricular, standards and assessment in an education system.
First, the curriculum must be reasonably broad and balanced for all learners. It must also have depth and coherence. In education parlance, a broad and balanced curriculum is one that teaches a wide range of subjects and topics without straining the child. It promotes a broad range of knowledge and skills and allows that child to discover and pursue their own particular interests and passions.
Such a curriculum caters for the learning needs of all students, so that students with different aptitudes, interests and abilities can give full play to their potential. It also provides greater learning space and widens students' knowledge base for all-round development.
Balanced curriculum is about combining the skills and knowledge, the technical with the non-technical, the academic with the creative and the stretch with the accessible.
“There is no one who doesn’t have a talent,” Wakiihuri said during the conference, a remark that aptly reflects this vision of curriculum thinking.
The second policy issue implied in Odongo’s poignant statement is that the prescribed curriculum must not only be taught, but must be seen to be taught without equivocation, or beating corners. The question of removing subjects such as Physical Education or library lessons from the school timetable should not arise. Nor should teachers or schools skip teaching certain topics because they are not examinable.
The third and equally important policy issue is that the assessment process must be aligned, must be authentic and must be faithful to the curriculum objectives. Assessment is part and parcel of a curriculum. It evaluates the effectiveness of the implementation of the curriculum. As much care must go into its design as it goes into curriculum design. There is and should not be any compromise on this.
The father of the modern New Zealand education system, Dr C.E Beeby, observed in a speech at Commonwealth Education Conference in Lagos, Nigeria: “inappropriate methods of examination or instruction can ruin any curriculum.”
It is rigorous adherence to the objectives of the curriculum means that no subject or topic will suffer the inattention that when schools teach to the test. It is teaching to the test—teaching in the light of examinations—that tempt teachers to remove certain subjects from the timetable or skip certain topics or concepts in a subject.
All the bodies of content knowledge or a specific set of cognitive skills enshrined in a subject or a topic contributes to the training of the mind, heart and body of the child. Excluding one subject or topic because it is not examinable or never examined is to undermine the all-round development of the child.
It was the same Dr Beeby, who in helping to shape the education policy of New Zealand, who observed: "Every person, whatever the level of his academic ability, whether he be rich or poor, whether he live in town or country, has the right, as a citizen, to a free education of a kind for which he is best suited and to the fullest extent of his powers."
The conference theme: Educational assessment for nurturing every learner’s potential is consistent with Dr Beeby's vision—every child has potential. However, whatever potential the child has cannot only be identified and, thereafter, nurtured by a broad and balanced curriculum. Taught as envisioned and learned as envisioned.
Too often a curriculum covers a range of subjects and topics that is not humanly possible to assess all. Assessment identifies—as far as content is concerned—certain topics or concepts that are fairly representative.
However, the abilities, skills, values and attitudes that it assesses are not restricted to any one subject or topic. Hence the folly of ignoring to expose learners to all the curriculum content that authorities want learners to know.
Exposure to the gamut of curriculum content—properly taught—stretches the critical thinking, problem solving and the imaginative and creative powers of the learner. Examinations that come at the end of a curriculum cycle should simply be able to assess how well teaching and learning has taken place first, before using the assessment results for other policy making purposes.
In his Influence of testing on the Curriculum, a Boise Professor of Education and Public Policy Emeritus George F. Madaus, an internationally renowned expert notes: “Testing programmes should, in my view, be seen as an ancillary tool the curriculum and instruction—albeit, a necessary, useful and important one—and nothing else. Measurement-driven instruction invariably leads to cramming; narrow the curriculum, concentrates attention on those skills most amenable to testing; constrains the creativity and spontaneity of teachers and students, and finally, demeans the professional judgment of teachers.”
When closing the conference on behalf of the Cabinet Secretary for Education Ezekiel Machogu, the Principal Secretary for Basic Education said that African policy makers on education must think thoughtfully about how they assess talent.
He gave the advice because talent, creativity is a variable not easily amenable to measurement, adding that they must design a fair assessment system to ensure that no child is left behind in determining the innate abilities children have.
We should design the curriculum and assess that instead of resigning to nothing gets attention unless it is assessed, we move to everything in the curriculum gets attention, with or without it being assessed.
Communications officer, Ministry of Education
