Learning assessment: How will teachers evaluate students?

The Directorate of Secondary and Higher Education (DSE) has sent revised guidelines to educational institutions across Bangladesh for subject-based assessment of students in the new curriculum.

The assessment guidelines for 2024 were formulated by the National Curriculum and Textbook Board and sent out on Wednesday.

Learning assessment programs for sixth to ninth grades will be conducted using these subject-based assessment tools.

The guidelines detail how the learning assessment of students will be done.

According to the directorate, teachers should always keep certain things in mind in learning assessment: 

1. The new curriculum is competency-based rather than content-based. Here the learning objective of the student is to acquire some specific skills. Therefore, how much the student can remember about the subject is no longer the main consideration in the evaluation, rather, it will be evaluated to what extent he/she can achieve the class-based qualifications by considering his/her proficiency in combining all the components of the qualification, knowledge, skills, attitudes and values.
2. The learning process is experiential: the student will progress towards the qualification through practical experiential learning. During this experience, the teacher will continue to observe and evaluate the student's work and behaviour. At the end of each experience, teachers have to record the student's level of proficiency according to the proficiency indicator (PI).
3. Instead of number-based results, the results of these assessments will provide a descriptive picture of the student's acquired competencies (knowledge, skills, attitudes and values).
4. According to the teachers’ guide, only the tasks that students are instructed to do during an experience should be considered for assessment. Students should not be made to do extra work outside of the subject guidance.
5. When conducting experiences where learning materials are required, the teacher shall ensure that the materials are free, low-cost and made of reusable (recyclable) materials. If necessary, the school will bear the cost of these educational materials.
6. The evaluation process will be done in two stages: learning and summative.

One or more Proficiency Indicators (PI) are set for each qualification to facilitate monitoring of how well students are progressing towards a learning qualification. 

Again, three dimensions are defined for each competency indicator. The teacher will determine the achievement level of this instruction based on the student's proficiency in the assessment.