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-maintain the non-gender biased setting of objective items and essay questions in its papers;
-investigate thoroughly all cases of candidates who seek redress as some of them claimed they were impersonated.
d) Other Stakeholders in Education:
-Government should provide the wherewithal for meaningful teaching to take place, including adequate remuneration of teachers, conducive learning environment, and sponsorship of teachers‟ attendance at professional workshops, seminars and conferences and improved funding for education.
-Inspectors of education should be more alive to their duty of ensuring effective monitoring of schools.
-The Ministries of Education should introduce and monitor quality control measures in the administration and scoring of Continuous Assessment.
-Government at all levels should create more awareness of the importance of vocational and technical subjects and provide incentives for technical school graduates in terms of job placement and admission into tertiary institutions.
-Parents and guardians should strive to provide the basic needs of their wards to enable them attain the threshold of motivation needed to bring about significant improvement in their academic performance.
2.9 Continuous Assessment in Senior Secondary Schools
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usually mandatorily required to collate and certify the Continuous Assessment scores before forwarding same to WAEC and NECO. The Continuous Assessment scores are so important for the May/June diet of SSCE in Nigeria that WAEC (2004) and NECO (2008) affirms that
“Only candidates whose complete Continuous Assessment scores have been submitted two months to the date of writing the final SSCE, shall be eligible. They further assert that “receipt of the Continuous Assessment scores on schedule from a school may lead to non-release of results of candidates of the school.”
2.9.2 Meaning of Continuous Assessment
There is consensus among scholars on the meaning of Continuous Assessment.
Ojerinde and Falayajo (1984) sees Continuous Assessment as a method of finding out what the pupils have gained from learning activities in terms of knowledge, thinking, character development and industry. While Osokoya and Odinko (2005) adds that Continuous Assessment is a mechanism whereby the final grading of a child at the end of a week, a term of a session of primary (or any other level of education) school education in the cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains of behaviour systematically takes into account all the performance of the child during the given period. These definitions affirm that Continuous Assessment covers the three domains of learning in order to produce children who are promptly alert and physically fit for the Nigerian Society.
Yoloye (2004) notes that Continuous Assessment is formative achievement and that it is used to assess the individual progress during the course of instruction. He adds that the overall assessment is based on the cumulative progressive performance. Yoloye‟s definition of Continuous Assessment agrees with that of Osokoya and Odinko that Continuous Assessment should be progressively conducted weekly, to cover every topic or content presented to the learners in the classroom. This practice helps teachers to identify weaknesses in their teaching and in the students‟ learning and provide remediation as instruction progresses to the end of the term. This corroborates Iwuji (1997) who opined that Continuous Assessment in education is a systematic and comprehensive processes of identifying a student‟s potential in his cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains with a view to helping him develop these for effective social and economic functioning within the society‟s modern culture.
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Furthermore, the Institute of Education, University of Ibadan, in the Lagos Eko training manual for English Language (2010) defines Continuous Assessment as a systematic, comprehensive and guidance oriented procedure of finding out the overall gains that a student has made in terms of knowledge, attitudes and skills after a given set of learning experiences.
This definition is comprehensive as it emphasized both the domains of learning and the characteristics of Continuous Assessment.
Ojerinde and Falayajo (1984) notes that Continuous Assessment is systematic in the sense that it requires operational plan, that is, what measurement are to be made of the pupils‟
performance, at what time intervals or times during the school year, including the nature of tools to be used in the measurement while Okonkwo (2004) adds that being systematic implies that Continuous Assessment activities should be planned and executed according to the plan rather than a spur of the moment exercise. Ojerinde and Falayajo opined that Continuous Assessment is comprehensive in the sense that many types of instruments are used in determining the performance. Okonkwo (2004) identified two aspects of comprehensiveness. First, the assessment must encompass all the three domains of behaviour, while the second involves utilization of various evaluation instruments. Table 2.4 shows the various instruments that can be used for Continuous Assessment at the various domains of leaning.
Again, Ojerinde and Falayajo (1984) observes that Continuous Assessment is cumulative since any decisions to be made at any point in time on the pupils takes into account all previous decisions i.e. decisions and records kept by the teacher on each pupil.
Okonkwo (2004) further explains that decisions on the child, which are to be taken on the basis of the assessment data, should involve all assessment data accumulated from his/her point of entry into the school to the time the decision is being taken. Finally, Continuous Assessment scores are guidance-oriented because information obtained is used to counsel and guide the learners on further development in character and career.
