Deputy Chief Minister Manish Sisodia on Thursday announced that the Assessment Unit of the Examination Branch is envisioned as a research and development team of the Education department. This unit is expected to drive the pedagogical and assessment reform in the schools of Delhi Government and develop as a centre of academic reform for the country, he added.
Sisodia was speaking at a meeting of the 'Assessment Unit of the Examination Branch', which was also attended by the director of education, director of SCERT, additional director (school and exam), OSD (assessment unit) and assessment unit members.
Currently this unit is responsible for creating high-quality assessment tools, analysing student answer sheets to develop insights into students understanding and misconceptions and learning gaps, and recommending interventions to improve learning outcomes. The unit engages with assessment agencies and education experts to build high end technical capacity in tool development, data analysis and reporting.
Sisodia said that what is tested in exams, heavily influences what teachers teach and students learn in the classrooms and hence "examinations that test students on higher-order skills instead of facts will encourage teaching that enables conceptual learning". He also asked the officials of the education department to review the practice of prescribing monthly completion of syllabus to semester wise syllabus.
"Further, the learnings from Chunauti 2018 should feed into determining the learning trajectory of students in different grades so that the wide gap among students in same grades can be bridged as far as possible and each child gets an opportunity to excel," he said.