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THE EFFECT OF CONTINUOUS ASSESSMENT IN EDUCATION INSTITUTION

CHAPTER ONE

INTRODUCTION

1.1       Background of the Study

Assessment of students’ level of academic performance is vital to teaching and learning process as it provides the necessary feedback about the outcome of educational goals and objectives. The assessment of learning outcomes provides objective evidences necessary in the decision making process in education. As pointed out by Bassavanthappa (2009), good measurement resulting in accurate data is the foundation of sound decision making about educational endevour. In education, assessment aims at determining the level of students’ mastery of a body of knowledge and skills in a subject (Airasian, 2006).

Continuous assessment is a classroom strategy implemented by teachers to ascertain the knowledge, skills and understanding attained by students at a particular point in time. Teachers administer assessments in a variety of ways in order to observe multiple tasks and information about what students know, understand and can do. The assessments are curriculum based tasks previously taught in classroom. Continuous assessment is a method of evaluation carried out periodically or at a predetermined interval of the school year. It is aimed at finding out how much students have acquired in a subject matter. It is a consistence monitoring of students’ progress in school. It involves collecting data with a view to making value judgement about the quality of a person, object, group or event (Ajuonuma, 2007).

The continuous assessment grading system requires the assessment of the change in behaviours, in terms of cognitive, affective and psychomotor domains. The students are evaluated from one stage to the other through tests, assignments, projects and other school activities. At the end of the term or session, the tests are used for determining the performance of the students in a particular subject. Race (2007) stated that continuous assessment is more useful to the students, as it provides them with on-going feedback on their performance, helps them to become more self-critical, and encourages them to attempt mastering material as they actually work through a course, thus, achieving success in their academic goals. According to Adegbeye (2003), CA is more relevant as it allows students to demonstrate their ability and development on a periodical basis, so that students who have studied hard but is not very good at sitting for examinations is not placed at a disadvantage compared with lazy students who engage in minimum amount of work needed to pass such examinations.

In the past, the educational systems of many African nations were dominated by the one-short summative type of assessment (Alausa, 2005). Students were trained to pass examinations so as to move up the education ladder; in order to stop this, suggestions for a broader approach to assessment, which would be flexible and also provide valid and reliable results were made (Federal Government of Nigeria, 2004). In the light of this, CA was introduced to find ways in which academic evaluation impacts on the way teaching occurred and learners learnt; hence, the significance of teachers’ understanding of relevance of continuous assessment to students’ academic success. It is when people know about innovation they are to adopt that they are motivated to embrace its practices.

Through the National Policy on Education (NPE), the Federal Government of Nigeria (FGN, 2004) stated that educational assessment at all levels of education would be liberalized by basing them in whole or part on continuous assessment.

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