At the National Institute of Education, Assistant Professor Kelvin Tan's students - heads of department and aspiring principals - tell him of their dilemmas in helping students learn well while helping them compete in exams such as the Primary School Leaving Examination (PSLE). Dr Tan, who researches and teaches on assessment, weighs in on the PSLE debate.
By Phua Mei Pin, The Straits Times, 3 Nov 2012
Deputy Prime Minister Tharman Shanmugaratnam has said that the PSLE sorts students more finely than the O levels. What's your take on this?
In PSLE, the focus tends to be on the aggregate score, which reports each student's overall performance in comparison with the entire cohort. It's called a T-score, or transformed score. It's derived through a certain computation and basically provides a ranking of the entire cohort.
The T-score itself doesn't actually tell the student how well he has performed in each subject or across the subjects. In effect, it is a queue number.
In the O levels, how well you do within a grade does not matter.
Once you score an A1, you will not be disadvantaged when compared to a student who has scored A1 with a higher score. In the PSLE, two students with the same grades, for example two A-stars and two As, may get rather different T-scores.
It depends on what purpose you are referring to.
The PSLE serves more than one purpose. The one we are all very familiar with is the PSLE being used as a mechanism to allocate priority for secondary school selection. In that sense, its finely-tuned numerical basis meets this purpose of allocating queue numbers.
But in terms of setting standards for what primary school learning should be, then it has certain limitations.
National high-stakes examinations often perform several purposes. It is a challenge in any country to accommodate - even reconcile - different purposes.
In what way is the PSLE not serving the purpose of setting clear standards for learning?
I can give you an analogy. Imagine a new kind of high jump technology for the next Olympics, where there is no bar to jump over. The high jumpers just keep jumping, higher and higher.
At the end of the competition, they are told not the actual height that they have jumped, but who comes in first, second and third. This meets the purpose of the Olympics in determining who jumped the highest.
But the actual height is not made known to anyone. At the next Olympics, how do you know how high you have to jump to win? It would have been useful to know what was the height that was reached before, as a kind of standard or benchmark.
That's what I mean by performance being reported against a definite standard, rather than against each other. The PSLE may not be able to provide clear and fixed standards for students to aspire to in their primary school education.
Is there a downside to the PSLE system as it stands?
There's a term in education known as "backwash". It refers to the phenomenon where end-stage assessment tends to influence the teaching, learning and curriculum that come before it.
In theory, teachers plan a curriculum, teach and then assess students' learning.
The backwash phenomenon tells us that some students or their stakeholders may interpret that sequence in reverse order.
They think quite hard about what will be assessed, which hugely influences what they will learn. That may then be different from the intended curriculum.
The PSLE may have created certain backwash effects in primary schools in Singapore.
What do you think of the call for the PSLE to be abolished?
If a child or parent deems it very important to go to a particular secondary school or to have a choice of any secondary school, then pressure is attached to that, and the PSLE is the mechanism.
If you were to remove the PSLE and have an alternative mechanism, that would have high stakes and may come with high pressure too. The stress is taking place in the form of the PSLE, but I'm not quite sure whether the stress is only because of the PSLE.
It's a good thing that we're having a national conversation about exams and education. We should hear the concerns behind every view and recommendation, even those we do not agree with.
If we can find other ways of addressing those concerns - which may not involve the PSLE directly - then I think we would have helped everyone in the process.
How can Singaporeans adopt a less stressful approach to the PSLE?
I like to make a distinction between status and stature.
Status is about our relative importance or merit in comparison to someone else; assessment sometimes will tell us about academic status.
In contrast, stature is inherent, not comparative. It's about doing the best that you can, and recognising your intrinsic potential. Assessment should also help us develop our stature.
I hope this for every teacher, parent and child: To think and work hard about raising the stature of our children, and not just about improving their status.
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