We know very well that absolute performance has a wide spread in any class, so it hardly helps if one child gets 2 out-of 10 and another 9 out-of 10. The good grades of one child don't percolate to another child like osmosis !
Percentile is even worse way to evaluate a child (compared to absolute marks) as it enhances the competency differences and has less to do with progress of each child. These marking schemes are like a fuzzy snap-shot of progress in time.
It's the progress per child that we want to track and not the absolute performance.
So shouldn't we be giving marks for how much a child has improved on the Simple Evaluation Metric (SEM) between the last assignment (the slope of the gradient) and the current one ? Larger the improvement greater the n, e, s score.
The marks should say - you have improved n, on neatness; e, on English; and s, on Subject understanding - between the last assignment and the current assignment !.
- So a good teacher is one whose class has high average <n>, <e> and <s>, averaged over all the students over one academic year
- A good school is where average <n>, <e> and <s> is high for all students, all classes.
The idea of evaluating children by their progress is indeed good, but if a child is already good, her increment will be zero unless more challeging tasks are presented and that is factored in. This means differential teaching. I feel differential teaching is a must, but it is also more demanding on the teacher and could create complexes in children if not handled properly (for instance, many children do not want to be seen being taught something different - unless it becomes an expected norm).
ReplyDeleteHow are these ideas approcahed in your school (and nearby ones) currently?