Testing times for teachers: educational assessment in South Africa

What happens when continuous assessment (CA) is added to established teaching practices? Do teachers need to rethink their current attitudes towards CA? Are teachers overly concerned with control? How can a change of attitude be encouraged? Could better assessment raise the quality of student learning?

A paper from the Universities of Natal and Sussex describes what South African teachers think of assessment and analyses the dilemmas facing assessment reform. Two examples, taken from the experiences of primary school teachers, suggest that South Africa has the opportunity to implement CA and promote more interactive teaching methods. Nevertheless, entrenched attitudes may make new practices hard to apply.

In Africa where in-service training has been available, it has tended to focus on procedural or bureaucratic functions – such as how to fill in and calculate official mark sheets – rather than helping teachers to understand the rationale and potential of CA. Even where there is a willingness to embrace new ideas about assessment, lack of training and tension between teachers’ values and those which underpin the new assessment order, are serious barriers to change.

The research demonstrates that:

• CA in South Africa has been seen as a technical solution to the education problem of only having one examination.
• Instead of empowering teachers and learners, complex new assessment requirements may alienate them and have damaging consequences.
• Far from achieving the aim of moving teachers from being curriculum implementers to curriculum developers, the assessment practices set out in South Africa’s new curriculum model could end up reducing teachers’ power.
• Many teachers’ attitudes to assessment are still influenced by the apartheid era's emphasis on rote learning of set texts, exams and leading ‘ignorant’ children to redemption.
• Assessment policy is unclear, partly due to the weak organisation of the national education ministry.
• In the absence of feedback, many teachers who have used new ideas in their teaching practice may be unaware that what they are doing is formative assessment.

The authors warn that CA – and particularly peer assessment – is not easy and depends on the development of considerable practical experience. Outward forms of educational practice may suggest a new assessment regime is being taken up, but without further debate and contextualised examination of these practices, their content may involve the collusion of teacher and learners to maintain the status quo.

With its relatively good provision of resources South Africa has potential to promote CA, transform the education system and empower teachers and disadvantaged students by:

• developing a more coherent and understandable curriculum structure
• exploring educators’ assumptions about assessment
• developing teachers' competence in CA through combined ‘off the job’ and in-school coaching
• challenging the current attitudes of in-service trainers towards assessment
• ensuring that when teachers receive information about CA that it distinguishes between the formal and informal purposes and does not over-emphasise the former
• ensuring that guidance to teachers on peer assessment does not underestimate power relations in a society where violence is never very far from any child’s experience.

 

Source(s):
‘Reconceptualising educational assessment in South Africa: testing times for teachers’, International Journal of Educational Development, 22, pp 673-686, by J. Pryor and C. Lubisi, 2001 Full document.

Funded by: Department for International Development, UK

id21 Research Highlight: 28 April, 2003

Further Information:
John Pryor
Centre for International Education
University of Sussex
Brighton BN1 9RG
UK

Tel: +44 (0) 1273 877144
Fax: +44 (0) 1273 678568
Contact the contributor: j.b.pryor@sussex.ac.uk

Centre for International Education, University of Sussex, UK

Cassius Lubisi
University of Natal
Post Bag X01
Scottsville
Pietmaritzburg 3209
Kwa-Zulu Natal
South Africa

Contact the contributor: Lubisi@nu.ac.za

University of Natal, South Africa

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'A useful addition? Active learning in secondary school mathematics in Botswana'

'Experiments in teacher training: improving primary science education in Fiji'