Sir, – The recent decision by the Minster for Education to replace the Junior Cert with a system based on continuous assessment (CA) is rushed in my view. There are a number of issues that the Minister needed to consider before embarking on what is essentially an educational experiment.
These are: 1. The use of continuous assessment substantially increases the workload on teachers – I know this from my own experience at third level where CA is used routinely. 2. The use of continuous assessment can add to student stress – students have little respite from the evaluation process. 3.Designing continuous assessment that rewards work ethic, basic skill and logical reasoning is not necessarily any easier than designing end-of-year exams that aim to meet the same objectives. 4. The use of continuous assessment can lead to students learning in “bite-size”, “easily-digested” chunks, avoiding the need to acquire an integrated understanding of a subject. 5. The marking of continuous assessment, especially project work, is often much more subjective than end-of-year exams and this has obvious implications for the credibility of the new approach. 5. Continuous assessment tends to lead to a bunching of marks, thus reducing the value of the assessment as a way of evaluating students’ true ability and potential. 6. End-of-year exams serve the very useful purpose of incentivising students to revise – continuous assessment can suffer badly from the “once-completed, instantly-forgotten” effect.
Having taught for over 20 years at third level, my advice to the Minister would be to ensure our assessment methods are characterised by an emphasis on diversity. Each mode of assessment has its merits, but an over-reliance on any one method, coupled with the need for any system to be credible and transparent, often has unintended and negative consequences. We have seen that with the State examination system. – Yours, etc,
(Dr) GREG FOLEY,
School of Biotechnology,
DCU,
Glasnevin, Dublin 9.
Sir, – Gráinne Faller's article (Opinion, November 26th) on the positive lessons to be learned from UK school performance tables made very interesting reading.
As a parent I recently attended a National Parents Council meeting on the subject of Ruairí Quinn’s New Framework for Junior Cycle, where I learned that from 2014 Second Year secondary students are to take standardised tests in English reading and mathematics and in 2016 these will be extended to science.
Amazingly, under Mr Quinn’s plans students and parents will not be told their results and school statistics will not be published. All of this is in total contrast with what happens in Northern Ireland and England where students are given their national scores and where students outperform Irish students.
Surely it is time for the TUI and others arguing for contextual analysis of third level entry statistics to back parents in calling for more openness with new Junior Cert data. – Yours, etc,
ALAN WHELAN,
Beaufort, Co Kerry.