Background
Education within the formal school system is a cycle of teaching, learning and reinforcement activities with the main goal of ensuring proficiency and skill development in a given knowledge area. Assessment is an important component in this cycle as it provides feedback to teachers on learning status and serves as the basis for any remedial action. The experience of learning crisis, which has been exacerbated by COVID-19 school shutdown, among developing countries has further reinforces the need to improve assessment practices as part of larger education system reform. For example, in the World Bank (2022) RADIP framework for learning recovery post-covid, periodic implementation of system and classroom assessment was emphasized. In addition, the framework work advocated for reforming assessment practices through innovative tools and technology to profile learning and capacity development for teachers.
In this policy brief, we evaluate the assessment practices in Nigeria to situate the current framework vis-à-vis desirable practices. Nigeria, like most developing countries, is experiencing chronic learning crisis with 75% and 87% of the school age children lacking in numeracy and literacy respectively. In this context, assessment has played a marginal role in the discourse around education reforms. The first large scale assessment (MICS 6) around foundation learning was not conducted until 2021, which demonstrates the lack of a culture of system level assessment to inform policy development. Second, even with the present of this assessment, its coverage has been limited to national and state levels, lacking insight to support reform efforts at the local level.
The role of classroom assessment is even more opaque. While teachers frequently administrated such assessments (tests, quizzes, exams etc), but the guideline around its deployment is absent. Very little is known about the practices around classroom assessment such as its frequency, coverage of formative and summative assessment, and usage in profiling student performance across grade not just within a school calendar.
For local education stakeholders like teachers, parents, and school administrators, syste, level assessment is of limited use in their own role at improving learning outcomes compared to classroom-based assessment (CBA) that is readily accessible to them. Even worse, localities with the most urgent need for learning assessment also have the least data on system, assessment. When the World Bank developed its new multi-country measure of education performance in 2019, called learning poverty, data was only available for 20 of the 54 countries in Africa. With the high costs of conducting learning assessment, estimated at between USD 150,000-500,000[1], most countries rely on often unpredictable donors’ assistance to implement learning assessments.
In this regard, there is a role for classroom assessment as a complementary tool to system level assessment in the fight against learning crisis. However, it is important to know the practices and process around them to shape policy development and design of appropriate guidelines for its deployment. This brief specifically set out to achieve this with an evaluation of assessment practices within classrooms in Nigeria.
Methodology
Survey approach
To understand the classroom assessment practices in Nigeria, the study uses a survey approach. We administered questionnaire on public primary school teachers in two Nigerian states: Jigawa and Oyo. Given the disparity in education development between the northern and southern regions in Nigeria, we select a state to represent each region to account for heterogeneity across different locations. The focus on public school is also intended to draw insight from schools that are directly under government control. Also, a large share of in-school children in Nigeria attends public schools which tend to serve the disadvantage groups. Moreover, data shows that education problems are more prevalent in public schools than private schools as well as issues around large class size which might affect assessment practices significantly.
Overall, the survey covers 200 teachers, equally divided between the two states. For each state, we select 50 schools that were randomly drawn to cover rural and urban areas. Two teachers were selected for each school, one each to represent subject expert in mathematics and English. We also alternate the selection between upper primary and lower primary across the school that was selected.
The methodological procedures for the analysis of the data are chronologically described in the pictorial illustration below.
Conceptual framing
For the purpose of this work, we define assessment as any process through which teachers obtained feedback on student learning and such feedback is recorded for future usage whether or not relates to high stakes. While assessment can cover tests, examinations, quizzes and even games., we however exclude feedback that is not recorded, hence we focus mostly on tests, examination and end of lesson evaluation that take place within classrooms.
The survey focusses on eliciting five practices around assessment. (1) Frequency of assessment: The best assessment practices require frequent tracking of performance to diagnose early areas of learning deficiency. (2) Ability to capture learning trajectory: A good practice should entail capacity to track performance across grades and over entire primary education cycle and not just within an academic year. (3) Content coverage: Assessment should cover all cognitive demand in order to ensure both conceptual and procedural understandings. In addition, assessment should provide disaggregated information on a subject. For example, in Mathematics, teachers should be able to track performance by concepts (say addition, division and subtraction), not just aggregate score in mathematics. (4) Capacity development: Ability to deploy quality classroom assessments depends on access to training on best and innovative assessment practices.
