Excelsior Correspondent
Srinagar, July 19: A five-day long online training workshop on School Based Assessment (SBA) for teachers and teacher educators organized by the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT), J&K concluded today.
The purpose of the workshop was to make the teachers understand the concept of school-based assessment, as enshrined in the National Education Policy (NEP), announced by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, in 2020.
The workshop e-inaugurated by the Principal Secretary to the Government, School Education Department, B K Singh, was attended by more than 100 teachers from all the districts of the J&K UT. Director SCERT, Prof Veena Pandita, welcomed the participants.
Prof Indrani Bhaduri, who heads the Educational Survey Division at the NCERT, joined the workshop from New Delhi.
Speaking at the occasion, Prof Pandita said that the traditional form of examination suffered from a variety of flaws that put students under a lot of pressure.
“The SBA encompasses a set of tools and techniques to assess a child’s performance while moving beyond marks and grades,” she said.
“The assessment would be used to benchmark students’ learning against criteria-process skills/learning indicators and learning outcomes- based on identified curricular aims and objectives.”
Prof Pandita said because different children exhibit different skill sets, the SBA has been so thought out that it provides comprehensive information regarding the extent of student learning vis-à-vis curricular objectives including performance in different subject areas.
Prof. Indrani Bhaduri, while underlining the importance of introducing the concept of SBA, said that the National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted in 2017 highlighted some grave issues in our education system that needed to be mitigated. NEP 2020 has also made recommendations that need to be understood and implemented.
She said the SBA is aimed at facilitating the attainment of competencies of the students to assess the efficiency of the teaching-learning process within the broader educational philosophy of assessment for learning.
She emphasized the need to extensively train the teachers to reap the benefits of the SBA fully and onsite support and supervision is the cornerstone.