Home ›› 13 Nov 2022 ›› Editorial
Benjamin Bloom's [1956] taxonomy on the structure of the learning ladder is a good instrument for assessing students' performance and is practiced in many countries, including Bangladesh. Under the cognitive domain of learning, the essential elements are knowledge, comprehension, application, analysis, synthesis, and evaluation. The structure is used to discourage rote learning as an instructional device. The creative question includes elements of cognitive skills and works as a substitute for Multiple Choice Questions [MCQ]. Two to three decades back, students even could answer from the MCQ test bank using memory. MCQs constituted fifty percent of the total points and were the genesis of grade inflation in the education spectrum in Bangladesh. The Ministry of Education introduced creative questions as a component of the Secondary Education Sector Improvement Project in 2010 but needed more preparation on the process for effectiveness. Question papers on the first paper of Bangla and Religion were framed in the structure of creative questions in 2010.
The innovation in creative questions is in the stem or stimulation. The stimulation is a brief paragraph on a context and not from the textbook. Only well-versed teachers can write the stem and align it with the subject matter of the text. The stem should be innovative, unbiased, impartial, and objective. For every creative question, there are ten points divided into four parts corresponding to knowledge, comprehension, application, and higher-order skills. The most challenging element in the creative question is the stem, and indeed only a teacher with erudition excels. Often it seems ridiculous to read the context. For example, once there was a news item on a religious subject, the stem or the context appeared to be bizarre and meaningless, and extravagant in political cleavage. A scrutiny of the stems used in different question papers would reveal the dull and repetitive nature of illustrations and the weak link with the content of the textbook.
The current episode brings an embarrassing issue that raised concern among educationists and members of scholarly society. The illustration of Nepal and Gopal with the land dispute and the bizarre attitude of Nepal to sell a portion of the Land to punish Gopal to a Muslim, Abdul, who used the land to construct a dwelling house and used the ground in a ritual. This manifests in the macro context helplessness of the Hindu community, and surprisingly, Nepal, not his brother, left for India with his family members. The episode then leads with banal questions on the simile of character between Mir Zafar and Nepal, and the structure of the three other queries asserts that questions without a stem could be more innovative in the agility of a more devoted and educated teacher.
Educational institutions should be neutral and work for harmony in the community. The dismal picture in the question paper is terrible and deserves a cautious look by the authority. Indeed, it is difficult to craft a stem unique in character to the different educational boards in the country. Question settings will have been more accessible if all the educational boards conducted single-stream examinations. Over 1.2 million students are appearing at the Higher Secondary Certificate Examination under different educational boards. This piecemeal centralization of administering the SSC and HSC but with different sets of questions for other boards is a challenge, even with improved ICT.
Creative question without a stem constitutes an essential element in the western world and are often a challenge for extraordinary students. The framing of creative questions requires an in-depth analysis of the subjects. It requires a dedicated team to set questions that fulfill the requirement of creativity and innovation at each step. Unfortunately, more professional teachers could address the framing of the creative questions. The authorities in many schools buy question papers from the market. It is also not possible to improve the skill of teachers all over the country to frame creative questions by training for a few months.
An exam that blesses many students with excellent grades utterly fails to filter the aptitude of the different tiers of students. Questions quoted from the student’s guidebooks or solution manuals are not creative questions. The obscurity of the creative questions in SSC and HSC incubated the mushrooming growth of coaching centers; now a legal entity in our education system. Students and guardians are helpless when teachers indulge in private tutoring, and the insecurity unfolds immoral channels of question leakages demoralizing the whole educational environment.
Education Minister Dipu Moni, in a conciliatory statement, "Be it in classes or textbooks, we always discourage any act that could be inflammatory to communal harmony. There are even instructions in this regard to question moderators. " The responsibility of the moderator who was supposed to carefully scrutinize the structure of questions is no less important in this case. However, the statement by Tapan Kumar Sarker, Chairman of Dhaka Education Board, is perturbing, "Basically, Dhaka Education Board's question papers come from other boards. Therefore, Dhaka board officials are not responsible for it." Then who will be responsible for these misdeeds?
The writer teaches as an adjunct Faculty in the Master's Program in Economics at BRAC University and BIDS. He can be contacted at [email protected]
