Going beyond the formal educational evaluation

By Mochtar Buchori

JAKARTA (JP): Education is a series of acts done to help pupils or students actualize their individual potential, as one definition of education goes.

This definition implies that any full educational act must in the end purport to guide students in their growth at an individual or personal level.

Therefore, what teachers must perform is not teaching a class a subject matter, but teaching each student to recognize his or her individual potential and teach them how to use this potential to comprehend various situations and problems they meet in their lives.

It is thus not enough that teachers bring a group of students or a class to a development stage characterized by richer knowledge, "smarter thinking", and other developmental attributes.

The job of every teacher is to make sure that each individual student grows in his or her ability to solve personal and collective problems. For this purpose it is essential that at the end, each individual student acquires "learning capability", that is the ability to extract knowledge and wisdom from life.

This point of view has certain consequences in the practice of educational evaluation. The first consequence is that every educational evaluation must aim at assessing the progress each individual student has made within a given period of time. This means that results of every educational evaluation should not only contain reports concerning who belong to the top of the group and who occupy positions at the bottom.

Good educational evaluation must ultimately give a comprehensive picture concerning the strengths and weaknesses of each individual student. On the basis of such information it should then be possible to say what each individual student should preferably do next. A good education evaluation must be able to suggest which course of action is best for each individual student, and which course of action should best be avoided.

The second consequence of this definition is that educational evaluation should not only comprise examination of students' development in aspects that are directly related to the formal curriculum. It must also try to uncover the "hidden aspects" of students' development, that is their development in areas that are not penetrated by educational practices based upon the formal curriculum.

It is important to note in this regard that there are so many personal characteristics which are socially very useful, but which have never been touched by the formal curriculum in our schools. Self-control and tranquility, for instances, are personal characteristics that are so useful in daily life. Yet no subject matter in the formal curriculum contains any design purporting to stimulate the development of this characteristic among students.

In addition, there are special talents that the formal curriculum is not capable to deal with. Talent in special areas like music, sports, drama, creative writing, social leadership, just to mention a few examples, are highly appreciated in society, yet they have been ignored in our formal curriculum and in our formal educational evaluation.

What does this all mean? It means that our formal curriculum and our formal educational evaluation are not designed to deal with the total life of our students. They are designed to deal only with certain parts of our students' lives.

For this reason teachers who are genuinely interested in the total development of their students must venture into realms beyond the formal curriculum and the formal educational evaluation. Teachers of this genre will guide their students to do explorations in the realm of nonformal education. They will also inform their students how to profit from personal encounters that are not intended to be educational at all. In other words they will guide their students into the art of informal education.

On the evaluation side, teachers with genuine interest in the total development of their students will augment formal educational evaluation with informal evaluation steps. They will use both classroom and out-of-classroom observations, among others, to deepen their understanding of each individual student. They will read essays written by their students not just with the purpose of assigning grades, but with a deeper purpose, i.e. to try to get a picture concerning the contour of each student's personality.

Are these things done in real life? Not in most of our schools. They are done only in well-managed schools that usually pursue a certain kind of educational idealism and are inclined toward professional perfection. For we should bear in mind that guiding students toward total development of their being is not only a matter of providing adequate financial rewards to the teachers, but more importantly a sharing of educational idealism and taste for professional perfection.

In the words of Elliot W. Eisner, professor of education and art at Stanford University, understanding what is occurring in schools and improving both educational practice and policy is a matter of "educational connoisseurship and criticism".

What are the long-term consequences of neglecting the full development of students' potentials? An educational policy and practice which never explores the possibilities outside the formal curriculum and which never looks at their students' development beyond the formal evaluation is bound to create a succession of generations that are increasingly inept at coping with the challenges of time.

Ending educational evaluation by ranking students is an outdated practice that must be terminated immediately. Failure to end this "legitimized error" is a sign of conceptual confusion in education.

The writer is an observer of social and cultural affairs.