BSE question papers don’t stir students’ creativity

| | in Bhubaneswar

Sir,

The question papers of the BSE, Odisha Matric examination, don’t give students an opportunity for creative and critical thinking as most of the questions are recall types which focus only on the knowledge of the students and their ability to learn by rote.

Teaching is a goal-oriented activity which facilitates learning. Learning can be assessed by using appropriate assessment tools. Question papers are one such assessment tool which must be effective for the assessment of students in all the cognitive domains of learning.

The questions must be valid, reliable and must have objectivity and usability. The Government of Odisha must organise some workshops for the schoolteachers to capacitate them on  the manner of framing question papers after giving due importance to all the cognitive domains of learning starting from the lowest level of Knowledge, Comprehension, Application, Analysis, Synthesis and, most importantly, Evaluation. Question paper is not just a random assemblage of questions, but it’s a highly-developed technique.

So, it should be framed in such a way that the low achievers can be differentiated from high achievers. In fact, not only in the Board exams but in school exams too the teachers must frame the questions in such a way that the students can apply their reasoning ability and application of the topic so that they are not forced to just memorise the topics.

These days students score good percentages in their Board exams just by committing to memory the answers to the previous years’ question papers, but when it comes to questions which demand their reasoning and critical thinking ability then they fail miserably. This is because they have not been trained that way.

They are just regarded as an information-accepting machine; and their thinking and reasoning ability has been disabled.

Hence, students must be given proper space and the opportunity right from the junior level to develop all the areas of the cognitive domains of learning.

K Ravi, E-237, GGP Colony, Bhubaneswar-751025, Mob=9437616497