It is the end of the year and the time for receiving and giving report cards. It is the dreaded moment for some children and parents when the fates of their children will get decided. Promotions are such a big deal for adults in the professional world. But they are an even bigger deal for children. So in this and the next column I will deal with:
• The function and purpose of the report card.
• The manner of reporting and its consequences.
• The issue of repeating a year.
The purpose of the report card is construed to give feedback to the parents. Actually, its original purpose is and ought to be primarily for the teacher. The kind of mistakes a child makes or the conceptual difficulties a child may have, should give the teacher and school a feedback about strategies to be adopted or changed. Instead, it becomes a judgment on the child.
There are two kinds of reports. One is the quantitative one which simply informs the child and parent how much a child got out of how much. This kind of reporting does not give any idea to the child, parent or teacher as to the exact nature of strengths and weaknesses. As most of the tests are written, they only test the written understanding. Often, teachers are not clear as to what is being tested. For example, in a fill in the blank question in geography where lets say, the answer is a ‘deciduous forest.’ If a child spells it wrong, often the teacher cuts the marks. But what was being tested here: the concept of the deciduous forest (a fill in the blank is not the best way to test concepts), or the spelling of the terminology? Spellings are a language test. If the terminology is to be tested then that should be a clear objective. So maybe this child understands what a deciduous forest is, what a tree in this forest looks like, where it grows and can even pronounce it, but gets it wrong in writing. So the marks are cut. I could give more examples of this kind where expectations from a test are not made clear and children are penalised. When marks are given, there is no real idea given to the child as to where to improve.
The other issue with a quantitative reporting is that it immediately positions children in a hierarchical relationship with others. This is obviously a normative system that does not look at the individual child but at a population. I won’t go into details here but this does not help a child improve. A quantitative evaluation is like saying that if someone earns more, he/she is better. Firstly, more is a relative term. Secondly, it does not take into account the context of evaluation, the other qualities and human values, life skills, etc. So a child who has great leadership skills but is bad at written expression gets penalized. Finally, what is being tested is not clear either. So children get marks for mugged up definitions but will get a zero for expressing their understanding in their own words. Obviously, mugging up is a lower order thinking skill whereas expression in one’s own words (whether oral or written) is a higher order thinking skill.
Somehow, marking to me appears much like branding a child. Labels of percentage are stuck onto a child that shelve children into slots. Obviously, quantitative evaluation such as objective type tests have their place in entrance exams, etc. But in the primary and secondary education, they are artificial and contrived.
The above article was published in the Ahmedabad Mirror on 20/04/2010