Punjab to change student assessment system

Few teachers familiar with current system for setting and marking Class V, Class VIII exams.

LAHORE: The Punjab Examination Commission (PEC) is likely to change the way it sets and marks question papers for Class V and Class VIII exams because few teachers are familiar with its current assessment system, a PEC official told The Express Tribune.

The Punjab government adopted the Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes (SOLO) taxonomy, a model that describes levels of increasing complexity in students’ understanding of subjects, for Class V and Class VIII exams in 2006. It is now expected to shift to the Bloom taxonomy, an older model.

“For the last four years the examiners have been confused about how they should be marking or setting the papers because they don’t know much about the SOLO taxonomy,” said Professor Nasir Zahid of the Institute of Education and Research, Punjab University.

He said that most teachers were familiar with the Bloom taxonomy but few teachers outside of Australia and a few Pacific countries understood the SOLO taxonomy. “Our teachers have been taught the six levels of learning described by Bloom and they can confidently apply them when setting the question papers and when checking them,” Zahid said.

“It would be a good decision for the PEC to set the Class V and Class VIII exams for 2011 under the Bloom taxonomy.”

Muhammad Jameel Najam, former director of public instruction, told The Express Tribune that UNICEF had funded the shift to the SOLO taxonomy and provided two Australian consultants, Dr Ken Vine and Dr Ted Redden, to implement the model in Pakistan.

He said that Dr Vine and Dr Redden had left the country last year because the Punjab government had failed to meet four conditions required for implementation of the SOLO system. The Punjab government was supposed to train teachers under the SOLO taxonomy, develop textbooks based on SOLO, rank public schools on the basis of exams results, and arrange remedial classes for students who had failed Class V but were still promoted to Class VI, he said. “SOLO only matches the Australian curriculum. It does not match ours,” Najam said. “The Punjab government had to accept SOLO before because it needed foreign funding at the time. But this system has not been fruitful and is wasted in our country.”

Dr Bashir Gondal, the PEC’s senior research fellow, admitted that the SOLO taxonomy did not match the curriculum and was unfamiliar to teachers. But he said SOLO was a better model than Bloom.

Before the PEC was established in 2006, Class V and Class VIII exams were organised by the Directorate of Public Instruction, which would provide executive district officers (education) across the province with model question papers that they would then use to set the exam. Every year, the PEC sets exams for some two million students of Class V and Class VIII.

SOLO vs Bloom

The Bloom taxonomy, proposed in 1956 by Benjamin Bloom, describes six learning objectives for students: knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis and evaluation.

The levels are sequential and hierarchical, so students are meant to complete one level before moving on to the next, more difficult level. So, for example, a student would have to gain a level of knowledge before moving to comprehension. Exams designed along the Bloom model.

Published in The Express Tribune, November 27^th, 2010.