Assessments are tools used within education systems to determine how well students perform primarily to gauge their progress but also for a variety of other actors - parents, teachers, schools, policy makers and donors.... [ view full abstract ]
Assessments are tools used within education systems to determine how well students perform primarily to gauge their progress but also for a variety of other actors - parents, teachers, schools, policy makers and donors. Assessments can take several forms. However, in order to be meaningful there has to be a match between the philosophies and goals that underlie learning and the curricula, and assessment practices. Traditional (behaviourist) models of education have understood the curriculum to be a distinct body of information to be transmitted and learning as ‘received’ and ‘memorised’ knowledge. Progressive models of education, drawing on constructivist, situated, embodied and enactivist perspectives, view learning as a process of individual meaning making. Accordingly, it is necessary for assessments to reflect this understanding.
In the Indian context, while the latest revision in the National Curricular Framework (NCF 2005) reflects these progressive conceptions of education, assessment practices largely continue to remain behavioural and based on information recall. Even large scale surveys such as Annual Status of Education Report (ASER) continue to reflect these older conceptions of assessment.
In contrast with these practices and surveys, we discuss the results of a learning assessment study conducted by us, to understand the status of education of tribal students in the state of Maharashtra, India. Reflecting on the specific principles we adopted in designing the assessments, as well as a cross-comparison of results for three grades (2, 5 and 9), we aim to show how certain unexpected outcomes were observed in language, math and science learning. We discuss how these results present an opportunity to understand hurdles to children's learning in more depth, and thus also allow for a more nuanced policy advocacy.
