Testing Over Learning

Context: Taken too far, New Education Policy’s focus on learning outcomes can drain education of meaning

About Learning Outcomes (LO) 

• Definition: LO refers to grade-appropriate, basic competencies in numeracy and literacy, which school-going children are supposed to acquire.
• Recent trend of overemphasis on LO:
  • Large-scale assessment surveys emphasise LO: E.g. Annual Status of Education Report (ASER).
  • National Council of Educational Research and Training (NCERT): has come out with documents listing LO at elementary and secondary stages.
  • National Education Policy (NEP) 2020 underscores the importance of foundational skills as being central to a child’s schooling.

Problems associated with NEP 2020: Due to its overemphasis on LO.

• Lack of sound pedagogic rationale: E.g. Andhra Pradesh’s decision to convert all government schools from Classes I to X to English medium and to prepare “mirror image” textbooks.
• Follows a didactic approach: presenting information that is supposed to be passively consumed and memorised.Denies the agency of both teacher and student, making them subservient to printed text.
• May change teaching-learning processes: from a meaningful co-construction of knowledge to a teacher teaching to the test.

Positive aspects of the National Curriculum Framework, prepared by NCERT in 2005 which changed the form and nature of textbooks.

• Redirected the meaning of quality education: By following curricular, pedagogic and assessment practices inside the classrooms.
  • The landmark Learning Without Burden (LWB) committee (1993) identified dense, poorly written and weakly conceptualised textbooks, unwieldy syllabi and rote-based exam system for burdening children’s school lives
  • It thus sought to connect the life of the child outside the school with learning in the classroom.
  • E.g. social science textbooks acknowledged social conflicts which children experienced in their lives and helped make sense of them.
• Promoted a two-way track of constructing knowledge: among the teacher and the student.

Conclusion: It is essential to celebrate learning as a meaning-making exercise by the teacher and the student rather than simply focusing on LO that will allow testing to take precedence over learning.