Using Assessment Results To Improve English Language Teaching And Learning

Abstract

Quality education is the bedrock of national development and progress. In the course of the history of education in Ghana, there arose the need to improve accessibility. Hence, a series of interventions such as the Education For All (EFA), the Free Compulsory Universal Basic Education (FCUBE), the Fast Track Initiative (FTI), and the abolition of school fees and levies which led to the introduction of the Capitation Grant scheme (CGS), were introduced. These initiatives triggered a surge in enrolment figures in public primary schools by about sixteen percent (16%). It became necessary that after getting the children into school, the government should ensure that the children receive relevant literacy skills and for that matter, academic knowledge. As a sequel to this development, there arose the need for quality instruction in the classroom, an issue which has become a major concern among reform movements across the world. Concern with quality immediately gives rise to the issue of assessment. Assessment is the process of obtaining information that is used to make educational decisions about students, to give feedback to the students about their progress, strengths and weaknesses and to judge instructional effectiveness and weaknesses and curricula adequacy. This is why various reforms that have dominated the education scene in the last three decades propose the use of assessment as a critical factor to improve quality. This research is to find out the opinions of the actual administrators and users of assessment results. The views collated from the various stakeholders showed that there is no major attempt to use the results of the various assessments so far conducted in the public schools in the classrooms to target the individual testees. Also, the opinions gathered suggest that many teachers in the classroom need a serious training / orientation on how to plan a test and how to write good test items.