Mass assessment a subjective measure of leaner's competence

If Nelson Mandela, one of the icons of change in Africa, was to wake up today from his eternal slumber, he would wonder if his quote; education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world, still has weight.

Probably he would have delivered a challenging speech about assessment, a key gap in education, to commemorate the International Day of Education that was marked late last month.

Article 53(1)(b) of Kenya's Constitution states that every child has a right to free and compulsory basic education. At implementation level, Kenya in the spirit of Sustainable Development Goal (SDG) 4:1, education is one of the major pillars of Vision 2030.

The most recent review of this vision was carried out in 2013 and that laid emphasis on the use of technology applied by the learner in accessing education. This is further reinforced in Kenya through the Children’s Act 2002, which lays emphasis on the fact that every child has a fundamental right to education and must be given an opportunity to achieve and maintain an acceptable level of learning.

Good policy support in place and apt assessment make the main recipe for an admirable education system. Peter Drucker, a respected management theorist, registers that what gets measured gets managed. Therefore, assessment is a key catalyst in the education of a learner. Through it a learner is able to realise personal grey areas and with the support of the teacher, a learner is able to self-gauge on capabilities.

Granted, Kenya has in place a national examinations council whose sole mandate is to administer examinations to various cadres of learners. However, this is routine as is being ritually executed now when the Form Four candidates are taking exams.

It turns learners into products on a conveyor belt in a processing factory, from where brands are packaged and end up on shelves of the supermarket. Mass assessment is not the right tool that education would impress. It leaves most learners raw for they are fixated on a linear approach, which is, teach, dispense exams and publish results.

Our new Competency-Based Curriculum (CBC) has premiered a new assessment system where it is no longer position in class that matters but the ability of the learner to carry out certain tasks that involve both the teacher and parent as facilitators.

We, however, need to appreciate one glaring gap, which is lack of adequate human and fiscal resources. The kind of assessment desired is what improves the learner's informed approach to learning and after school, the graduate fits in seamlessly into what the community expects out of them.

It is within this very breath of competency-based assessment that this year’s theme for the International Day of Education titled, 'Changing Course, Transforming Education', found strength.

Kenya needs to change course, particularly in assessment, if our graduates from various levels of education are going to fit within the labour realm or much better, the self-employment radar, which is the call for most developed economies that have embraced technical courses-based learning – TVET. These include Germany, the UK, Singapore, India and China. We need to highly embrace the essence of assessment.

It brings closer the meaning of an article, 'Integrating assessment with learning: What will it take to make it work?', published in 2007 by the journal of Computer Science and Economics. Therein, two educationists, Dylan Wiliam and Marnie Thompson, advocate for the five attributes of the AFL strategy.

In their study, there was a need to change classroom assessments using five elements of AFL, namely, making goals and assessment criteria explicit and understandable, creating a situation that makes learning visible, providing feedback that moves learners forward, activating learners as resources to each other, and activating learners as owners of their learning. Assessors of the core competencies of CBC can tap from such strategies.

This line of thought formed part of the texture of deliberations during the 2021 Education Evidence for Action (EE4A) conference held in November in Kenya. It was concluded that Kenya is yet to develop an assessment framework for competencies for learning and with particular regard to the CBC.

Despite this challenge, a number of stakeholders continue to build up muscles on the CBC trajectory. Through a recent knowledge transfer exercise from a research initiative by Zizi Afrique Foundation, parents were organised in clusters to propel community-based digital learning in Bungoma County.

Today, the parent champions are able to host more than 1,250 learners every week and oversee digital learning sessions at community level. This is participatory learning, which catapults parental engagement and mutual accountability. Similarly, the Regional Education learning initiative (RELI) is incubating a contextualised assessment of life skills and values for East Africa. These, among many others, enrich the assessment menu for Kenya's education.

As we wade through 2022, stakeholders in education need to prioritise assessment as it is a key pillar in developing the ability of our learners and therefore the desired human capital, more so as given relevant weight in Vision 2030.