Knowledge about Language and Testing
THE CONTEXT
Testing in Jamaica
The Jamaican secondary education system is very examination oriented. The performance of students at the end of each rung of the system is weighed by how well the students do in external examinations. Having a certain number of subjects in the Caribbean Council (CXC) Examinations or the General Certificate Examination (GCE) is one’s ticket to gaining access to many jobs and entry to all tertiary institutions. The public also rates schools in general by how well their students perform on examinations.
Apart from the external examinations, there are class evaluations and end of term/year testing. In the case of class evaluations, individual teachers construct various means of assessing their students’ achievement during regular teaching sessions. These may be in the form of in-class culminating activities, out-of-class assignments or periodically a more structured test. Where grades are awarded, these are classified as term grades, not examination grades. Generally, the students (and often parents as well) do not attach as much significance to these grades as they do for the examination grades.
The end of term/year examinations, on the other hand, are like miniature versions of external evaluation. They are more formal than the class tests as all students of each grade level have to sit the same test at the same time. The grades from these tests are listed separately on the students’ progress reports and the examination grade is often seen as the more important of the two. It is the subject teachers who design these end-of-term/year examinations. All the teachers of each grade level, for example grade 9 or 10, construct one common test that all the students of that particular grade will sit under examination conditions. It is the teachers who determine the content, time limit and conditions of the tests.
The study presented here examines the extent to which language teachers use their KAL in constructing class evaluation instruments and end of term/year testing. It does not look at standardized testing directly, as all teachers are not directly involved in constructing these tests.
