SCERT’s 5-Day E-Workshop On SBA Concludes

 SBA will put an end to the monopoly of the examination system on the education system: Prof Indrani

Farooq Shah

SRINAGAR: Five- day online training workshop on School Based Assessment (SBA) for teachers and teacher educators, which was organized by the State Council of Education Research and Training (SCERT), J&K, concluded here today.

The purpose of the workshop was to make the teachers understand the concept of school based assessment as enshrined in the National Education Policy (NEP) announced by the Ministry of Education, Government of India, in 2020. The policy, whose implanting agency is the National Council of Education Research and Training (NCERT), is referred to as NEP-2020.

The workshop e-inaugurated by the Principal Secretary to the Government, School Education Department, B K Singh, was attended by more than 100 teachers from all the districts of the J&K UT. Director SCERT, Prof Veena Pandita, welcomed the participants.

Prof Indrani Bhaduri, who heads the Educational Survey Division at the NCERT, joined the workshop from New Delhi.

Speaking at the occasion, Prof Pandita said that the traditional form of examination suffered from a variety of flaws that put a student to a lot of pressure.

 “The SBA encompasses a set of tool and techniques to assess a child’s performance while moving beyond marks and grades,” she said. “The assessment would be used to benchmark students’ learning against criteria—process skills/learning indicators and learning outcomes— based on identified curricular aims and objectives.”

Prof Pandita said because different children exhibit different skill sets, the SBA has been so thought out that it provides a comprehensive information regarding the extent of student learning vis-à-vis curricular objectives including performance in different subject areas.

Prof. Indrani Bhaduri, while underlining the importance of introducing the concept of SBA, said that the National Achievement Survey (NAS) conducted in 2017 highlighted some grave issues in our education system that needed to be mitigated. NEP 2020 has also made recommendations which need to be understood and implemented.

 “Too much of emphasis on Rote learning sacrifices comprehension, so by itself it is an ineffective in mastering any complex subject at an advanced level,” Prof Bhaduri said. “While it prepares a child quickly for exams using a cramming technique, it fails to instil a competency-based learning.”

She said the SBA is aimed at facilitating the attainment of competencies of the students in order to assess the efficiency of the teaching-learning process within the broader educational philosophy of assessment for learning.

 “It invariably puts an end to the monopoly of the examination system on the education system and to think about a better practice that will make the student more interactive and expressive,” she remarked.

She emphasized the need to extensively train the teachers to reap the benefits of the SBA fully.

And on site support and supervision is the corner stone.

 “Because the teacher is at the heart of the teaching-learning process, it’s important that they undergo a rigorous training to fully understand the concept and then implement it on the ground,” Prof Indrani said.

The first of its kind workshop on SBA was organised by the Educational Research and Assessment Survey (ERSA) Division of the SCERT.

Media Links:

1. https://kashmirobserver.net/2021/07/19/scerts-5-day-e-workshop-on-sba-concludes/
2. https://indiaeducationdiary.in/scerts-5-day-e-workshop-on-sba-concludes/