Abstract: CONCEPTUAL FRAMEWORK If education system sets its target for students to be able to think critically, solve problems individually and collectively, be creative, instructional and assessment processes must undergo a paradigm shift as suggested in National Curriculum Framework 2005. Critics of current assessment practices argue that the goal should be to have students who can create, reflect, solve problems, collect and use information, and formulate interesting and worthwhile questions. Thus, it is argued, our assessments - whether they are developed by teachers, writers of textbooks, or large corporations - must measure the extent to which students have mastered these types of knowledge and skills. Most of the criticism has been directed at the widespread use of achievement tests in our educational institutions. Many of our assessment practices place too much emphasis on assessing content and give too little attention to the skills and applications. Critiques point that such evaluation fails to assess learner's level of meta-cognition, creativity and other higher order skills which are mostly the prerequisite of real life situations, work employment, personal and professional growth. It is argued that we must no longer treat assessment as fundamentally separate from instruction. If curriculum, instruction, and assessment are integrated, the assessment itself becomes a valuable learning experience. Learning and evaluation activities are blended into a holistic act/task, which demands learners not to select but design and create the task. In this changing scenario, alternative technology mediated procedures such as e-portfolio and rubrics are the need of hour. In view of this, here an attempt has been made to provide an alternative paradigm of assessment from constructivist perspective. It first highlights the criticisms of prevailing achievement tests and presents some ideas of preparing portfolio and performance task from constructivist perspectives and assessing the performance by creating rubrics. Instructional processes provide the sufficient condition for quality education. Our instructional processes and practices are characterized largely by lectures where students are passive listeners. Such instructional processes contribute at best to lower order cognition, memorization and fragile learning; together, they make a grand nexus for large-scale failing in examination. Students lack problem-solving ability, higher order thinking and cognition, and creativity. If the education system sets its target for students to be able to think critically, solve problems individually and collectively, be creative, instructional processes must undergo a paradigm shift. Instructional processes must bring students at the centre of stage where they primarily learn to learn through peer interaction, problem-solving, experiential learning, etc. In this new instructional scenario, teachers will be facilitators of learning. Research as a tool for learning is quite common all over the world; introduced even at the pre-primary stage. Indeed, by the time students are in the 9th and 10th standards they should become researchers to be able to crack problems, contemplate solutions, explore and experiments alternative and creative ways of problem-solving instructional processes must be constructivist in its approach. Through constructivism, students will learn to construct their learning according to their own worldview that unfolds over the years of schooling. It is this learning to construct learning that will hold them into the adult life at work and later. Conventionally, education system, particularly school education is guided and controlled by concern for results in examination irrespective of the quality of learning --whether fragile or sustainable. The competition, though artificial, for securing percentage of marks in the final examination creates unusual stress in the students leading often to mental break down and suicides. This must change. Change in the mechanics of examination will be too simplistic a solution, amounting to treating the symptoms, not the disease itself. Examination-stress is directly related to facing the challenge of examination with 'fragile' learning due to memorizing huge stock of information. In order to manage the stress factor in examination it will be necessary to ensure sustainable learning.
Publication Year: 2010
Publication Date: 2010-01-01
Language: en
Type: article
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