Examinations as an instrument for strengthening pedagogy: lessons from three decades of experience in Kenya

Abstract

This paper starts with an analysis of the twin purposes of an examination reform programme originally launched in Kenya during the 1970s: first, to broaden the spectrum of cognitive skills being tested; and second, to set up a feedback system based on the performance profiles, providing schools and teachers with guidance as to how pedagogy and learning might be strengthened. Then, in a change of time perspective, the paper looks back over 30 years of implementation experience, examining the reasons why some components of the original programme have proved more sustainable than others. A final section discusses three key issues which have emerged in recent years, and considers their implications for policy.

Keywords:

• Kenya
• feedback
• examinations

Acknowledgements

Views expressed in this paper are those of its authors, and should not be taken as representing the views of the Kenya National Examinations Council.

Notes

1. In a careful follow-up analysis, Kinyanjui (1974) found that in a sample of more than 1000 pupils who graduated from secondary school in 1968, 45% were in continued formal education or training one year later; 33% were employed; and only 14% unemployed.

2. Introduced in 1988 with prompting from the IMF and World Bank, these measures aimed at reducing the proportion of the recurrent budget devoted to education from 35% to 30%, through the imposition of parental levies (Republic of Kenya, Sessional Paper No 1, 1986).

3. A Kiswahili term widely employed in Kenyan English to refer to a charcoal brazier made of metal, used for cooking.

4. In Bloom’s (1956) widely used taxonomy, skills-based questions involving the rearrangement of remembered knowledge are classified as application questions; those where new information is supplied as analysis questions. The distinction between them is often fuzzy.

5. They also encouraged many pupils to commit model essays to memory, in the hopes that the topic might come up in the examination.

6. In an unpublished survey carried out in 1978, it was found that 62% of the fathers of final-year pupils in four Nairobi high-cost schools were in senior managerial positions or the graduate professions. Just 2% were manual workers.

7. Brackets enclose answers to previous questions.

8. If performance rankings had been introduced before the move away from questions testing predominantly low-level recall, the backwash effects would almost certainly have been negative: the incentive for teachers to prepare pupils for the examination by drilling and rote memorisation would have been strengthened still further.

9. However, to allow for the socio-economic differences, separate performance listings were established for rural and urban districts.

10. Heyneman’s (1979) classic study of school achievement in Uganda, published while these reforms were being implemented, provided clear evidence of similar trends in a neighbouring country.

11. In a recent study, gender differences in performance have been tracked from this 1979 analysis through to 2010. It was found that in English the gender gap has disappeared, while in mathematics it has narrowed considerably. But in science, girls lag behind the boys as much as they did three decades ago (Lewin, Wasanga, Wanderi, & Somerset, 2011).

12. There was substantial overlap in the membership of the two teams.

13. Only the first three paragraphs are given; the full composition is more than twice as long.

14. Print runs were huge: in the first nine months of 1971 alone, 65,000 copies of the most popular title were sold (King, 1974).

15. As many as seven different guides to the English composition examination were recently on sale in a major Nairobi bookshop.

16. A Kiswahili word meaning, roughly, ‘ability’ or ‘competency’.

17. In 2007, there were 908,400 pupils enrolled in Grade 6, so the sampling fraction was less than 0.5%.

18. It is of interest that in 2007 the highest-ranking country in the literacy test was Tanzania; the only country in which pupils were tested in a national language (Kiswahili) rather than in English or French.

19. International donors have included: Hewlett Foundation (Uwezo); Ford Foundation (Uwezo); World Bank (Uwezo and NASMLA); UNICEF (NASMLA); and the Netherlands Government (SACMEQ). NASMLA, however, is now funded entirely from national sources. The World Bank has provided further support through the publication of professional guidelines (Kellaghan, Greaney, & Scott Murray, 2009).

20. The rapid expansion of private schooling is not confined to Kenya: the same phenomenon is occurring in many if not most low-income countries (Srivastava & Walford, 2007).

21. In 2011, the performance gap for English amounted to 13.8 standard-score points, compared with 9.6 and 8.9 points for mathematics and science, respectively.