Getting PEP right

THE CURTAIN has come down on the 2018 Grade Six Achievement Test (GSAT), bringing to a close its 19-year run, and signalling a new era of the Primary Exit Profile (PEP) in 2019. The proposed PEP, a new and exciting paradigm in our educational landscape, is a series of assessments that will provide a profile of where the student is academically, essentially capturing the student’s strengths and weaknesses and readiness for grade seven.

It will also assess students’ knowledge, as emphasis will be placed on assessing 21st-century skills such as critical thinking and communication. Let me say from the outset that the proposed PEP is a move that I fully endorse. We should have been here a long time ago, but as the old adage goes, ‘better late than never’.

PEP, by its very nature, is all about assessment, and this is an important driver in the 21st-century debate about teaching and learning. The proposed implementation of PEP has now brought into sharper focus the conversation of classroom assessment in general and formative assessment in particular.

Highlighting this reality is the National Educational Inspectorate (NEI), which has identified classroom assessment practices as weak, irregular and inconsistent. The NEI noted specifically that formative assessment was unsatisfactory. This was endorsed by the findings of Ministry Paper #87/14 on Curriculum and Assessment, that 50 per cent of the items on GSAT assess recall, which are lower-order cognitive skills.

PEP will focus on the assessment of higher-order cognitive skills, which require greater assessment competency and effectiveness in designing, interpreting and monitoring the assessment process.

In spite of the many salient issues associated with PEP, the sine qua non for getting PEP right is teacher competency and effectiveness in designing, interpreting and monitoring the requisite assessments.

The ministry has taken steps to address this very issue through the placing of assessment coordinators in schools. This is good, but since it is not a situation where one coordinator is assigned to each class, the onus is on the individual classroom teacher to hone the requisite assessment knowledge and skills. What are these skills? How can teachers become competent and effective so that they can adroitly administer PEP?

IDENTIFYING THE GAP

There are four core elements of formative assessment: identifying the ‘gap’, feedback, student involvement and learning progression. Teachers need to have clear understanding of these elements, in order to use formative assessment successfully in the classroom.

PEP is about higher-order thinking skills and application of knowledge. Traditional assessments answer the question, “Do you know it?” Performance assessment, on the other hand, answers the question, “How well can you use what you know?”

Performance assessment involves the demonstration and application of knowledge, skills, and work habits through what is known as a performance task. The task must be meaningful and engaging to students; it should also provide an authentic audience to whom they will present their knowledge.

Performance task is extremely central to PEP, which means that teachers must be au fait with its construction and limitations. In constructing performance assessments, teachers must consider what content standards to assess. Teachers should also think of the limitations of performance assessment as well, such as lower reliability and generalisability.

Rubrics are descriptive scoring schemes that are developed by teachers or other evaluators to guide the analysis of the products or processes of students’ efforts (Brookhart, 1999). Scoring rubrics are typically employed when a judgement of quality is required and may be used to evaluate a broad range of subjects and activities.

Fairness is a central aspect of examinations such as PEP, and any inherent unfairness in any aspect of public examinations would be contradictory to the concept. The issues of fairness to which reference is often made are, essentially, matters of teacher inconsistency and bias.

One way to eliminate this bias and inconsistency is through moderation of assessments that are instituted by public examination boards. Moderation is a quality-assurance process that ensures appropriate standards. It is a process for ensuring that marks or grades are awarded appropriately and consistently.