Assessment: From the forum

Is CCE about maintaining more and more records??
Message from a teacher in the English STF

"Hello. Today I got 3rd day CCA training in BRC office Davanagere.Really coming days, our job is going to be a tough and mental stress. We will loose our teaching skills and going to stick on "records,records". There is no time to discus about students with staff. Only record maintaining. but we have to follow govt orders"

Response from Dr Kumaraswamy, DIET Mysore Original Message Subject: 	Re: Re: [EnglishSTF-444] Re: [ss-stf '4214'] Date: 	Sun, 17 Feb 2013 00:02:11 +0530 From: 	Kumara Swamy 

For a minute close your eyes and think if CCE is the thing we need or not. It is definitely needed. We have been talking about it for long. But never practised it the way it should have been practised.

If something is right and academically desirable we will first accept the idea and see how we can make its implementation meaningful. The whole business of CCE is about understanding a child holistically. Every teacher has a fairly good understanding of his/her students. However, this gut feeling can not be substantiated easily. So we need some kind of systematic data. Such data will not only support our conclusions about a child but also open up other dimensions of the child's personality.

Let us think of an example about ourselves. If there is a small checklist about personality traits and someone checks them for us,   we would surely be interested in knowing what that person's assessment about us is. Every such feedback would make us think about ourselves. That is why we stand before the mirror and take feedback on our own presentation, make necessary changes in our dressing and the like. The mirror does not mince any data. And it is so enjoyable looking at our own image in the mirror.

That is how our feedback to a student has to be. Every student is interested in getting feedback. Instead of going by gut feeling, if we have an objective and comprehensive assessment of the child, it adds to the worth of our feedback. It also tells the child/parent in which direction he/she has to move.

So to have a variety of data on a child's learning and other personality traits is surely desirable.

Now let us think of the burden part of it. I agree. It appears to be a burden. Until something becomes a habit it is a burden. For a person who never walks, walking half a km is a burden. But for morning walkers walking 5 kms daily is not a burden. After getting sugar complaints, walking even 10 kms won't be a burden!! Should we wait till we get sugar complaints?

I always think of the teacher who gave elaborate feedback on my daughter when she was at school. I had deep respect of that teacher. Whenever I talk to parents about their wards in detail, they feel so happy, reassured about their ward's learning. But to what extent can we substantiate our own comments/observations on the child? Such a support is a faith building mechanism.

If I just tell you that you are an excellent teacher or a bad teacher, how would you like it? If I support my comment with some evidences from your own teaching behavior, you would be benefited by that. See how cce forms allow teachers to reflect over a child's profile comprehensively. I find it so good.

Neverthelss, I agree with you. When a govt mechanism implements something, there will be a lot of record building or documentation. This becomes necessary to build a habit. May be after a year, we will know where to stop,  how to make things simpler without compromising on quality.

Pl don't hesitate to respond to this. You are free to disagree with me completely. But I urge you to first appreciate the basic idea of CCE and how important it is for a child. We can explore ways of making it more bearable. We need to talk about these things and move towards better clarity on CCE practices.

Dr Kumara Swamy H DIET, Mysore

CCE for 8th standard
Questions were raised by Mr Tharanath Achar, Mr Tandavamurthy and Mr Shashi Kumar on how to structure CCE for Class 8.

Some thoughts have been shared below by Ranjani Ranganathan IT for Change

Continuous comprehensive evaluation is to help teachers help in formative assessment of children. The idea is that we can use assessments periodically to make corrections to ourselves as teachers so that we enable better learning processes. "Converting test marks to ten" and adding all those converted marks is only part of the framework. The focus is on reviewing students' work through the year and also to design processes that will allow us to observe different aspects of learning.

What I describe below may not be a solution for this year; these are just some guidelines for how we can plan for CCE.

The emphasis is on evaluating skills of learning, skills needed for the subject, conceptual understanding and problem solving. For example, some of these skills for science could be:
 * observation, recording (field work, lab work)
 * analysis (not only numerical)
 * ability to question and link concepts, build understanding (can be seen in a research based project)
 * ability to present, write and draw - not the language competence but the presentation of an idea (projects, assignments, shorter unit tests)
 * interest and willingness to go through the discipline of learning (submission of work, timely submission, level of detail)
 * content (some students might find some areas difficult; regular feedback through shorter tests could be one way of assessing difficulties in content areas and looking for appropriate resources)

For example the CCE set of evaluation materials could include:
 * 1) projects that the students complete that allow some component of field/ outside work
 * 2) assignments that encourage students to do independent study - having them solve problems and answer questions that are not necessarily to be found at the end of the textbook; these must be regularly given and should be regularly evaluated
 * 3) having formal experimentation classes and observing how students work in a lab setting - however this can be done only if the lab classes have been a part of the regular teaching-learning. In high school (upto class 10) the objective of working in a lab class is to learn how to work in the lab and not necessarily learn the content and how to work in a lab is a skill that must be taught separately!
 * 4) participation in classroom discussions (this could be difficult in a large classroom) but can be facilitated better using ICT [example - use a video to facilitate a discussion and observe the responses/ comments and participation from the children]
 * 5) tests (every 2 months/ quarterly, etc)
 * 6) Midterm and Final Examinations

These can be done by each term. The next step is to arrive at a weightage for the exam and the other components. For example, this weightage could be 60% and 40%. (In the ICSE, these other components from (i) to (v) constitute internal assessment and have weightage of 40%. Within the 40% of non-exam based assessment, how much weightage you want to give for regular homework, projects, lab etc. can be decided based on the school.)

For sample formats, please see assessment methods used for a class of and  for class 9. For this form of assessment to be effective, it must be accompanied by a similarly structured teaching.

One sample format of CCE is also available on Sample_Assessment_Format. This has been shared by Ms Savitha Naik, Senior Lecturer, DIET Kumta.