Going beyond the formal educational evaluation

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.