Results
We now examine the survey findings along the dimensions of the expected best practice.
Frequency of assessment
The majority of the teachers (78%) conduct only exams and test and no other form of assessment. Only 5% conduct assessments beyond this mid-session or end of session evaluation. The result donot should not be significant variation by state, location (rural or urban) and level of primary school. The survey also asks about willingness to conduct more assessment that presently be done and 70% respond in affirmation. This indicates willingness to increase the frequency of assessment, but certain factors constraints the teachers. One of such constraints is the mode of delivery assessment either paper or computer based. A further evaluation of assessment delivery medium shows that 97.2% have only used paper-based testing throughout their testing experience. This highlights the limited adoption of Edtech in school and therefore the system missing out potential areas that it could ensure better and more regular assessment.
Access to learning trajectory:
The survey also shows that the majority (54%) of the teachers are unable to track the children’s performance beyond a year. About 34% can track for at least school and another 13% can track for 2 years. No teacher indicates the ability to track beyond two years. This assessment data is adequately utilized in building the learning trajectory of a student and their cohort. Given the planning and diagnostic and prescriptive value that can be gained with assess to learning trajectory, the education system in Nigeria has not adequately tap into this.
Content coverage:
Based on Glass taxonomy, the student is expected to be assessed on their conceptual and procedural knowledge. A worrying finding in the literature finds point to lack of procedural understanding among student as part of the learning crisis. Hence, we evaluate to what extent the classroom assessment covers different learning taxonomy. Again, the focus is predominantly on memorization (45%) and less on procedural understanding (23%). This has implication in conditioning teaching also into low cognitive demand which can limit developing proficiency and expertise.
Similarly, we evaluate the extent the teachers could disaggregate the assessment in an subject according to different subtopics. More teachers indicate the ability to do this. The debriefing session with the teacher highlights how they could be able to do this. Specifically, the test or exams are prepared chronologically with allocation to each subject level. This provides a broad insight into performance in different aspects. However, this technique while revealing is not precise disaggregated assessment score.
Capacity development
Outside of the previous exposure of assessment practices as students, 73% of the teachers have not received trainings on how to improve assessment or innovation that can strength their classroom assessment practices. Poor capacity development presents two challenges to the education sector. Each teacher and school independently draw its assessment practices with learning among themselves. Two, policy makers are unaware of the classroom conditions and experience to effectively support teacher professional development. With better capacity development, better assessment practice can be implemented with the classrooms.
Conclusion
Quality of classroom assessment is arguably one of the most important components in improving system of education. Yet, there is little understanding of the modalities and guidelines around its implementation in Nigeria. This brief has examined the practices around classroom assessment in Nigeria. Overall findings point space for improvement in the frequency of assessment, content coverage, access to capture trajectory and capacity development for teachers. In light of this findings, we recommend three key priorities to upscale the assessment practices:
- Blended learning environment: With large class size in most public schools, technology can support more periodic assessment. Yet, cost implications of technology remain a major constraint. However, COVID-19 is leading to gradual entry of technology into the public sector. For example, In Edo State, WhatsApp and SMS were deployed as alternative mode of delivering assessment. With the school fully reopened, innovation around blended learning environment can be strengthened and expanded upon.
- Capacity development: By UBEC estimates, only 65% of public primary school teachers in Nigeria are qualified. This is defined to mean those that have graduated from NCE or a degree in education. The implications are that many schoolteachers lack pedagogical training and knowledge in assessment and psychometric evaluation. It is therefore important for regular training of teachers on local and global innovations around assessment.
- Create infrastructure for teacher’s self-improvement: Government and non-state actors can also support improvement in assessment practices by building portfolio of tools and resources that teachers can independently use to improve their capacity around assessment. These resources can be online or offline that enable teachers to better evaluate and also use feedback from assessment to improve classroom experience and learners’ performance.
