New Card Will Give Full Record Of Pupil’s Progress At Schools

Press, Volume XCII, Issue 27735, 12 August 1955, Page 6

New Card Will Give Full Record Of Pupil’s Progress At Schools

A new record card which will be used for every pupil through the primary and post-primary schools, is now being issued by the Education Department. Besides giving a more complete record of progress, this form liberalises the approach to assess? ment by providing for teachers at all levels to note special abilities and characteristics. The guide issued to teachers says: “It is not expected that children will show exactly the same trends in different years or with different teachers. Differences of estimate are therefore to be expected, and are a challenge to the teacher to know and understand his pupils.” The new record is designed to assist recognition of all special requirements for more satisfactory schooling and ultimate. vocational settlement. The card will be started when a child begins school, and the first entries will be made when he is being considered for promotion from the infant department to Standard 1, and then every subsequent year. It will indicate his performance in oral and written language, reading, spelling, writing, arithmetic, social -studies, nature • study, art and craft, music, physical education, woodwork and metalwork, or cookery, and dressmaking. These will be assessed on a fivepoint scale—outstanding, above average, average, below average, and limited—based on the assumption that in a group of 100 pupils there would be five in the first grade, 20 in the second, 50 average, 20 in the fourth, and five in the fifth. “If the criterion of 100 representative children is kept firmly in mind, the actual spread of assessments in

many mixed-ability classes will closely approach these percentages. However, the spread in others will vary considerably,” says the guide to teachers. It emphasises that assessments should not come solely from formal tests, but from all information which becomes available from day to day. On each card, there is space for notes on interests, and hobbies, which may range through intellectual, practical, aesthetic, social, and physical activities, and for special abilities hi, say, creative writing, manual dexterity, or observation and investigation. All these are important to later schooling and adult life. Personal characteristics are also covered under the broad headings of stability, co-operation, independence, and perseverance. Teachers are warned that the percentage distribution in scoring school subjects will not apply in assessing these qualities of personality. In the elaborated characteristics suggested for consideration in this assessment, there are illustrations such as the distinction between a child who may be unstable and the one who is fundamentally stable but excitable or upset in some situations. Provision is also made for medical notes from school doctors. At the end of primary schooling, the head teacher will enter his comments on "the card, and the vocational tuidance officer may do likewise, eparate entries allow distinction between “pupil’s vocational preference” and “parents’ plans.” A similar pattern is followed in the post-primary section of the same card, but there is particular attention to reliability, social adjustment, and vocational potentialities.