Shun exam oriented curriculum

Stakeholders expect the curriculum that will result from the reform process the Government is about to initiate, will not be examination oriented as the current one. The curriculum developers never designed the current curriculum to be examination oriented. The experts designed the curriculum with scope and sequences that provide for effective teaching and learning. They also provided for balanced assessment of learning experiences of the prescribed curriculum.

The assessment was to be guided by three fundamental principles of assessment: first, to diagnose the on-going teaching and learning process; to prescribe solutions to the identified weaknesses in the teaching and learning process and, to evaluate student learning at the of end an educational cycle.

Curriculum development is a cycle. It begins with an analysis, design for learning, implementation and is assessed for results against set educational objectives and outcomes.

Two professors of education, John Wiles and Joseph Bondi argue that 90 per cent of all curriculum work fails during the coordination of the many efforts needed to implement the plan or programme of all experiences which the learner encounters under the direction of a school.

“The impurity of the work environment (distortions) often means that what is intended is not what is delivered to children in the classroom. The goal of the curriculum worker is to ensure that distortions are minimised and intentions are carried out to the degree possible. Failure to acknowledge this theory-practice gap, and to use sound management techniques to overcome it, results in many of the failures in today’s curriculum work in schools,” Prof Wiles and Prof Bondi, in their book, Curriculum Development, A Guide to Practice.

The experience we have had in the last ten years or so, where some school overburdens learners with frequent continuous assessment, extra tuition, remedial teachings and loads of assignment has no educational or pedagogical basis in the current curriculum. The Ministry of Education, the Kenya Institute of Curriculum Development (KICD) and the Teachers Service Commission have not sanctioned this.

If curriculum workers appreciate examinations as a tool for monitoring and evaluating the quality of curriculum management and delivery, they are likely to place internal examinations in their right context and use it as such and not as strategy to control students behavior.

Teachers should be involved in designing the curriculum so that they appreciate the educational philosophy and other foundational ideas that inform the substance of the curriculum.