A confidential report from the National Council for Curriculum and Assessment has criticised the Junior Certificate curriculum for its over-reliance on a single, externally-assessed written examination.
The progress report of the Junior Cycle Review Committee says such a reliance - to the virtual exclusion of orals, aurals, practicals, project work and assignments - "excludes from the assessment process the affective development of students, their ability to work as part of a team, individual contribution to group projects, autonomous potential and personal initiative".
The Junior Certificate exam system provides "little information on the very qualities most highly valued by a changing society and economy", the report adds.
Elsewhere it observes: "The current reliance on terminal assessment, and the over-emphasis on written examinations, has resulted in a series of imbalances within the Junior Certificate programme which compromise to an unacceptable degree the integrity of the programme and the junior cycle of post-primary education." The need for reform of the way the junior cycle is assessed was "clear and urgent".
The need to change the examination system was endorsed in a survey, conducted for the report, of 239 second-level principals around the State. Asked how the exam might be improved, nearly 87 per cent supported more use of projects, orals, aurals and practicals, and nearly 86 per cent backed the continuous assessment of students by their teachers.
Ireland is the only state in the developed world with a completely externally examined written exam at the end of the junior cycle of secondary education. With an increasing emphasis on testing skills and competencies, the trend internationally is to involve teachers more in the earlier stages of second-level assessment and certification. However, the main opposition to this in Ireland comes from teachers.
The report says Irish teachers fear the integrity of the exam might be undermined if they were to mark their own students. They worry that such marking would have a negative impact on their relationship with students, since they would be seen as "judges" of, rather than "advocates" for, those students. Some teachers fear they might be open to "accusations of bias and possible pressure from parents given the high stakes nature of the examinations".
However, the report's authors point out that moves towards school-based assessment would enhance teachers' roles in the assessment process, and thus their professional status. They note that teachers who have experience of assessment outside the traditional exam system do not have the same difficulty with school-based assessment as teachers with no such experience.
Noting that the urgency of these issues "cannot be overstated", the committee recommends the establishment of a pilot project in a number of schools to explore ways of extending the range of assessment techniques to include orals, practicals and project-based methods. It proposes that this should begin in October and be ready for a decision on developing it as national policy by December 2001.
Although the committee reports general satisfaction among the education partners with the way the Junior Certificate programme works, it says it does not serve educationally-disadvantaged students or potential early school-leavers well. This view is echoed in the answers to the principals' questionnaire (see table).
It recommends, as "a matter of urgency", that the Junior Certificate School Programme, aimed at students who have difficulties with the mainstream programme, should be greatly expanded. This is taken by fewer than 1,500 students and is "severely under-resourced". The report emphasises its importance in "supporting students who might otherwise drop out of the junior cycle".
The report says its proposal to give greater flexibility to schools in designing their own curriculum within a national framework is aimed partly at facilitating schools with a high proportion of disadvantaged students.