Quality, validity important in exam

Quality, validity important in exam

Simon Marcus Gower, Jakarta

The national tests for schools in Indonesia seem to be a
perennial source of concern and even conflict. Debate swings
between the ideas that the government here wants to enter into a
process of recentralization, and the rights of teachers and
schools to exercise greater autonomy in assessing their students'
efforts. All of this leaves an unhappy predicament with students
stranded in the middle.

The grim reality, most likely, is that students and the
education system of Indonesia are not being best served if there
is effectively a power struggle going on for control. Also, it
simply must be realized that quality is not a product of the
process of 'standardization'. Standardization without sufficient
and appropriate reference to standards ends up being fairly
worthless and is, effectively, a vicious circle of no progress.

The apparent process or claim towards standardization is
partly predicated on the notion that across Indonesia schools
ought to be achieving some degree of parity of educational
outcomes and achievement but this whole argument is almost
inevitably rendered fallacious with even the merest and most
basic of assessments of what is actually happening across
Indonesia.

For example, the idea of having a degree of standardization
for the learning of the English language can hardly stand up to
scrutiny of the range and diversity of learning experiences that
Indonesian students can have. A student in a high school in
Jakarta can conceivably benefit from exposure to native speaker
teachers of the language and access to quite a range of
literature and media in the English language.

In the meantime, it is possible to meet students in more
distant provinces of the nation that actually complain that they
can rarely have direct contact with native speakers and the
literature or paper-based material available to them is far more
limited. For these students any exposure to native speakers can
often be limited to chance meetings with tourists visiting their
part of the country.

Inevitably this immediately and directly creates something of
an 'unfair advantage' for those students that benefit from big
city residence. Indeed students in high schools in Jakarta can be
met who have a sufficient degree of English language competence
to allow them to offer critiques of the quality of English that
they are required to respond to in 'standardized' tests.

A lack of parity does, then, immediately challenge or even
undermine any notion of standardization leading to improving
quality and standards. But it is also of value to consider what
kinds of tests are actually being prepared for and so implemented
in Indonesian schools. Consistently the tests which students are
being prepared for are multiple-choice in nature and this too can
leave the whole process looking weak.

Multiple-choice testing can be convenient and time saving for
teachers and examiners but does it really determine the academic
strengths and/ or weaknesses of the students? Such testing cannot
possibly create opportunities for students to demonstrate their
understanding. Multiple-choice questioning does create a
condition in which the answer is actually before the students and
they simply must find it.

Far more challenging and even enriching testing can and does
exist in which the students are required to show and/ or
demonstrate their own thinking and understanding of the subjects
before them. With this kind of testing in place a better standard
of teaching is also likely to emerge because teachers have to
encourage and guide their students towards thinking skills.

Originality and independence of thought are then being
targeted and this kind of objective is far more valid and
legitimate in the pursuit of standards. Standards cannot really
effectively be imposed, rather they need to be nurtured and
supported in a way that encourages the students to take
initiative and responsibility into their own hands. This should
be at the core of what the education system is aiming to do.

This simultaneously highlights the essential ingredient of
having educational objectives that are valid and worthwhile for
education professionals too. The practically blind and
dictatorial imposition of standardized tests does little to
encourage the development of teachers; they are simply required
to follow what is handed down to them and any degree of autonomy
and freedom to develop is either totally precluded or, at best,
significantly marginalized.

Certainly the setting of standards and identifying criteria
for graduation of students is appropriate but these things need
to be part of a larger and more detailed educational package. For
any education system to target and hopefully attain targets it
must work within the context of the community in which it is
applied and significantly this must reference the local context
in which it is active.

But any system of education, if it is to attain sophistication
and quality, has to work to an agenda of not merely preparing
students to robotically pass tests. A good system of education is
preparing students to be participants in the wider world of both
their society and their future careers.

In this sense, then, the debates, the doubts and the perennial
questions that exist about national tests really should be placed
in the context of more thoughtful considerations of what schools
in Indonesia really ought to be achieving. Mundane, uninspired
and uninspiring tests that impose requirements of conformity and
offer little scope to show true understanding have to be
considered as questionable in their value and indeed validity.

It is far more constructive for educators to think about the
things that they would wish for students to be able to achieve
and do having attended so many years of formal education and
learning. Rote memorization and quite naively following the
knowledge handed down from either centralized examiners or
teachers seems unlikely to achieve the kinds of graduates that
are desirable.

Educators and examiners ought to be seeking to encourage
students that have the capacity to enquire, show initiative, be
inventive, problem-solve, make predictions and proposals based on
their thinking and be critical and active thinkers. These kinds
of learning objectives and outcomes can be engendered by
appropriate vehicles for testing; but testing alone cannot create
standards. The teaching that leads into testing is where real
standards are achieved and therefore any "struggle" or
"development" in testing must closely relate to what and how
students are taught and learn; then true standards may emerge.

The writer is an education consultant.