Parliamentary Replies
Primary One Assessment
Name and Constituency of Member of Parliament
Mdm Halimah Yacob, Jurong GRC
Question
To ask the Minister for Education (a) what is the rationale for abolishing the Primary One year-end examinations; (b) how will the Ministry address parents’ concerns that their children may not be adequately prepared for major primary school examinations including the PSLE; (c) whether such parental concerns will result in greater pressure on the children as parents put them through additional afterschool programmes; and (d) what training and additional resources will be provided to teachers to help them handle the changes effectively.
Response
I thank Mdm Halimah for raising these questions.
Assessments — tests or examinations — serve as useful and critical tools to provide information about teaching and learning to individual pupils and their parents. Assessments also provide important information about standards of performance for the individual and the system as a whole. Like all tools, assessments must be used judiciously. They are not an end in themselves but should be properly applied in the right circumstances with clear educational outcomes in mind.
Summative assessments like term tests or year end exams have their uses and at appropriate stages are used to measure pupil achievement for the purpose of grading, ranking or certification. But they do not provide essential information about specific areas that the pupil could improve in that would help him better learn the topic or subject. In this regard, formative assessments provide richer information that can be used by the teacher, pupils and parents to improve in specific areas. For example, for English compositions, teachers can use rubrics to provide feedback to pupils on specific areas such as presentation of ideas, grammar and vocabulary. Rubrics provide a structured way of giving qualitative feedback beyond just an overall mark.
Both types of assessments should be used as tools to enable every pupil to reach his full potential but in the early years of education in lower primary, the more important focus should be on formative assessment to build basic learning skills rather than summative assessments to rank pupils.
Mdm Halimah asked if formative assessments would prepare pupils adequately for the PSLE. Formative assessments if used well can help accelerate pupils’ learning as they would identify specific skill sets or topics that the teacher could then focus on. We do need to train teachers in the application of formative assessments. Since July last year, MOE has partnered 16 schools to plan and prototype Holistic Assessment models and strategies at Primary 1 and Primary 2. This prototyping has enabled us to draw key learning points from the schools’ experiences as we expand to include more schools. MOE has plans for all primary schools to be trained in the use of formative assessments for P1 and 2 levels by 2013. When schools are ready, they will move towards the use of topical tests and bite-sized performance tasks to check for understanding and mastery for Primary 1 and 2. Such use is appropriate because they are more effective tools to form basic learning skills compared to summative exams. Parents will continue to receive marks and grades in these assessments. But beyond this, teachers will also provide qualitative feedback to the pupils and parents to highlight areas where pupils have done well, and also ways to improve pupils’ learning. In short, parents will be getting more and richer feedback about their children’s learning. Schools will monitor pupils’ progress and provide parents with useful feedback on the development of their children.