PREPARING PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS FOR MAJOR EXAMINATIONS

PREPARING PRIMARY SCHOOL STUDENTS FOR MAJOR EXAMINATIONS: 1.

Mdm Halimah Yacob asked the Minister for Education (a) what is the rationale for abolishing the Primary 1 year-end examinations; (b) how will the Ministry address parents' concerns that their children may not be adequately prepared for major primary school examinations including the PSLE; (c) whether such parental concerns will result

Column: 1183

in greater pressure on the children as parents put them through additional after school programmes; and (d) what training and additional resources will be provided to teachers to help them handle the changes effectively.

The Senior Minister of State for Education (Ms Grace Fu Hai Yien) (for the Minister for Education): I thank Mdm Halimah for her questions. Assessments – whether tests or examinations – serve as useful and critical tools to provide information about teaching and learning to individual pupils and their parents. Assessments also provide important information about standards of performance for the individual and the system as a whole. Like all tools, assessments must be used judiciously. They are not an end in themselves but should be properly applied in the right circumstances with clear educational outcomes in mind.

Summative assessments like term tests or year end examinations have their uses and at appropriate stages are used to measure pupil achievement for the purpose of grading, ranking or certification. But they do not provide essential information about specific areas that the pupil can improve in that would help him better learn the topic or subject. In this regard, formative assessments provide richer information that can be used by the teacher, pupils and parents to improve in specific areas. For example, for English compositions, teachers can use rubrics to provide feedback to pupils on specific areas such as presentation of ideas, grammar and vocabulary. Rubrics provide a structured way of giving qualitative feedback beyond just an overall mark.

Both types of assessments should be used as tools to enable every pupil to reach his full potential but in the early years of education in lower primary, the

Column: 1184

more important focus should be on formative assessment to build basic learning skills rather than summative assessments to rank pupils.

Mdm Halimah asked if formative assessments would prepare pupils adequately for the PSLE. Formative assessments if used well can help accelerate pupils’ learning as they would identify specific skill sets or topics that the teacher could then focus on. We do need to train teachers in the application of formative assessments. Since July last year, MOE has partnered 16 schools to plan and prototype Holistic Assessment models and strategies at Primary 1 and Primary 2. This prototyping has enabled us to draw key learning points from the schools’ experiences as we expand to include more schools. MOE has plans for all primary schools to be trained in the use of formative assessments for Primary 1 and 2 levels by 2013. When schools are ready, they will move towards the use of topical tests and bite-sized performance tasks to check for understanding and mastery for Primary 1 and 2. Such use is appropriate because they are more effective tools to form basic learning skills compared to summative exams.

Parents will continue to receive marks and grades in these assessments. But beyond this, teachers will also provide qualitative feedback to the pupils and parents to highlight areas where pupils have done well, and also ways to improve pupils’ learning. In short, parents will be getting more and richer feedback about their children’s learning. Schools will monitor pupils’ progress and provide parents with useful feedback on the development of their children.

Mdm Halimah Yacob (Jurong): I thank the Senior Minister of State for the reply and I can see the shift from having examination-focused type of education to a more holistic education. In my view, the question that is still not answered is

Column: 1185

whether the Ministry of Education has really gone far enough in this effort as we still have streaming at the relevant stages and we still have PSLE. Hence, we will continue to see students, parents and teachers focusing on examinations. Worse, this may, in fact, make additional tuition classes more necessary. May I ask the Senior Minister of State for her comments on this because that is the feedback that I am getting from parents?

Ms Grace Fu Hai Yien: I can appreciate the parents' involvement in their children's education. In MOE, we see that as a positive phenomenon. Having parents who are interested in how their children are being educated and brought up is important. I would just like to re-emphasise MOE's move towards holistic education. We are trying to make our education richer and more effective for our children. We are creating new and multiple pathways for children of different strengths and abilities to excel in their own areas. While parents are naturally anxious at the critical points of examination in their children's lives, we would like to assure the parents that the school system – the teachers, the leaders – has the interest of the children in their minds and will do their best to help the children. The system itself will provide sufficient pathways for their children.

Column: 1185