Not just curriculum, we need to rethink assessment too

Covid-19 has combined India’s multi-decade education challenges of justice with the learning loss of online delivery. Policy reformers had spent the first decade of the millennium on teacher salaries, teacher qualifications and small class sizes that gave no tangible outcomes. The recent shift in focus towards curriculum and teacher training is logical but will remain inadequate without reimagining assessments. Historians suggest catastrophes often trigger overdue changes; I make the case for shifting assessment thinking from purely assessment “of” learning to include assessment “for” and “as” learning.

India’s big school exams have become the tail that wags the dog; we manage transitions via gateways in Grade 4, Grade 8, Grade 10 and Grade 12. Each has high dropout rates; only half our kids who start pre-school finish Grade 12 and about half of those go to college. NEP 2020 imagines deep and expansive learning with a bold curriculum and robust pedagogy, but board exams and post-school choices force teachers, schools and parents to focus entirely on grades. Grades — especially as we define them — are not only a lazy proxy for capacity, capability, or competence but a monoclonal grade focus has a viral backwash effect, distorting teaching, eroding learning diversity, infecting younger grades, and eventually leading to kindergarten children mindlessly drawing standing lines and sleeping lines. Our gateway exams blunt wonder, curiosity and desire because what gets assessed gets taught.

Nobody grows taller by being measured. A linear industrial world needed the ability to recall information accurately and assessments that measured narrow content delivered one way, worked. Today’s rapidly changing post-industrial world needs constant iteration and reflection; a circular model where teaching and learning lead to assessments that identify strengths and challenges, leading to renewed goals and circling back with changes in teaching and learning. Assessments today must measure knowledge of content but also its understanding and the developing skills of learning. Profiling that paints a more holistic picture of a student’s strengths -- started to be mirrored by employers creating a balanced score-card of an employee’s attributes -- is built on age-based best practices that include brain development, social learning, identity, dispositions, self-esteem, impulse control, literacy competence, competition vs affiliation and skills like critical thinking, collaboration and communication.

Assessment needs three categories; of, for and as learning. Assessment “of” learning, the oldest kind, is often equated with summatives and usually indicates relative placement, usually using marks or grades to control student outcomes. This includes exams (which can be criteria or norm referenced, graded or marked) and standardised tests (used for universal comparisons, stage readiness checks or placements).

Assessment “for” learning— first identified by Caroline Gipp in the late 1980s — overlaps with ‘formatives’ and is a ‘forward-looking’ view that prepares students for a lifetime of learning by acknowledging that everyone learns differently but there are predictable patterns and pathways that learners can follow to meet goals. It demonstrates and develops learning, uses mistakes as feedback for learning, building confidence and capability of learners. ‘Formatives’ are mostly ungraded, and can be in-class tasks, conversations, skill observations, peer or self-assessments, and include feedback and reflection. These are simple but not easy and require rebuilding teacher capacity, and also building learners’ evaluation and reflection skills.

Assessment “as” learning focuses on the learner making connections as they perform, needing longer term development of the methodology for research, communication, self-management, collaborative learning and critical thinking. Assessments today are largely “of” learning. Boards that involve continuous assessment, extended coursework and project submissions besides exams, not only ensure that their evaluations are robust, representative, and growth focussed, but create lifelong learners.

NEP 2020 proposes shifting away from the 10+2 exams of 60 boards, to a new 5+3+3+4 framework. NEP’s ‘tight but light’ regulatory system will need data-based governance. Schools generate a lot of data around attendance, behaviour, homework delays, besides exam grades, but the data often exists in silos, does not transfer from one year to the next, and is not structured for analysis. Academic data has four purposes— monitoring, measuring, documenting and reporting— with the smallest purpose being reporting and the biggest, monitoring. This is currently reversed. Reimagining assessment needs establishing rigorous standards for student and teacher assessment and performance and restructuring assessments around the three purposes. This needs a new foundation in mark/grade restructuring, data management systems, teacher and examiner training, and student preparation.

The NEP 2020 target of assessment change in 2022 was always going to be tough. It has been made tougher by Covid-related closures, fatalities and a shrunk economy. The Covid havoc with traditional board exam students is a passing shower that must be resolved thoughtfully, but it should not distract us from meeting the climate change of assessments. This requires answering complex questions: How do we define learning achievement? What do we assess? How do we look at the data? What do we report? What do we do with the rest? What do we review? How do we review it? Who reviews it? How often? We always knew that a great education creates more questions than answers. Let the questioning begin.

(The writer is Head of School, Neev Academy)