TOOL REVIEW MEETING REPORT ITA Offices 15 th January 10 th February, 2017 Tool review meeting, this time was held in all provincial offices i.e. Lahore, Karachi, Islamabad, Peshawar and Balochistan. All teams not only shared the tools internally but also set up a meeting with the assessment department of the government to get their feedback. The list of the all participants who were approached to provide feedback on the tools is given below. Their suggestions are also mentioned at the end of the document. Participants: Balochistan: o Syed Tanzeem (ASER-Balochistan) o Representative from Education department of Balochistan Islamabad Capital Territory: o Nasir Amin (AEPAM) o Waqas Bajwa (ASER/ITA- Islamabad) o Mahum Tanveer (ASER/ITA- Islamabad) o Sadaf Taimur (ASER/ITA- Islamabad) Punjab: o Dr. Aroona Hashmi (Institute of Education & Research, University of Punjab) o Dr. Nusra Hayat (Education Department, LCWU) o Dr Nasir (Punjab Examination Commission) o Talha Shehzad (ASER) o Sehar Saeed (ASER) o Mohamad Awais (ASER) o Muhammad Fiaz (ASER) o Sonia Riaz (ASER) o Sindh: o Shazia Solangi (Sindh Education Foundation) o Muhammad Saghir Sheik (Reform Sector Unit, Sindh Karachi)
o Mumtaz Pirzada (ITA-Sindh) o Minahil Adeel (ASER/ITA- Sindh) KPK/FATA: o Dr. Muhammad Bilal (P.I.T.E Peshawar) o Gul Hussain (GSSC Peshawar) o Afzal Ahmed shah (ITA-KPK) External Experts: o Dr. Monazza Aslam (Oxford University) o Dr. Ursula Schwantar (Australian Council for Education Research) Introduction of ASER s Tool Framework: ASER standards on assessments, and benchmarks as per National Curriculum. A brief highlight of the framework for each of the sections is mentioned below. URDU/SINDHI/PASHTO: 1. Basic recognition of language through alphabets (level 1) and words (level 2) 2. Reading skills through sentence/paragraph (level 3) and story reading (level 4) 3. Cognitive levels of comprehension and application based skills will be assessed by asking two bonus questions from story 4. Listening skills shall be assessed by orally posing the comprehension questions 5. The levels shall be used for grading and grading instructions shall be contained in each level ENGLISH: 1. Letter recognition (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum English 2006 Standards of Reading & Thinking Skills) assessed through capital alphabets (level 1) and small alphabets (level 2). 2. Reading (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum English 2006 standards of Reading & Thinking Skills) assessed through simple words (level 3) and sentences (level 4). 3. Understanding of words and sentences (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum English 2006 standards of Reading & Thinking Skills) assessed by asking the meaning of the words and sentences chosen by the child in his/her own language.
4. Cognitive level of comprehension and application based skills (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum English 2006 standards of Reading & Thinking Skills) will be assessed by asking two bonus questions i.e. identification of the name of the object by looking at the picture.
5. The levels shall be used for grading and grading instructions shall be contained in each level. NUMERACY: 1. Basic numeracy skills (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum Mathematics 2006 standards of Numbers & Operations) will be assessed through number recognition. Number recognition from 1-9 will be regarded as (level 1) while number recognition from 10-99 will be termed as (level 2). 2. Advance numeracy skills (Competency 1 defined by the National Curriculum Mathematics 2006 standards of Numbers & Operations) will be assessed by posing subtraction (level 3) and division questions (level 4). 3. Bonus questions asked after the third and fourth level will be based upon Competency 3 and 4 defined by the National Curriculum Mathematics 2006 standards of Measurement and Geometry, Reasoning and Logical Thinking skills. 4. The levels shall be used for grading and grading instructions shall be contained in each level.
Suggestions and Comments for Urdu Section collected from all offices: 1) Most of the participants suggested that instructions should be improved and made clearer to remove the bias created by the misinterpretation of instructions. They also mentioned that there were no clear instructions regarding the marking scheme. 2) One of the participant suggested that in addition to asking children to read a particular letter, they should also be asked to identify certain letters. This two way assessment will increase the efficiency of the tool. 3) In the words section, participants suggested that words of different difficulty levels were randomly presented. Instead of which, the words should be reordered in a way where each line represents a particular difficulty level. 4) For the story section, suggestion was presented that rather than asking at the end, questions should be asked from the child while he/she is reading the story. Moreover, in addition to questions about the story, he/she should also be asked questions like what would he have done if he/she was the character of the story? Suggestions and Comments for English Section: 1) Participants suggested that there was some repetition of words in the sentences. These words should be replaced by other words to encompass maximum variety of words in the assessment. 2) Most of the participants again were of the opinion that instructions were not clear which can lead to biases; hence should be cleared. Suggestions and Comments for Arithmetic Section: 1) An important suggestion presented was that since the marking scheme in arithmetic is based on partial grading where marks are awarded for each successful step so such a method should be incorporated while scoring the arithmetic s assessment. 2) It should be ensured that all the questions in a particular section should be at same difficulty level. 3) There were some questions involving negative sums and division with remainder which were asked to be corrected.