Mozambique examination reform project
This important project represented AlphaPlus’ first major venture into overseas development work. The project brief was to assist the Mozambique government to implement a more secure examination system at a time when Grade 12 students leaving post-compulsory education were wishing to apply for higher education places in other countries. The problem with the existing examination system was that it was largely controlled by the teachers and in a country where the centres of population are widely dispersed it was difficult to guarantee the reliability of the outcomes.
As a first step towards a more secure system, the government had decided that it wanted better quality question setting and marking procedures and saw objective testing and machine marking as the quickest way forward. AlphaPlus consultants were therefore commissioned to run a series of three day assessment training workshops to selected teachers in three venues (Maputo, Beira and Nampula). The workshops had a dual purpose:
- to familiarise teachers with the construction and use of multiple-choice questions
- to commence the development of a question bank to be used in future national examinations.
One early problem we encountered was the lack of a common understanding of what standard of achievement could be expected of a Grade 12 student, a problem exacerbated by the lack of clear course specifications for each subject and by the paucity of textbooks and other resources. However, attendance at the workshops was excellent and by the end of the third day most teachers had more confidence in their judgements and their competence in question setting had noticeably improved.
At the conclusion of the project in 2009, we left the government with an action plan that would build upon the platform established by the AlphaPlus team and the teachers. This identified the urgent work that needed to be done to take the reforms to the next stage, in particular the need to:
- develop an agreed assessment specification for all subjects
- filter and transcribe into digital form the items that had been produced, using relevant subject expertise
- identify teachers with the required degree of expertise (a maximum of six) to form subject scrutiny teams
- establish a large item bank
- compile whole tests with high quality questions.
As a result of project there is now a small cadre of potential assessment trainers in the country who, with some further support, should be capable of taking this agenda forward.
