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Maria Ng Mui-yee is helping students at Carmel Secondary School adjust to the school-based assessment system. Photo: Dickson Lee

Teachers and pupils struggle with school-based assessment system

Teachers and pupils alike are finding it difficult to cope with new criteria for gauging students' abilities in core subjects

LIFE

Students are used to being graded and appraised on their efforts in the classroom, and standard evaluations are second nature for them and their teachers.

But the city's school-based assessment (SBA) system - which serves as a key, compulsory component of the Hong Kong Diploma of Secondary Education (HKDSE) university entrance examination launched last year - has introduced unexpected, and often burdensome, elements into those evaluations.

The HKEAA needs to simplify the assessment requirements to suit the level of secondary students
Cheung Yui-fat, teachers' union

The purpose of the SBA system is simple: provide students with ongoing feedback on their learning progress, with marks that are included in the final public examination. This way, students don't have to rely solely on how they do in the university entrance exam.

The scoring is broken into various stages and parts, and it varies from subject to subject. In 2009, many schools started teaching SBA lessons to Form Four students in the core subjects of Chinese and English languages, liberal studies, and a few electives.

But the task preparations, markings and submission of marks created heavy workloads for teachers, not to mention their students, prompting a deluge of complaints.

In response, the Hong Kong Examinations and Assessment Authority (HKEAA) streamlined the system last year by reducing the number of marks that must be submitted for most subjects, while full implementation of the SBA - including nine elective subjects - was pushed back from 2014 to 2019.

Chan Hiu-nam was in the first batch of Form Four students subject to the SBA and the first HKDSE exam in 2012, while attending Carmel Secondary School in Ho Man Tin. Now a year-two student at the University of Hong Kong, she looks back on the SBA system with mixed feelings.

"I enjoyed doing SBA for English. It gave me a chance to read more books and watch movies. I still remember an Indian film about a teacher helping a student with special needs," the 19-year-old says. "It was inspiring. The mode - group discussions and presentations - was something out of the ordinary lessons, and I could forget about the boring grammar rules.

"It also improved my speaking and presentation skills, because of the regular practice."

Chan was assessed by Maria Ng Mui-yee, the school's vice-principal and its English panel head for 20 years.

"Because SBA has a [15 per cent] bearing on their HKDSE marks, students take it seriously and practise hard for the assessment," Ng says. "And some have made marked improvements."

And the key to a successful SBA is formative feedback, Ng says. She has spent extra time videotaping students' discussions, then letting them watch their performances during lunch hours. "The videotaping is not required in the assessment, but I found it useful to help my students learn."

However, while Chan says her SBA experience for English was enjoyable and manageable, it proved to be a headache for other subjects in which she was assessed - Chinese, history and liberal studies. She had a particularly hard time handling history's mini-research study, with its 1,500- to 3,000-word written report, and liberal studies' Independent Enquiry Study (IES), which includes a 1,500- to 4,000-word research project.

"I had to research and write extensively for each. It was like the kind of academic research work I'm now doing in university," Chan says.

"It's too hard for secondary students. I had to finish both in the same year. That was serious pressure."

If Chan, who studied in a top, or "high-band", school, found it taxing to do university-level research, what hope is there for students in lower-band schools?

"Our students can't even think of a research topic, let alone conduct research on it," says Mandy Kot Yau-man, the panel head of liberal studies in a New Territories band-three school - the lowest band among Hong Kong's secondary schools.

"They lack the ability, and some lack motivation. IES is very demanding for them. The less-able students - the majority - may look things up online and copy anything they can find. The better ones are willing to spend more time and go to the library and find more reliable sources, but these are only 1 per cent of the students.

"SBA is ideal and well-intended; as a teacher, I think it should be kept, but only if education authorities can lower the standards to cater to different students' abilities."

Kot also notes that the SBA system creates additional challenges for teachers.

Without enough resources, schools are increasingly asking teachers with free periods to teach liberal studies. Kot, who oversees a team of 10, says they are all called on to teach the subject, even if it's not their area of expertise, and some struggle with it.

"Five colleagues have taken up courses on teaching liberal studies," she says. "It's not an easy subject to teach. It has a wide range of topics, from personal development to global issues to politics. I'm not an expert in politics myself, and I have to read up a lot to prepare for the topic, too."

Some teachers, she says, are even calling for the SBA system to be abolished.

As head of the liberal studies panel, Kot must also run team workshops showing teachers how to conduct a survey and lead a discussion, before they are ready to take on the new tasks.

"It's a different kind of classroom management and mindset; it's not what they're accustomed to doing in their classrooms," Kot says. "You can't expect a science or Chinese teacher to know how to design a questionnaire or conduct IES research, either."

Cheung Yui-fai, director of the Professional Teachers' Union's education research department, agrees that the school-based assessment system needs to be modified in order to work properly.

"The HKEAA needs to simplify the assessment requirements to suit the level of secondary students. The government needs to provide more resources, such as manpower, since SBA necessitates the teaching of small classes in order for it to be effective and beneficial to students," he says.

"SBA creates a huge amount of work for students because it's required for every subject," Cheung says.

"It would be better to combine similar tasks and assessments across subjects, such as liberal studies and history, rather than having an assessment for each subject. The government needs to look at it from a higher curriculum level."

This article appeared in the South China Morning Post print edition as: Off
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