Who sets the Examination Papers and what format do they take?
Brief Answer: A committee of subject specialists representing, teachers, Punjab Text Book Board, and Universities has been appointed and given the responsibility of setting examination papers under the coordination of the Operations Manager of PEC. There are three steps in this process. The first is to develop a Subject design matrix to specify the content and question difficulty to be included in the examination. The second is to prepare a Pilot examination that is tested using approximately 2000 students. Finally, the annual examination paper is prepared, along with a similar ‘model paper’ for sharing with schools.
For grade 5 each exam paper is 1 hour long and consists of some multiple choice questions and some open response questions
Key Question : How is the analysis of the student responses under taken? Is it any different from the traditional “mark” given to students?
Brief Answer: While we do provide a “mark” for students, we also try and give greater meaning to this mark. The traditional mark system is what is technically referred to as a “norm referenced” system that gives us a mark and a rank for each student, but tells us very little about what it is the student can do. That is, what outcomes the student has acquired. The new system of analysis attempts to link outcomes to groups of students in what is known as a “criterion referenced” system.
The approach taken is known as Rasch Modeling, and we use Quest software to perform the analysis following the entry of student responses into an electronic database.
Key Question : We understand that PEC is introducing a new conceptual framework to support the design of examination papers and the design of marking schemes for the open-ended questions.
Brief Answer: Yes, this is so. Traditionally, test developers have used Bloom’s Taxonomy to encourage the use of questions of different difficulty. While Bloom has served us well and will continue to do so, there is some literature now available that suggests it does not describe student’s cognitive growth. (For example see Hattie article in the links below). If we ask “knowledge” or an “evaluation” question (Bloom’s terms) we can still expect a variety of qualities of responses from a cohort of students. In an attempt to classify these response qualities and the make explicit the differences between them we have introduced a conceptual framework that has grown out of the work of Piaget, and was developed by Biggs and Collis in 1982 known as the SOLO (Structure of Observed Learning Outcomes) Taxonomy. This conceptual framework has undergone considerable development since 1982, but thus far we are applying the relatively simple original version
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