2.9.3 Rationale for introducing Continuous Assessment
Continuous assessment was one of the recommendations of the Justice Sogbetun Tribunal which was set up to investigate the massive leakage of SSCE by WAEC in 1977 (Expo ‟77). The tribunal proposed that certification of school leavers should be based on the
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external examination and results from schools periodic testing of candidates. This recommendation was adopted and it gave birth to the practice of Continuous Assessment in Nigeria‟s educational system. The National Policy on Education (2004) gave credence to this by affirming that “educational assessment and evaluation shall be liberalized by their being based in whole or in part on continuous assessment of the progress of the individual‟‟ pg. 4.
WAEC (1989) further justifies the need for Continuous Assessment in schools by saying that „the single final examination, which was summative in Nature, has become threatening and anxiety provoking with teachers teaching almost exclusively for examinations. This lamentation by WAEC suggests that the formative evaluation which prepares candidates for the summative evaluation has no place in the final assessment of candidates. Hence, the justification for the introduction of Continuous Assessment in the educational system.
Based on the above, Continuous Assessment was introduced into Nigerian school system to allow teachers the opportunity of being involved in the final assessment of the candidates whom they have prepared for external examinations. Ojerinde and Falayajo (1984) argue that it is reasonable that the teacher should be involved in the final assessment of pupils he or she has taught. They also contended that an assessment procedure which takes into account the learner‟s performance throughout the entire period of schooling is likely to be more valid and more indicative of the learner‟s overall ability than a single examination. Thus, in the opinion of Emeke (1994), CA by its nature, gives the teacher greater input into the overall assessment of his/her students, as he can better plan his … teaching to meet the needs of his students through flexibility and innovations.
Finally, the primary aim of CA is not to grade a child, or to decide whether he/she
“passed” or “failed”. It is to help the child in personal development by highlighting his/her strengths and weaknesses and suggesting where he/she needs to put more effort and in what areas he/she is most likely to excel (Okonkwo, 2004).
2.9.4 Problems of Continuous Assessment Practices
Scholars like Ojerinde and Falayajo (1984), Okonkwo (2004), Osunde and Ughamadu (2004), and Mgbor and Mgbor (2003) have identified the following problems facing Continuous Assessment in Nigerian schools.
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(1) Incomprehensiveness: Comprehensive feature of Continuous Assessment ensures that it covers the three domains of learning. But today, only the cognitive aspect of learning is emphasized in Continuous Assessment as teachers predominantly use test which is a cognitive based instrument, to conduct Continuous Assessment (Okonkwo, 2004). This practice is a problem to Continuous Assessment because it puts the affective and psychomotor domains at a disadvantage or rather it ignores them.
(2) Comparability of scores: It is likely that Continuous Assessment scores generated by two different teachers or even the same teacher in two different tests may not be directly comparable. This problem arises from the fact that the quality of test and other assessment instruments may vary from school to school; procedures of scoring the instruments used to gather data for Continuous Assessment may also vary from school to school and from teacher to teacher (Okonkwo, 2004; Ojerinde and Falayajo, 1984). Hence there is need for SSCE examining bodies to find a way of standardizing Continuous Assessment scores from schools before taking certification decisions on them.
(3) Record Keeping and Continuity of Records: For Continuous Assessment to be meaningful, it has to be a meticulous keeping of accurate records by teachers on each student. It is therefore difficult for different teachers to keep accurate records of each learner from class to class, year to year on all subjects (Osunde and Ughamadu;
Mgbor and Mgbor, 2003; Ojerinde and Falayajo, 1984). This situation is compounded by the general poor record keeping apathy prevalent in the larger Nigerian society.
(4) Problems in Allocation of Marks: Mgbor and Mgbor (2004) reports that there are problems in allocating marks in Continuous Assessment practices in Nigerian schools.
While some schools allocate as low as 20%, others allocate as high as 50% marks to Continuous Assessment in a term. This is wrong and there is no justifiable reason for this. The ideal percentage for Continuous Assessment in a term should be 30 i.e. 10%
to each domain of learning.
(5) Lack of Professionally Qualified Teachers: There are many untrained teachers in Nigerian classrooms today who can neither implement nor interpret Continuous Assessment scores simply because they lack assessment knowledge (Mgbor and
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Mgbor, 2004). This is further compounded by the fact that Continuous Assessment as a topic in Measurement and Evaluation (or test and measurement as the name is called in various schools) are hardly covered by the lecturers who teach them, may be because the topic is usually towards the end of the course content and there is no time to teach it or they do not understand its concept and principles. It is, thus, overdue for a full course on Continuous Assessment with reasonable credit units to be introduced in Teacher Education programmes in Nigeria.
Table 2.3: Instruments for Conducting Continuous Assessment in various Domains of Learning
S/N Evaluation Tools Cognitive Affective Psychomotor
1. Tests
2. Projects
3. Assignments
4. Interviews
5. Rating scales
6. Observation
7. Questionnaire
8. Anecdotal Records
9. Sociometric
SOURCE: Ughamadu, K.A. (1991) in Osunde and Ughamadu (2003).