Mita Mukherjee

The Central Board of Secondary Education (CBSE) has asked teachers of its affiliated schools to adopt learner centric, inclusive and participatory approach for assessing students studying in Classes I to III.

Under the new assessment system, teachers will have to assess the task the pupils are asked to do and not the learners. In the process of assessment, emphasis will also have to be given to ensure building of self-awareness and self-esteem among students, the CBSE has said.

The board has recently announced its decision to introduce competency-based assessment of students to ensure “multidimensional progress monitoring”, an initiative envisaged under the National Education Policy . The above instructions to the teachers are a part of the guidelines prepared by the CBSE to guide teachers on how to prepare Holistic Progress Card (HPC) to provide the “360-degree multidimensional report” of students’ progress as recommended in the NEP.

According to the CBSE, in the HPC system, performance need not be measured through grades and students will have to be assessed over a period of time. The report cards, according to the CBSE must contain certain unique competencies which are not academic but a comprehensive list of age-wise learning outcomes.

The assessment can be done through certain activities. For example, students may be asked to draw pictures of themselves and their family members which will give students an opportunity to pay attention to themselves and their family members.

According to the board’s instructions to the teachers, once the drawing is complete, “ Do not interpret the child’s picture. Be open to anything and everything that the child draws even if it is not representing a glimpse of themselves and family…..The intention is to make the drawing a space for a child to access their creative sides and use their fine motor skills while they represent themselves.”

While preparing the progress cards teachers should consider certain other points too, such as what do parents and students want to know from report cards, how can parents know the uniqueness in their child and what are the ways in which the school can communicate the child’s progress to parents.

The new approach aims to mark shift in assessment from the existing one that is “summative, primarily testing rote memorization skills to one that is more regular and formative – more competency-based, promoting learning and development for our students, and evaluating higher-order skills, such as analysis, critical thinking, and conceptual clarity….” The CBSE said in the guidelines.

Tamal Mukherjee, chairman of Nalanda Learning Systems Pvt Ltd, group that runs a chain of pre-schools in Bengal welcomed the CBSE’s move to implement the competency-based assessment.

According to Mukherjee, a number of instructions mentioned in the  CBSE guidelines were already implemented by his institutions.

“I am extremely happy that the solutions currently given to schools where Nalanda Learning is an academic partner has all the features mentioned in the CBSE guidelines. At Nalanda Learning we have been doing this for the last 12 years,” Mukherjee said.

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